Video games don’t damage people’s mental health, and they don’t help it. In fact, they don’t do much at all to move the needle, according to a new study of tens of thousands of gamers.
For years, policymakers and public health agencies have expressed concern about the potential for video games to be addictive or harm mental health. This study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, offers one of the more comprehensive looks at the relationship between video games and well-being. It builds on previous research by the same team, which also found no ill effects on mental health.
The research team worked with video game publishers to recruit nearly 39,000 people who played one of seven games: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Apex Legends, Eve Online, Forza Horizon 4, Gran Turismo Sport, and The Crew 2. The game publishers provided a game. game data for participants for six weeks, and the researchers surveyed participants three times.
Because the team was able to examine a player‘s game data, they didn’t have to rely on a player’s self-report of the amount of time they spent playing — so the team was able to get a more accurate reading on playing time. The study measured well-being using two tools: the scale of positive and negative experiences, which asks people to rank how often they experienced feelings such as “happy” and “scared”, and the Cantril self-anchoring scale, which asks people to say. where they are on a ladder with the top representing their best possible life.
The study also asked people to take the Player Experience Need Satisfaction survey, which tracks people’s experience with specific games — tracking things like their perception of autonomy and their motivations for playing the game.
The analysis found that spending more or less time playing games had no negative or positive effect on how people felt. Conversely, how people felt did not have a significant effect on how much time people spent playing.
The authors said that any role that video games play in swinging well-being that emerged in the study was too small to have a real effect on how people feel. People would have to play games for 10 more hours a day than their baseline to notice changes in their well-being, the study found.
The study did, however, find some evidence that people’s motivation to play games and their experience playing them had a slightly greater impact on well-being. When people played because they wanted to, their well-being was better than when people played because they felt compelled to. However, these relationships were small, and it is not clear whether these incentives would have much of a noticeable effect for players.
There is still more to learn about the ways video games affect how people feel and how they behave, the study authors noted. This analysis only looked at a handful of the thousands of games on the market. Researchers have yet to examine how motivations for playing games and quality of gameplay might change people’s experiences. They also need to find out whether certain people have characteristics that make them more or less susceptible to changes in well-being.
“We know we need a lot more player data from a lot more platforms to develop the kind of deeper understanding needed to inform policy and shape advice to parents and medical professionals,” said study author Andrew Przybylski, a senior researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, in a statement.
