“Time to Take a Break”: How Heavy Adult Gamers React to a Built-In Gaming Gradual Intervention System

DOI

Although often ignored, adult gamers, just like the children and adolescents, can suffer from problematic gaming. This study explored the use of a built-in game gradual intervention system (G-GIS), designed to help adult gamers build their wanted game habits in an autonomous and acceptable way. In this study, we interviewed 26 heavy adult gamers (i.e. adult gamers who played the game frequently and for a relatively long time) of an online poker game (with a G-GIS in-built) and triangulated the interview results with their real-world behavioral data collected in eight months, to explore how demographics, attitudes, and contextual factors influence their use of the G-GIS. The results of the study showed that family and occupation demographics play key roles in determining adult gamers’ gaming habits and their self-control under the G-GIS intervention. We also revealed that adult gamers’ attitudes and contextual factors would facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of the G-GIS. The findings of this study extend people’s understanding of heavy adult gamers and reveal how a G-GIS influences the adult gamers from the individual level, which can be applied to design future game intervention systems, especially for the adult gamers.