JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Excessive Internet game use frequently leads to various physical, psychological, and social problems, and Internet gaming disorder (IGD) has become a serious public health issue worldwide. Recently, virtual reality (VR) therapy emerged as a promising method to increase psychological treatment motivation and accessibility. However, few studies have examined the potential of VR technology for the management of IGD, and VR contents tailored to IGD characteristics are still scarce.

Objective:

This preliminary study aimed to examine the potential of VR-based program that was designed to help users identify their leisure time use patterns, especially those related to gaming, and to modify their gaming overuse by alternative activities provided in VR contents. Also, in order to investigate whether the users’ VR activities can reflect various clinical variables of IGD youths, we examined the relationships among leisure time activity selection pattern, built-in response and speech data obtained from the VR program, as well as symptom severity of Internet gaming, psychiatric comorbidity, and motivation of participants reported through relevant questionnaire data.

Methods:

Three types of VR contents (understanding my daily activities at home, finding alternative activity to Internet gaming at home, expressing contradictory opinion toward friend’s gaming beliefs) were developed by simulating the daily situations where IGD patients can select alternative free-time leisure activities. We examined 23 IGD and 29 control participants with measures of Internet addiction, mental health problems, and motivation. Behavioral and self-rated responses from VR, such as alternative activity selection data and speech patterns (speech time, speech satisfaction, and speech accordance), and various questionnaires were compared between groups. The correlations between IGD behaviors in VR and real-life behaviors assessed by questionnaire measures were analyzed.

Results:

Significant correlations were found between Internet gaming behavior and user activity data, such as speech and activity selection pattern, in our VR program. Our results showed that the IGD group had fewer leisure activities and preferred game or digital activities to other types of activities compared to controls, even in VR. There was a positive relationship between the viability of alternative leisure activity participants selected in VR and the amount of perceived satisfaction from that activity (r = 0.748, p < .001). Speech accordance in the IGD group was lower than in the control group, and was correlated negatively with IAT and IAT-gaming scores (r = -.300, p = .031) but positively with users’ motivation (r = .312, p = .024)

Conclusions:

The result from our VR program can provide information about daily activity patterns of youths with IGD and the relationship between user VR activities and IGD symptoms, which can be useful in applying VR technology to IGD management.