Social video gaming and well-being

The impact of media on children during the COVID-19 pandemic: A narrative review

“…Gaming has also played a significant role in entertaining children during isolation, even bringing in some cases positive, and non-negative, effects such as improving mental health and helping combat isolation ( Barr and Copeland-Stewart, 2022 ). In fact, video games are functional stress-relieving tools for both children and adults: they are believed to reduce both anxiety and depression and increase other abilities ( Bowman et al., 2022 ; Limone, 2021 ; Yee and Sng, 2022 ).…”

Advancing our understanding of the associations between social media use and well-being

“…[8, p. 316]. Social media channels can be used with a multitude of aims and in different contexts, such as social gaming [9], online dating [10], and networking in the workplace [11]. Social media can include all kinds of general audience apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, but also specialized ones, such as dating (e.g., Tinder), professional (e.g., LinkedIn), or social gaming apps (e.g., Discord).…”

“…Toma's review on online dating reveals that even though individuals with psycho-social vulnerabilities generally prefer online dating to offline dating, the well-being implications for these online daters have hardly been investigated [10]. Such implications have been better addressed for social gaming, the playing of games with other members of the same online group, while communicating via social media [9], which can stimulate a sense of community and well-being in the short term.…”

“…Most of the included reviews agree that the social media use-well-being evidence base is largely cross-sectional [5,9,11,16,20,23,30,37,39]. But, at the same time, many observe a trend in recent studies to employ more sophisticated within-person designs, including intensive short-term (e.g., experience sampling) or more long-term panel surveys with wider measurement intervals.…”

Eight Hypotheses on Technology Use and Psychosocial Wellbeing: A Bicultural Phenomenological Study of Gaming during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Numerous in-depth studies have also documented the varying social functions of gaming across life contexts (e.g., Chen, 2012 ; Fine, 1983 ; for a review, see Bowman et al, 2022 ). That said, it remains unknown how those social functions were affected by the pandemic.…”