Time spent playing video games has no effect on people’s well-being, research from the University of Oxford has found, countering fears that gaming could be harmful to mental health.
Unlike most previous studies on the effects of video games on well-being, the Oxford team was able to track actual gameplay, rather than relying on self-reported estimates.
With the cooperation of seven different game publishers, who agreed to share data without publication control, they were able to track the gaming habits of nearly 40,000 individual players, all of whom agreed to participate in the study.
The scale of the study provides strong evidence for the lack of effect on well-being, said Andy Przybylski, one of the researchers. “With 40,000 observations over six weeks, we really gave the increase and decrease in video games a fair chance to predict emotional states in life satisfaction, and we didn’t find evidence for that – we found evidence that it wasn’t true in a practically significant way. road.”
What matters, says Przybylski, is “the mindset that people have when they approach the game”. Players are asked to report their experiences on grounds such as “autonomy”, “competency” and “intrinsic motivation”, to unpick whether they play for healthy reasons, such as fun or socializing with friends, or more about one, such as a compulsion to satisfy set goals by the game.
Stronger motivation is associated with positive well-being, the study found, while players who feel as though they “have to” play games also tend to have poorer satisfaction, regardless of how long they play.
The finding of no relationship between gaming and well-being can be broken down to an extreme level: there can be an effect if players increase their playing time by 10 hours a day above what is usual for them. The researchers did not collect data for individual gameplay sessions with a duration below zero or above 10 hours, due to the risk of logging errors. But it’s strong enough to disprove many fears of a common link between game time and poor mental health.
That said, the findings cannot cover the entire game, said Przybylski. Despite approaching more than 30 publishers, only seven agreed to participate, and the games studied (Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Apex Legends, Eve Online, Forza Horizon 4, Gran Turismo Sport, Outriders, and The Crew 2) represent a wide but not total cross-section of the medium.
“It took a year and a half for this game company to donate their data,” said Przybylski, “and this game is not randomly selected. But this is a publisher that is leading for open science.”
Nevertheless, the study, which builds on a previous paper from the university that followed the players of two games, is very important to close the “concern-evidence gap”.
“This is a very basic study: we don’t even know what people do when they’re playing games, we didn’t create an experiment, and even without that data, countries that pass rules, in the case of Japan, or laws in in the case of China, it bans or restricts games. That is, if we take the explanation at face value, it is supposed to be about improving the mental health of young people. There is no evidence that they are effective.”
