Press Enter or Escape to Play: Deconstructing Escapism in Multiplayer Gaming

This study examines escapism in multiplayer gaming, arguing that the concept is widely used in game research yet remains loosely defined and unevenly evaluated, with its negative connotations often treated as the default. The authors contend that escapism carries both healthy and unhealthy meanings, and that understanding it requires attention to how players themselves interpret the term rather than relying solely on researcher-defined categories. To that end, they propose a framework distinguishing escapist motivations, namely mundane breaking, stress relief, pleasure seeking, and imagination conjuring, from activity types ranging from evasive and passive to active and extreme.

The empirical core consists of focus-group research with active multiplayer gamers, drawn from clan and guild communities, combining a Likert-scale survey with group discussion and discourse analysis. Pleasure seeking emerged as the most important motivation for escapism, rated 4.54 on a 5-point scale, while imagination conjuring ranked lowest at 2.71. Across the groups, the researchers identified eight competing discourses on escapism, including therapeutic, entertainment, hardcore immersion, and solitary framings. These definitions varied along dimensions of intensity, social context, and valence, and often proved mutually irreconcilable, with players reacting strongly when escapism was named as their reason for gaming.

The authors conclude that escapism resists a single, consistent definition or measurement, and that efforts to impose one are unlikely to succeed. Rather than seeking a unified redefinition, they recommend using their motivation-and-activity framework critically to identify when escapism becomes problematic. They also suggest that the blurring boundary between real and virtual worlds in contemporary multiplayer gaming may further complicate the concept, which they nonetheless regard as a useful tool in game research when applied with appropriate care.