Actually, Gamers Have Just as Many RL Friends as Non-Gamers, Study Finds

Say goodbye to the stereotype of the lone young gamer, waist-deep in potato-chip dust as he logs on in place of real human connection, because a new research paper indicates teen gamers have just as many friends at high school as their non-gaming peers.

Delving into this little-researched area, the researchers—who are from Uppsala University in Sweden—also surmised that gaming itself is a great source of RL friendships. Their analysis is based on combined data from studies on the topic, most prominently a 2017 study titled Do adolescent gamers make friends offline? in which 115 Swedish secondary school students aged 17–19 were surveyed about their social lives three times over one year. Of the 115 students, 19 percent reported gaming as a hobby. The majority of these were young men, which correlates with US research showing that more young men than women in this age group identify as gamers. "Results indicate that how much time young people spend on gaming is not a significant factor for friendship formation in the studied sample," the co-authors of the study and the 2018 paper, Lina Eklund and Sara Roman, concluded in 2017. "Moreover, high-use did not make game users socially isolated or less popular in school."

"The results are both surprising and expected," they write in the recent paper. "Sure enough, we thought 'gamers' would turn out to be making friends with one another. Gaming is such an important part of today's youth culture that anything else would be odd. "On the other hand, we weren't so sure whether players would prove to be less sociable, or thus have fewer friends at school. Here, the previous research is limited."

In fact, the authors found students practised "time-management strategies" in order to make room for gaming while "not letting it impact [their] personal relationships."

"In sum, we know that gamers can make friends online […]" they write of their work in this area. "But we know less about offline settings such as school, as studies on games have tended to focus on online spaces."

The 2017 study they drew from has obvious limits: only one nationality was surveyed, and students from rural or remote areas were not included in the analysis. The sample size was also relatively small, and students might hold differing ideas as to what constitutes a "friendship".

Still, the paper sheds light on something many gamers already knew: there is no one "type" of gamer, and gaming in itself does not neccesarily indicate less of an appetite for, or skills in, real-world social interaction. In fact, it could be the exact opposite.