The Effect of Flow Experience on Online Game Addiction during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Moderating Effect of Activity Passion

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript is well organized, the hypotheses are clearly stated, the methods are clearly described and conclusion is well constructed. The issues are presented and well discussed.

Despite this, I have some points to mention to make the article more comprehensive and appealing and

to increase its impact. Please find below a list of comments on my review that should be concern:

Abstract

·        COVID-19 is referring to coronavirus disease of 2019. The author should write a full name for any usage of acronym.

·        It is suggested to the author to provides a brief description of the research methodology and future work of the study at the abstract.

Keyword

·        Arrange the keywords in their ascending order.

Introduction

 ·   Acronyms/Abbreviations/Initialisms should be defined the first time they appear in each of three sections: the abstract; the main text; the first figure or table. When defined for the first time, the acronym/abbreviation/initialism should be added in parentheses after the written-out form.

·        ·  p.1, line 25: “COVID-19”

 ·        Please avoid using questions in sentences, such as:

i.       p. 1, line 29-32: Past research often believes that players' gaming skills, ability factors [6], social interaction [7], and specialization [8] will affect the outcome of continued participation, but these factors do not explain why individuals with the same high passion for online game have different recreational outcomes (e.g. advance or addiction) [8]?

ii.      p. 5, line 87-88: That is, is continued participation behavior a pursuit of skill and further advancements, or is it just an addictive behavior?

·        ·  The issues discussed is during COVID-19 period. Thus, it is suggested to the authors to add more current references in supporting study (2019-2022).

 ·        Grammar: There are a few grammatical errors in the manuscripts that needs through checking and corrections.

Literature Review

·       ·    It is suggested to authors to add more current research in supporting study (2018-2022).

 Methodology and Instruments

·         ·  Font style for figure should be as: Figure 1. This is a figure. Schemes follow the same formatting.

      ·   Only Figure 1 is Bold, while the Figure’s label is normal style.

 3.3. Sample and Data Collection

 ·        p. 3, line 284: The delivered questionnaire should be included in a table or in an Appendix.

 ·        p. 3, line 284-288: This paragraph is described that the data collection will be done by giving a certain period. Is it the data is already collected or not?

 “Therefore, in the case of an estimated effective recovery rate of 80%, the estimated valid questionnaire is 330, and the consideration of the waste questionnaire is taken into account, so the questionnaire needs to be issued at least 412 or more. This study is expected to use an online questionnaire to collect data, and the implementation time will be from March 2021 to August 2021 during COVID-19 pandemic.”

·        However, the next paragraph state that:

“After the questionnaire was collected, a total of 314 valid questionnaires were obtained.”

·         The author used Upper Case in the middle of the sentence.

p.4, line 288-292: “Since this study also used three items: the respondents' preference for online games, the importance of online games to respondents, and the time respondents spent on online games [15], auxiliary Determine whether respondents have a passion for online games.”

Research Result

·        The author used Upper Case in the middle of the sentence.

p.2, line 302: “In the measurement model, Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) can be used to test the internal consistency, indicator reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity for each construct.”

 ·        There is no explanation on Figure 2 in the text.

Conclusions and Discussions

·        The issues discussed is during COVID-19, however, the discussions are not supported by the current references / current year.

 Limitations and Recommendations for future research

·        p. 1, line 465-466: The sentence / statement should be supported with references.

“Research on online game addiction is still in its infancy, and relevant empirical re-465 search is still quite scarce”

 References

 ·  The references style should follow the template, such as the reference from the journal, so the journal name should be in italic style.

1.       Author 1, A.B.; Author 2, C.D. Title of the article. Abbreviated Journal Name Year, Volume, page range.

 ·  Finally, I would like to congratulate the authors for carried out a valuable investigation with important practical implications. I am sure that, with the appropriate adjustments, the work will have a good scientific impact. I would accept this manuscript if the comments will be properly addressed.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting study and the paper is well written. This study aims to find out the relationship between participants’ flow experience and online game addiction.

1.     1) Define or describe the term “flow experience” in the introduction.

2.      2)Line 249 sentence is not complete

3.     3) I have not found the questionnaires in the supplementary data, so it is very difficult to understand the details of the experiment.

4.   4)   It is also not clear whether the participants were healthy individuals or may have some psychological disorders e.g. suffering from stress and anxiety. Which may also result in game addiction.

5.    5)  Based on the conclusion that flow experience can also lead to negative consequences, it somewhat is agreeable, but again it also depends on many other factors, and I am not sure how these factors are considered. i.e. the mental state of the participants and their socio-economic status.

6.     6)As during covid people can spend more time on online gaming which may not be the case with a normal lifestyle.  How this factor is considered in this study.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review the referenced manuscript.  The authors did a great job summarizing the current state of the literature and in structuring their research study.  There are minor English syntax errors throughout the document, such as the use of singular or plural verbs grammatically incorrect.  For example, sentence on line 205 does not appear to be articulated well. 

I am concerned with the lack of IRB requirement for studies involving human subjects and informed consent, particularly as it relates to references regarding mental health, and addictive gaming.  

The authors discuss the limitations of the study and recommendations of the study findings.  However, I recommend a small paragraph addressing the implications of the findings of this study and any specific suggestions as for recommendations of actions and who are the stakeholders. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

First, I would like to congratulate the authors for addressing a very developing topic with a wide impact on the society that massively uses online games. This paper analyses the relationship between flow experience and addiction behaviour in online games by regular players. Also, the variable passion with two levels, harmonic passion and obsessive passion, is used as a moderator of the relationship between the other variables. I believe that methodologically the article is well presented, the technique of multi-group analysis (MGA) allows us to know the differences between variables. The results of the paper are also interested in determining how obsessive passion influences the addictive process in online games.

However, I would like to suggest a few considerations leading to improve the outcome of this study. 

Given that in the introduction paragraph (lines 42-44) it is stated that the flow experience has addictive properties, it should be investigated through an analysis of covariance how much weight has the flow experience and how much the obsessive passion in the addiction to online games. Since it could be the case that part of the addiction is caused by the flow experience as pointed out by Csikwszentmihaly. 

In the methodological aspect, the authors should clarify why they use the criteria of behavioural addiction criteria by Brown (1991, 1993) followed by Charlton and Danforth, only four of the six elements are taken into account, leaving out (mood modification and tolerance). 

In the results section, I believe that Table 1 presents a mistake where it says CR should read AVE and vice versa. Lines 306 and 307where it says CR should say AVE. Lines 313 and 314 where it says AVE should say CR, or by changing the data of these two coefficients. Line 351 does not specify from which platform was performed to make Multi-group Analysis (SPSS-AMOS, SmartPLS, etc).

It would be interesting to know whether the time (hours) of daily use of the online game to know if an abuse of hours of game time per week it has shown good predictive validity and reliability for addiction. Understanding the difference between addiction, abuse and non-addiction is important in knowing what types of mechanisms are involved in order to guide future addiction prevention programs. 

One of the serious problems with convenience sampling is that we do not choose the subjects we choose but those who present themselves, and the problem of social desirability is one of the pitfalls when it comes to obtaining social validity of the study. However, the statistical evidence obtained from the tests used in this study provides sufficient guarantees of solid results.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf