Video game play is positively correlated with well-being

Abstract

People have never played more video games and many stakeholders are worried that this activity might be bad for players. So far, research has not had adequate data to test whether these worries are justified and if policymakers should act to regulate video game play time. We attempt to provide much-needed evidence with adequate data. Whereas previous research had to rely on self-reported play behaviour, we collaborated with two games companies, Electronic Arts and Nintendo of America, to obtain players’ actual play behaviour. We surveyed players of Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons for their well-being, motivations, and need satisfaction during play and merged their responses with telemetry data (i.e., logged game play). Contrary to many fears that excessive game time will lead to addiction and poor mental health, we found a small positive relation between game play and well-being. Need satisfaction and motivations during play did not interact with game time but were instead independently related to well-being. Our results advance the field in two important ways. First, we show that collaborations with industry partners can be done to high academic standards in an ethical and transparent fashion. Second, we deliver much-needed evidence to policymakers on the link between play and mental health.

There is no evidence that associations between adolescents’ digital technology engagement and mental health problems have increased

“…In addition to the complexities in determining causal relations, the self-report nature of the current data presents unique problems. Although self-report measures of mental health and technology use have high face validity, they might be poor representations of the actual state of affairs (Shaw et al, 2020): In studies of this topic, self-report measures of technology use are consistently biased and are not highly correlated with objective use (Johannes et al, 2020;Parry et al, 2020;Scharkow, 2016). Additionally, true changes in technologies and their associations with health could be difficult to observe in between-persons data because adolescents, too, might change and e.g.…”

“…Studies that have adopted more systematic approaches to estimating associations between well-being and technology engagement have shown that the resulting relations depend on gender, arbitrary analytic choices, and the exact variables included in the analyses (Bjerre-Nielsen et al, 2020;Jensen et al, 2019;Kreski et al, 2020;Orben et al, 2019). In addition, most of this literature is limited by its use of self-reports of technology use, which are known to be biased and noisy indicators of true amounts of engagement, and lead to inaccurate estimated relations between health and well-being (Johannes et al, 2020;Parry et al, 2020;Scharkow, 2016;Shaw et al, 2020). Nevertheless, recent analyses and reviews have shown a trend whereby individuals who report greater technology engagement tend to also report higher levels of mental health problems, but the factors underlying these cross-sectional relationships still remain poorly understood (Appel et al, 2020).…”

The hidden intricacy of loot box design: A granular description of random monetized reward features

“…Each feature of loot boxes here may moderate the effects of others, and thus evidence for effects of a given feature must be understood as limited to a particular context, and ideally reached after controlling for other features around it. Given this, natural experiments (e.g., Zendle, 2019) and industry collaborations (e.g., Johannes et al, 2020) will likely be crucial sources of data.…”

Remote Collaboration in Higher Game Development Education. Online Practices and Learning Processes of Students Between Professional Routines and Psychosocial Challenges

“…Interestingly, in our study, some teams were able to manage their well-being internally by engaging themselves purposefully in recreational communication and activities on a regular basis. These activities included, in many cases, playing online games together, which is insofar obvious because games are their shared passion, but worth mentioning as recent research has shown a positive relation between (social) gaming and well-being (Johannes et al, 2020). It can be concluded that future courses on remote work should explicitly educate students in coping with the psychosocial challenges of working remotely over physical distance.…”