There are at least two implications for practitioners involved in virtual youth services. First, for individuals responsible for a virtual youth service it is important to define the underlying rea-sons for an intervention in relation to the functions of the service. Second, the young who are socially shy are not more likely to spend time playing MMOs or gain less social capital outside virtual environment. The qualities of MMOs seem to have no expected impact on enhancing the young socially shy to social interaction. Therefore, reasons to integrate the young people who play MMOs into the society or fostering them into autonomous and self-conscious adults are perhaps to be sought elsewhere than in their personality (i.e. social shyness). The article has shown that in terms of being socially shy those who play MMOs have no more difficulties as their non-gamer peers in adjusting to society or have problems in the process of forming their personality.
In this article, a relationship between social shyness and the time spent playing MMOs was ex-plored and theoretically explained via the ability to interact with strangers and the accumulation of social capital. Ideally, this logic should be empirically tested by measuring the relationship between the incentives to seek for social interaction through MMOs. However, this was not
possible in this case due to the lack of information regarding the willingness to play MMOs. This is in the author’s view the main limitation of the article. Another limitation is that the model has been validated by making use of a sample of respondents living in Western culture (Finland), which is likely to affect the extent to which MMO perceptions influence behaviour. Despite these limitations, however, the hypothesis developed in the article is grounded on valid arguments regarding social motivation behind playing MMOs made by prior research.
It is recommended that further research to expand the knowledge of the effects of the young people’s personality on the time spent playing MMOs and social capital be conducted. This article stresses the importance of the presence of social shyness in the young when seeking social interaction especially in a virtual environment. As more young individuals join MMOs, other factors may become relevant. In general, more research answering the broader question of what factors influence the ways in which young people seek social capital through MMOs is required.
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