{"title":"Contextual influences and agency to transform context in excessive gaming: A social-ecological perspective","authors":"Zicheng Zhu, Renwen Zhang, Alex Mitchell","doi":"10.1016/j.tele.2025.102301","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Excessive media use has long been the focus of communication research. Yet most research focuses on the role of individual traits or technological affordances in explaining excessive media use (e.g., gaming), while overlooking the influence of contexts. Drawing on the social-ecological theory, we explore how contexts shape people’s excessive gaming and how players exercise their agency to navigate these contextual influences. Through in-depth interviews with 44 Chinese game players, our study suggests that people’s availability and access to games, social networks, and gameplay experiences dynamically shape their excessive gaming. People also proactively combat excessive gaming by altering their gameplay availability, negotiating with their social networks, and re-appropriating gameplay experiences. These findings highlight the contextual nature of excessive gaming, and the role of context transformation, in which people exercise agency in negotiating with contexts to counter the downsides of media use.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48257,"journal":{"name":"Telematics and Informatics","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102301"},"PeriodicalIF":7.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Telematics and Informatics","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585325000632","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Excessive media use has long been the focus of communication research. Yet most research focuses on the role of individual traits or technological affordances in explaining excessive media use (e.g., gaming), while overlooking the influence of contexts. Drawing on the social-ecological theory, we explore how contexts shape people’s excessive gaming and how players exercise their agency to navigate these contextual influences. Through in-depth interviews with 44 Chinese game players, our study suggests that people’s availability and access to games, social networks, and gameplay experiences dynamically shape their excessive gaming. People also proactively combat excessive gaming by altering their gameplay availability, negotiating with their social networks, and re-appropriating gameplay experiences. These findings highlight the contextual nature of excessive gaming, and the role of context transformation, in which people exercise agency in negotiating with contexts to counter the downsides of media use.
期刊介绍:
Telematics and Informatics is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes cutting-edge theoretical and methodological research exploring the social, economic, geographic, political, and cultural impacts of digital technologies. It covers various application areas, such as smart cities, sensors, information fusion, digital society, IoT, cyber-physical technologies, privacy, knowledge management, distributed work, emergency response, mobile communications, health informatics, social media's psychosocial effects, ICT for sustainable development, blockchain, e-commerce, and e-government.