A longitudinal design was employed to collect three waves of survey data over a 14 month period from 2790 online gamers. Respondents were asked questions about their gaming activity, motivations, personality, social and emotional environment, and the effect gaming has had on their lives. Prospective analysis was used to establish causal and temporal linkages among the repeatedly measured factors. While the data provide some indication that a player's reasons for playing do influence the development of problematic usage, these effects are overshadowed by the central importance of self-regulation in managing both the timing and amount of play. An individual's level of self-regulatory activity is shown to be very important in allowing them to avoid negative outcomes like problematic use. The role of depression is also discussed. With responsible use, online gaming appears to be a healthy recreational activity that provides millions of people with hours of social entertainment and adaptive diversion. However, failure to manage play behavior can lead to feelings of dependency.

As part of a process to identify potential simulator sickness issues with our NAVE (Non-expensive Automatic Virtual Environment), a new virtual environment display system developed at Georgia Tech, we have conducted a study to address the experience of simulator sickness and presence under different display and user role configurations. The NAVE has three 8 feet by 6 feet screens. The two side screens are positioned at 120 degree angles to the central screen to give a three-sided display area that is sixteen feet wide and approximately seven feet deep. This allows for two different field of view configurations, a one-screen set-up that provides a 60 degree FOV, and a three-screen set-up that provides a 180 degree FOV. Users are seated in front of the center screen and navigate with a joystick. The virtual environment used in this study could be displayed in the NAVE stereo-visually or in mono, providing us with a second experimental factor, display fidelity. Lastly, we were interested in determining whether or not the user's role in the environment would affect their experience of simulator sickness and presence as suggested by Stanney and Kennedy (1997). This provided us with our third factor user role, with its two levels, driver and passenger.