In the early 90`s a new form of entertainment appeared through the growing popularity of dedicated game console machines. Most of you probably remember them because of their consecrated characters: Sonic the Hedgehog or the extremely popular Super Mario Brothers. With the appearance of the Internet we find ourselves in front of a new gaming medium consecrated as a new and challenging gaming forum. New games emerged, enabling people to link up online and to game together.

The rise  of computer games as a leisure phenomenon was subject to little research and when it actually happened, researchers preferred a quantitative perspective rather than a qualitative one and mostly concentrated on the more negative aspects: excessive play and addiction.

Almost all of the research studies focused on arcade and console games.

Most of the studies showed that on the Internet, as a new medium for video games, the majority of the players were males, approximately 85% and over 60% of them were older than 19 years. The results of these recent surveys attempt to break a consecrated stereotypical image of an adolescent  online gamer. It has been proved that the typical online player is not a socially withdrawn young male with limited sex role identity, even though this kind of image continues to be misplaced and the image of a typical gamer is seen as socially negative, remaining firmly within  what has been called youth culture.

One of the positive aspects of the online gaming phenomenon has been displayed by the results of a recent online empirical survey, indicating that both altruism and reciprocity influence prosocial behavior simultaneously. So, male players are more likely than female players to seek friendship of opposite sex and for most of them the interaction among players is more important than actually playing the online game, creating premises for a prosocial behavior.

Online game communities, more than other virtual communities are designed to promote a real-world look and feel within the borders and many other unique properties of the cyberspace where anonymity rules. That why some of the researchers are still skeptic about how the results of previous prosocial behavior studies might be applicable to online communities. Still, in the case of social exchange theory, stating the expectation of obtaining  feedback and rewards after helping a person, virtual communities studies draw some very interesting conclusions. In this case, the feedback of reciprocity may come from the entire community rather than from a specific helped person.

Other studies regarding the impact of the online gaming showed that sometimes in the virtual gaming space, sex roles are changed and some of the online participants even play avatars of the opposite sex. Also the case of the  physical gaming space, mainly Internet Cafes, is very interesting because they were speculated as a masculine space and thus considered highly gendered. But male and female respondents exhibited similar patterns when predicting their intentions and behavior towards visiting Internet Cafes.

If you have probably thought that video games, computer games and Internet Cafes are part from a male`s adolescent  universe only, you were not entirely wrong, but stereotypical.The above mentioned aspects are just a few research aspects of this very challenging subject. Online gaming is a very powerful phenomenon, likely to produce addiction but with subtitle, yet numerous positive aspects, essential for a healthy, personal and social attitude.