Abstract:

Computers, the internet and games are involved in every aspect of human life, from home to work, from education to leisure, from entertainment to daily life and sharing. The majority of the time individuals spend on the computer and the Internet consists of leisure and various entertainment activities. One of these entertainment activities is digital games. Because nowadays when it comes to leisure and entertainment, playing digital games has become a common activity for children, adolescents and adults. Today, even working adults can play digital games during short breaks at work, adolescents and children can play digital games at school between classes, or plan the digital game they will play at the end of class. Because playing games is regarded as an important stage in the development and subjective well-being of individuals. The reason for this is that the concepts of playing games and having fun, which were realized in the past in open spaces such as playgrounds, streets ... etc. in the past, have started to be played between people in the virtual environment, especially with the development of information communication technology.

In today's world, digital games are one of the most practical ways to access information communication technologies and adapt to the online world. Especially in societies where information communication technologies are used intensively, individuals' inferior ability in information communication technologies may lead to low performance in their work and school lives. In this context, digital games provide individuals with a sense of achievement by incorporating a reward system, and thus have the ability to provide players with certain skills and abilities.

Digital games used for educational purposes facilitate the learning and decision-making process of both school-age children and adults studying a particular subject. On the other hand, it has also been reported in the literature that computer games may have various negative effects on the development of children and young people. The long duration of digital games can negatively affect young individuals, especially those who have difficulty controlling their time, academically, mentally, socially and physically.

Subjective well-being is defined as individuals having positive affect and being away from negative affect as a result of their subjective evaluation of themselves in terms of cognitive and affective aspects. In other words, subjective well-being is a concept that expresses how positively individuals interpret their lives and experiences and how satisfied they are with their lives and themselves. Individuals with high levels of subjective well-being make more effort to contribute to society than individuals with low levels of subjective well-being. Individuals with high levels of subjective well-being exhibit many behaviors that they believe are for the benefit of society, as they care about social benefit as much as individual benefit.

This study aims to determine the relationship between digital game addiction and subjective well-being for 450 students in the faculty of education at Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa. As the result of the regression analysis, a significant 43.8% negative relationship was found between digital game addiction and subjective well-being. Digital game addiction negatively affects subjective well-being.

Keywords:

Digital Game Addiction, Subjective Well-Being, University Students, Statistical Analysis.