Authenticity and Resilience: A Study of Video Game Live Streamers

Abstract

Resilience is an active process defined as, “skills, attributes, and abilities that enable individuals to adapt to hardships, difficulties, and challenges.” (Alvord & Grados, 2005). Resilience is critical, as throughout our lives, encountering challenging situations is inevitable. Acting in accordance with one’s true self could potentially decrease dissonance between one’s actions and values. This study aims to better understand the relationship between authenticity and resilience through a naturalistic observational study of video-game live streamers. Gamers who took ownership of their mistakes were classified as authentic, as a common trait of authentic individuals is being true to oneself (Vannini & Franzese, 2008). We hypothesized that video game players who verbally take ownership of their in-game mistakes would have higher resilience scores, as measured by the number of optimistic statements, compared to those who do not take ownership. The results indicate that taking ownership of our mistakes could potentially make us more resilient. Further, these results give validity to examining resilience and authenticity in other domains beyond video games through an experimental design. Taking ownership of mistakes helps foster resilience and therefore it has implications for school-based programs and for parents to encourage their children to be transparent about their faults.