‘Duration playing video games is unlikely to impact wellbeing’
Posted: 17 Aug 2022At the end of July 2022, a new research study has been published by the Oxford Internet Institute, which found little to no evidence for a causal connection between gameplay duration and wellbeing.
The Study
The study was conducted with almost 39,000 players game behaviour data across the span of 6 weeks, provided by 7 games publishers:
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo of America; N = 13 646)
Apex Legends (Electronic Arts; N = 1158)
Eve Online (CCP Games; N = 905)
Forza Horizon 4 (Microsoft; N = 1981)
Gran Turismo Sport (Sony Interactive Entertainment; N = 19 258)
Outriders (Square Enix; N = 1530)
The Crew 2 (Ubisoft; N = 457).
The study is published at an interesting time, contradicting findings from a previous study from the same team in 2020, finding that ‘video games are good for wellbeing’.
The study does allow us to draw that the duration playing games doesn’t link to well-being, but it is important to note that since there was no control group (who refrained from gameplay throughout the study), we can only comment on duration rather than video games as a broader topic.
What’s new about this study?
Previous work linking video games to an array of human states and behaviours has not, (in the views of the authors) been robust, credible or relevant, being seriously limited by:
(i) Unsupported theoretical starting points
(e.g. some researchers take the starting perspective that video gameplay “displaces” social activity (i.e. time spent in a game is time lost to (it is implied) social interactions). Such evidence as there is suggests that this is an incorrect starting point
(ii) Limitations in experimental methods:
- Examining gameplay in an experimental setting doesn’t capture natural gameplay
- Measures of game behaviour have relied on subjective recall which is notoriously inaccurate
- Studies often use cross-sectional (one-off) measures which don’t allow us to infer what causes what (i.e. if my gameplay is high and my wellbeing is low, there are at least three explanations for this association: (i) more gameplay causes poor wellbeing (ii) Poor wellbeing causes more gameplay (iii) some other factor (e.g. loneliness?) causes more gameplay and poorer wellbeing.
- Often the selection of games themselves is limited so it’s not sure whether we can generalise (e.g. just because ‘The Last of Us’ might make me feel miserable, doesn’t mean that playing ‘Journey’ will do the same.
The current study overcame, at least partly, all of those limitations by using objective measures of players’ behaviour over a 6-week period and making three different measures of well-being across 7 games, which allowed the possibility of looking at causality in two directions. They also recorded players motivations towards gameplay as a means of gaining further insights into the causal chain.
Study Findings
So, what can we understand from this study?
- Pretty strong evidence that duration of gameplay does not affect wellbeing (including affect and life satisfaction)
- Pretty strong evidence too that wellbeing (affect and life satisfaction) do not influence duration of gameplay.
Regarding Motivation:
“Intrinsic motivation” was associated positively with wellbeing and affect
“Extrinsic motivation” was associated negatively with wellbeing and affect
“Our findings, therefore, suggest that amount of play does not, on balance, undermine well-being. Instead, our results align with a perspective that the motivational experiences during play may influence well-being [23].
Simply put, the subjective qualities of play may be more important than its quantity.
The extent to which this effect generalizes or is practically significant remains an open question.”
Safe In Our World’s Thoughts
We got together with our clinical board to discuss the study, and put together some of our own thoughts on the study.
- We thought that although the study is not perfect, (the sample size in comparison to the number of games and number of gamers is relatively small), the study is a well-motivated piece of research that has worked on previous limitations that have been used to draw conclusions with far-reaching impact.
- The study is not showing that games don’t make you feel better. It shows that duration of play doesn’t relate to wellbeing.
- It allows us to reject claims that have no evidentiary basis, and makes a fairly broad statement, but calls for further research to be conducted.
We think that this could align with the results found in the 2022 Mental Health Foundation Study, in which they found that players could benefit from self-reflecting on their gaming habits – again highlighting that the quality of a gaming session may be more beneficial to well-being than the quantity, which can be documented via a gaming log.
Safe In Our World continues to welcome further research and study into player behaviour and gameplay, wellbeing and the link between gaming and mental health.
