Chapter 2

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES

This chapter presents the review of related literature

and studies pertaining to the effects of playing Mobile

Legends to the behavior of the students from different

sources such as books, journals, internet sites, published

and unpublished theses and other reading materials.

Related Literature

Mobile Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena

(MOBA) game designed for mobile phones developed and

published by Shanghai Moonton Technology. In this game, the

two opposing teams fight to destroy the enemy base while

defending their own base.

In each team there are five players that control their

own avatar called “hero” from their own devices. Playing

this consumes quite a lot of time and focus on the battle,

it is also very addicting especially when one has the urge

to win and gain stars to rank up (Carolina, et.al 2019).

Related Studies

According to the research of Kuss and Griffiths

(2012), the reason teens play online games is to have fun

and also because they want to feel relief. During school

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hours, students tend to feel stressed due to loads of

school works and through playing it will relive their

stress.

Some researches also found that playing online games

is beneficial as it enables the players to come up with

decisions in tight situations that keep the players to be

alert, active and strategic. They also form collaborations

not only with their friends but also with strangers.

However, Yubou and Xinning (2014) found in their study

that collaboration formed with friends still poses less

challenges in handling in-game conflicts compared with one

formed with strangers.

Based on studies, MOBA has positive effects to a

person. This game has met people's expectations in looking

for a perfect way to spend time with their family, friends

or even people they don’t know.

This is because you could also turn on your mic and

communicate with each other while on the game. However,

this is also the reason why players might get in a heated

argument while on-game.

Playing too much of this can also cause a lot of

problems to your health and even relationships with other

people (Obrero, 2019).

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Castillo (2019) states that what comes along with the

excessive usage of video gaming are increase in violent

behaviors in real life, usage of verbally abusive language,

sometimes depression and anxiety after playing video games

for overly long period of time.

However, these excessive and compulsive usage of video

gaming are associated in ‘game addiction’ or ‘problematic

video gaming’ which will not be explored in this study and

is part of its limitations.

Furthermore, studies regarding the effects of online

gaming on the academic performance and behavior of students

appeared to be mix. However, this only seems to be true on

several older studies as recent ones shows that online

games can have a positive effect on learning when used in

particular ways.

On a study conducted by Castillo (2017) focusing on

the impact of online gaming on the academic performance and

social behavior of the students, playing online games do

not affect their grades badly for they know how to limit

themselves.

They know that they need to control themselves in

order to function well in their class that is why they only

play games during vacation and weekends with a lot of time

compared when they have classes.

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The same is also noted in a 2008 study on media attention

and cognitive abilities, “content appears to be crucial”

(Schmidt and Vanderwater, 2008). It reveals that if the

content being consumed is positive, then positive results

can be expected. If the content is negative, then negative

results can be expected. The study examined research from

many sources in arriving at this conclusion.

In addition, the study of Payne et al explored and

researched the effects of computer games on poor social

communications, low self-esteem, poor health and even

violence from online games. The results show low self-

esteem, poor social communications on most of the gamers as

they do not go out and socialize with people except for

only other online gamers and also health related issues due

to lack of exercise and proper diet caused by excessive

playing.

A similar study was also conducted by Azad Fallah and

Ahmadi which studied the effects of computer addiction to

mental and physical health, social skills, and causes so

much stress to the body and revealed the same result as the

study of Payne et al.

The research differs in the above mentioned studies in

terms of the broadness as it only focuses on a specific

game that is currently prevalent among Filipinos which is

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Mobile Legends. The study also looks into the different

causes of playing mobile legends and its effects on a

student’s behavior.

Conceptual Framework

This conceptual framework is anchored on the statement

of the problem of the study. It aims to know the causes and

the effects of playing Mobile Legends to the behavior of

the Junior High School students, affecting the respondents

themselves, their families, peers and studies.

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Mobile
Legends

Causes

Effects

Self Family Peers Studies

Moral Development

Implications

Figure 1. Paradigm of the Study