Research Student Profile

Mrs Norah Alqahtani

Research Student

Brief biographical information

Online Gaming Risks for Children: Developing a Dynamic Awareness Framework

Online gaming has become big business in recent years. The worldwide online gaming industry grew 9% in 2013 and now exceeds $76 billion, with projections it will reach over $86 billion by 2016 (Galarneanu, 2014). The statistics show that the projected size of the global online gaming market in 2015 will triple in size compared to 2005 (Statista, 2015). Consistently, the survey conducted by Livingstone et al. (2014) shows that the association between online activities and online risks is positive; however, the more that children gain opportunities online, the more they also encounter risk. This study explores how countries differ in the risky use of online activities. For example, in Romania, there has been a large increase in children with 100+ contacts on social network sites (SNS) and most Romanian children have a public profile, while in the UK, SNS use is relatively safer with more privacy, fewer contacts and less underage use.
Online gaming can vary greatly, with casual, single-player games, multiplayer games, community-based games in social networking sites (also known as social gaming), massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). When children play online games, positive effects and benefits can be gained, including rewarded success, new challenges, opportunities for an effective approach to learning and skills development, such as a better understanding of the culture and the use of language in different contexts (Schrier, 2014; Kongmee et al., 2011). Despite the benefits of gaming, most researchers are concerned about the negative impacts, such as desensitisation to violence and gruesome and harmful scenes, Sanders et al. (2011); focused on the negative implications rather than establishing solutions.
The MPhil phase will seek to establish the current state of existing online gaming researches and studies, aiming at exploring, comparing and drawing conclusions of these studies. It will also highlight the classification of online gaming risks, such as inappropriate content and language, addictive tendencies and the impact on behaviour, health and welfare. It will identify and investigate the main factors that directly affect the conducted research. These factors include, but are not limited to, culture, language, geography, gender and Internet policies (Slavtcheva et al., 2014; Martínez, 2014).

Mrs Norah Alqahtani

Director of studies: Dr Shirley Atkinson
Other supervisors: Dr Ingo Stengel, Prof. Steven M Furnell

Posters

1 Posters

1 publication(s) - all categories.