When the going gets tough, does gaming make it tougher? A shortitudinal study of escapism motivations and subjective well-being among adult gamers

The dualistic model of escapism stipulates that when individuals experience worsened life circumstances, those particularly vulnerable to stress will seek engagement in activities that facilitate maladaptive escapism, namely self-suppression, rather than psychologically adaptive escapism, self-expansion . However, very few studies have explored the longitudinal associations between dimensions and general well-being. In a repeated-measures design comprising 278 gamers ( M age = 32.28, 50.4% male, 48.6% female, 1.1% non-binary or other), we tested the extent to which decreases in general well-being over a 4-week period led to changes in levels of self-suppression and/or self-expansion in gaming engagement. First, correlational analyses showed that self-suppression was substantially associated with lower well-being, whereas self-expansion was weakly associated. Higher levels of gaming were associated with both greater self-suppression and self-expansion. Second, structural equation modeling—using an autoregressive latent factor approach—showed that a decrease in well-being from baseline to follow-up was associated with a substantial increase in self-suppression escapism. In contrast, it was unrelated to changes in self-expansion. These findings provide additional empirical evidence on the dynamics of escapism and exemplify how a dualistic approach to escapism may help differentiate between adaptive and maladaptive motivation for gaming and further help to disentangle their diverging determinants and outcomes.