A Study On Psychological Needs Of Teenager Online Game Players

With the fast development of internet, a new form of computer game-online game is becoming more and more popular. This new, exciting form of game is so attractive for the teenagers that it is gradually became their main everyday entertainment and influences their mentality and behaviors. Therefore, based on the feature of online games and teenagers' psychological character, with the support of game theories, psychological needs theories, we applied qualitative and quantitative methods to find out why online games are so attractive to teenagers, to construct a psychological needs model of the teenage online game players, and at last to explore the differences in actual psychological needs between game players and common group by G-TAT.This research includes three parts: (1) Qualitative study: We brought forwards general dimensions after coding and analyzing the materials obtained by interviews and practical article analysis. (2) Quantitative study: Questionnaires were compiled based on the hypothesis came from qualitative studies, then we constructed and testified the psychological needs model of the teenage online game behaviors by using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, after that, reliability and validity of the model were analyzed. (3) Normal-referenced study: The G-TAT was used to explore the differences between game players and common group in actual psychological needs.The results show that: (1) online games satisfy teenagers' psychological needs for communication and belonging, compensation for actual feeling, and self-fulfillment. (2) The questionnaire of psychological needs of online game behaviors has good reliability and validity and the indexes of the construct model comply with the fitting standard. (3) In terms of contents and degrees of psychological needs, no significant difference was found between high school students and college students, female and male. However, there are significant differences between students with different game ages and between those who are different in frequencies of game playing per week. (4)The result of G-TAT shows that there is no significant difference between online game players and the common group in domain of need. However, in terms of love in need dimension, withdraw in reaction dimension, and uncertainty in result dimension, their scores are significant higher than the normal group.According to the results above, the researcher gives the following suggestions that: the influence of online games on the teenager' s psychological development should be treated neutrally and we should be humanistic when try to prevent and cure their addiction to online games; moral education and knowledge should be naturally included in the online games and also we should develop real interaction and communication for the virtual games.