The Psychosocial Impact of Extreme Gaming on Indian PUBG Gamers: the Case of PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds)

Abstract

Online video gaming has become one of the world’s most popular leisure time activities among youth (Ballabio et al. 2017; Männikkö et al. 2015). Research has consistently shown that gaming can bring many positive benefits including therapeutic, medical, health, cognitive, and educational benefits (Griffiths 2002, 2019; Nuyens et al. 2019). However, for a small minority, gaming can be problematic and potentially addictive (Kuss and Griffiths 2012; Pontes and Griffiths 2014). One of the most popular games at the time of writing is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), a Bwinner-takes-all^ team game inspired by the Japanese film, Battle Royale. More specifically, in each game, PUBG parachutes 100 players on to a virtual island where teams of four fight each other to death until only one team is left alive. It was officially launched in December 2017 and can be played on both gaming consoles and smartphones (Quartz India 2018) and has been downloaded over 100 million times on the Google Play Store (Google Play 2019). At present, the game has over 30 million daily active users globally and is very popular in India (Bhattacharya 2019)—the country of focus in the present letter. A 2018 market research survey conducted among 1047 Indian gamers (Quartz India 2018) reported that PUBG was the most popular game (62%) followed by the games Free Fire (21%) and Fortnite (8%). Despite the popularity of gaming in India, there have been no dedicated studies on the negative psychosocial impact although there have been studies that have included Indian gamers (1) as part of psychometric evaluations of the properties of gaming disorder assessment instruments (e.g., Pontes et al. 2017), (2) in multi-country gaming samples but not including any breakdown of individual country characteristics or variables (e.g., Subramaniam et al. 2016), and (3) as part of studies examining International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-019-00102-4