The Effect of Psychological and Environmental Factors on Academic Performance of Video Gamers

This study presents an initial attempt to uncover psychological and environmental factors influencing the academic performance of video gamers. We surveyed IT undergraduate students with respect to their video-gaming experiences. For the psychological factors at hand, we found that task awareness or the ability to stay focused on business activities has the potential to influence positively academic performance. Among the environmental factors, platform diversity or ability to operate multiple platforms and game genres appeared to have the effect on academic performance. Versatility in operating game platforms leads to advanced cognitive and technical skills that in turn could boost student grades. As for game genres, we found that certain game genres such as sports games are more likely to result in poorer performance. The results of this investigation would help us design future studies focusing on developing instructional game applications.