The " Lonely Gamer " Revisited Title the " Lonely Gamer " Revisited

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) supporting rich and complex social interactions among over 8 million players worldwide. In this study, we explore implications of the pervasive “lonely gamer” stereotype, which portrays online gamers as socially isolated and addicted young people, usually male, with few real-life (RL) social ties. This is the first study to directly address the stereotype quantitatively, focusing on assessing the extent to which WoW players interact in the game with other people with whom they share a RL social relationship. Most previous studies of the interaction between online gaming and sociality have focused solely on either in-game or RL social interactions, without seriously taking into account today’s