Why Teens Game: New Study Traces Shifting Motives Behind Gaming Disorder Risk

A three-month longitudinal study of Polish secondary-school students has found that the motivations driving adolescent gaming may shift in character as problematic patterns take hold. Researchers at Jagiellonian University followed 120 teenage gamers across two measurement waves and discovered that gratification-oriented motives—gaming for fantasy and for identity—predicted increases in gaming disorder symptoms over time, while gaming disorder risk, in turn, predicted subsequent increases in compensation-oriented motives such as coping and introjected regulation. The findings, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, offer some of the first longitudinal evidence that the psychological functions gaming serves may differ depending on where a young person sits on the spectrum of problematic play.

The research was anchored in the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, a theoretical framework for addictive behaviors that distinguishes between two kinds of engagement with a rewarding activity. Gratification-driven engagement reflects positive reinforcement: people play because the activity itself is immersive, meaningful, or tied to how they see themselves. Compensation-driven engagement, by contrast, reflects negative reinforcement: people play to escape distress, relieve stress, or satisfy internalized pressures. The team drew on the Comprehensive Gaming Motivation Inventory, which measures five motives within its immersion and escapism dimension—Coping, Escape, Fantasy, Identity, and Introjected Regulation. Based on the content of the questionnaire items, the researchers grouped Fantasy and Identity as gratification-oriented motives, and Coping, Escape, and Introjected Regulation as compensation-oriented ones.

Most previous studies linking gaming motivations to gaming disorder have been cross-sectional, capturing a single moment in time and therefore unable to establish which comes first. Longitudinal investigations remain relatively rare, yet they are essential for determining the temporal ordering of associations—though, as the authors emphasize, temporal precedence alone cannot establish causation. The research team had previously conducted a three-wave longitudinal study of emerging adults, in which compensation-oriented motives, particularly coping and escape, emerged as the primary longitudinal predictors of gaming disorder risk, while gratification-oriented motives did not predict later symptoms. Adolescence, however, involves ongoing and heterogeneous changes in reward processing, cognitive control, and goal-directed learning, raising the question of whether adult-derived models of addiction apply straightforwardly to younger populations.

To find out, the researchers recruited students aged 14 to 18 from a single secondary school, with the average participant aged 15.45 years. The final longitudinal sample included 71 girls, 42 boys, one non-binary participant, and six students who preferred not to disclose their gender. Eligibility required playing video games for at least one hour per week. Participants completed online questionnaires during class under supervision, passing two attention checks before their data were retained. To enable anonymous matching across waves, participants generated identification codes from randomly selected personal information. The first wave began in December 2024, with the second following three months later.

The path from initial recruitment to the final sample was substantial. Of 320 students who completed the first survey, 260 provided valid data after exclusions for ineligibility, failed attention checks, or invalid codes. At the second wave, 248 students participated, of whom 215 provided valid responses. Only 120 participants could be reliably matched across both waves, because matching relied entirely on self-generated anonymous codes—the researchers could not distinguish true attrition from cases where a participant simply entered a different code the second time. Comparisons between retained and non-retained participants showed no significant differences in age, gender, baseline gaming disorder symptoms, or four of the five motives, although retained participants reported somewhat higher baseline coping motives, a small difference the authors flag as a potential selection consideration.

Gaming disorder risk was measured with the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale Short Form, a nine-item questionnaire reflecting the DSM-5 criteria for internet gaming disorder, rated on a five-point scale from never to very often. The researchers stress that this instrument served as a screening indicator rather than a clinical diagnosis, and notably, no participant in the sample reached the research-based cut-off score of 36 or higher for disordered gaming at either wave. Gaming motivation was assessed with the Gaming Motivation Inventory, rated on a seven-point scale. Internal consistency of the scales was generally satisfactory across both waves, with one exception: the introjected regulation subscale showed weaker reliability at the first measurement.

Statistically, the team employed cross-lagged panel analysis with item-parceling methodology, aggregating questionnaire items into parcels used as indicators of latent constructs. This approach was necessary because a traditional two-wave cross-lagged model using scale mean scores would be statistically saturated and produce no fit indices. Each motive was analyzed in a separate model paired with gaming disorder risk, and reported values represent averages across 100 model replications. At both time points, all five motives correlated positively and significantly with gaming disorder risk, with the strongest concurrent associations observed for introjected regulation and fantasy—confirming, at the correlational level, the robust links between immersion and escapism motives and problematic gaming reported in earlier cross-sectional research.

The cross-lagged results told a more differentiated story. Supporting the gratification hypothesis, higher fantasy and identity motives at the first wave each predicted higher gaming disorder risk at the second wave, after accounting for baseline symptoms. The reverse path—from gaming disorder risk to later fantasy—did not reach statistical significance. Intriguingly, gaming disorder risk at the first wave predicted a subsequent decline in identity motives, meaning that adolescents with more severe symptoms later endorsed identity-related reasons for gaming less strongly. The authors caution that this finding concerns the specific questionnaire subscale, which measures whether gaming feels personally meaningful or identity-related, not general adolescent identity development, and that the underlying psychological processes were not directly assessed. The compensation hypothesis received partial support: gaming disorder risk prospectively predicted increases in coping and introjected regulation, but no significant cross-lagged association emerged for escape in either direction.

The null finding for escape is particularly noteworthy. The researchers suggest that escape may operate differently from other compensation-oriented motives—possibly being more sensitive to short-term fluctuations in distress, which could make its association with gaming disorder symptoms harder to detect over a three-month interval. They stress that this interpretation remains tentative and requires testing with more frequent measurement occasions. More broadly, the pattern is consistent with the possibility that among adolescents at higher risk, gaming becomes more strongly linked to coping with distress or responding to internalized pressures, echoing models in which compensatory motives grow more salient alongside increasing disorder risk. However, the authors are careful to note that the study does not demonstrate changes in goal-means relationships, nor that these motives emerge as consequences of gaming disorder itself.

The limitations of the design temper the conclusions considerably. With only two measurement occasions, the cross-lagged models cannot separate stable between-person differences from within-person processes, meaning the observed paths should not be read as evidence of individual-level change. Temporal precedence within the three-month window does not establish causality, since the associations may reflect stable individual differences, unmeasured confounding, or processes not represented in the models. All data were self-reported, the sample came from a single school in one national context, classroom-level clustering could not be assessed, and no covariate-adjusted analyses were feasible given the sample size. The authors call for future research with additional waves, larger and better-tracked samples, behavioral indicators such as playtime logs, and cross-cultural comparisons. If the motive-specific patterns are replicated, they could inform school-based prevention: fantasy and identity motives might serve as early risk indicators, while coping and introjected regulation could become targets for interventions aimed at strengthening emotion-regulation skills and alternative coping strategies.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal associations between gaming motivations and gaming disorder symptoms in adolescents

Article Title: Gratification vs. compensation: longitudinal evidence for the shifting motivations behind adolescent gaming disorder

Article References: Starzec, S., Zajas, A., Michałkiewicz, N., Kiszka, P., Kowalska, L., & Strojny, P. (2026). Gratification vs. compensation: longitudinal evidence for the shifting motivations behind adolescent gaming disorder. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, Article 1938938. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1938938

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1938938

Keywords: gaming disorder, adolescents, gaming motivation, I-PACE model, longitudinal study, cross-lagged panel analysis, gratification, compensation, fantasy motives, identity motives, coping, Frontiers in Psychiatry