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Gamers Who Play Together Stay Together

A picture of hands playing a video game controller
Creative Commons

The widely held notion – that people who play computer games are loners – might not be true after all.  A new study from North Carolina State University finds that gamers are expanding their social lives and often wind up meeting the people they compete against. 

Nick Taylor is an assistant professor of Digital Media at NC State, and worked on the study.  He says the findings were consistent regardless of the types of games being played.

“In fact, gaming is one way through which people that are involved in them actually supplement their social lives, extend their social lives into different virtual arenas and in fact often times come together face to face to meet these people that they've only often interacted with online.”

Taylor says researchers tracked the online and offline behavior of thousands of gamers at more than twenty public gaming events in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Eric Hodge hosts WUNC’s broadcast of Morning Edition, and files reports for the North Carolina news segments of the broadcast. He started at the station in 2004 doing fill-in work on weekends and All Things Considered.
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