BYU study: Avatar welcome in marriage only if both of you love gaming

PROVO — Online role-playing games can virtually damage marital satisfaction, according to researchers at BYU. Unless the spouse also likes to play, it leaves spouses feeling short-changed in terms of the relationship.

The exception is couples who both like online role-playing games. Then, it can draw the couple closer, according to the study, which will be published Wednesday in the Journal of Leisure Research.

Multiplayer online role playing is not an adolescent phenomenon, said Neil Lundberg, one of the researchers and a professor of recreation management at Brigham Young University. It's as popular with adults. And it's also not a casual pursuit: The video games themselves are high-use, with the average gamer spending about 20 hours a week in the genre in games such as World of Warcraft. "It's almost a part-time job," he said.

That prompted BYU graduate student Michelle Ahlstrom to propose the research. She'd seen it create tension in friends' marriages, Lundberg said.

The researchers found lots of studies on video-game playing and none on couples who both played.

They found that 75 percent of the spouses who don't share the pursuit said it takes away from their time together and their relationship. "The unexpected finding" was that those who both play and who interact within the game — and they were harder to find — reported increased marital satisfaction at about the same level; 75 percent of that subset said it enhances their relationship, Lundberg said.

The hours played didn't make the difference, even though role-playing games are time-consuming and "hypothetically the most addicting type of video game," he said. What the researchers found, backed up by all kinds of research on couples and how they recreate together, is that everything depends on the quality of the interaction and the experience. So couples that argued about the game itself or for whom it interfered with real-life activities like going to bed or doing other things had issues with the amount of time spent. For couples who were agreeable and enjoyed the activity, that didn't matter.

The 349 couples surveyed had been married six to seven years, on average, so they were not young kids. They were recruited on gaming websites and on Facebook.

Lundberg points out that the sample itself was likely skewed toward couples where both were willing to take the survey. That means, "we know heavily engaged gamers are not well-represented in this," Lundberg said. And some gaming forums opted not to allow recruitment, assuming it would be "agenda-driven," he said.

"We weren't trying to present just one side. But the certain segment that didn't want to participate is those who would probably have scored the most poorly, so it may be a little rosier picture than is currently out there," he said.

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