League of legends e o ciclo vicioso do jogar no ambiente virtual

Abstract

This empirical-exploratory research aimed at investigating "game dependence" from an analytic-behavioral perspective. The information was obtained through semi-structured interviews with three male volunteers over the age of eighteen, who played the League of Legends (LOL) for at least four uninterrupted hours a day. Functional analysis has shown that the high daily frequency with which participants play, and the harmful effects associated with it, can be explained by the interrelationship between positive and negative reinforcement contingencies, which occurs in the form of a vicious cycle: the more the participants play more produces natural and arbitrary reinforcers in the virtual context and, at the same time, the behavior produces further aversive social events in the non-virtual environment, which ends up strengthening the very play LOL as an avoidance from the non-virtual environment. Indeed, the “game dependence” can dispense with psychopathological explanations, which appeal to inner causes as impetus or impulse.