On Tuesday, 3 May 2022 at 3:30pm Bangkok time, the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Oxford, the United Kingdom, will present an online Zoom lecture on research stating that Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being.
As the Oxford University website explains,
Video games are a massively popular form of entertainment, socialising, cooperation, and competition. Games’ ubiquity fuels fears that they cause poor mental health, and major health bodies and national governments have made far-reaching policy decisions to address games’ potential risks, despite lacking adequate supporting data. The concern-evidence mismatch underscores that we know too little about games’ impacts on well-being. We addressed this disconnect by linking six weeks of 38,935 players’ objective game-behaviour data, provided by seven global game publishers, with three waves of their self-reported well-being that we collected. We found little to no evidence for a causal connection be- tween gameplay and well-being. However, results suggested that motivations play a role in players’ well-being. For good or ill, the average effects of time spent playing video games on players’ well-being are likely very small, and further industry data are required to determine potential risks and supportive factors to health.
The TU Library collection includes many books on different aspects of video games.
The speaker will be Professor Andrew Przybylski, an experimental psychologist at The Oxford Internet Institute.
Professor Przybylski’s work is mainly concerned with applying psychological models of motivation and health to study how people interact with virtual environments including video games and social media. He is particularly interested in integrating open, robust, and reproducible science with evidence-based policymaking.
TU students who wish to participate are invited to write to the following booking email:
diana.verley@psych.ox.ac.uk
Chair of the event will be Dr. Rebecca Syed Sheriff, a Consultant Psychiatrist at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust; Senior Clinical Research fellow at the University of Oxford, Department of Psychiatry; and Honorary Associate Professor at the Institute of Mental Health, Nottingham University. She has a special interest in the mental health of adolescents and young adults.
Last year in a publication of the Royal Society, Professor Przybylski coauthored a paper, Video game play is positively correlated with well-being.
Its abstract follows:
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 Plantsvs.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 play time will lead to addiction and poor mental health, we found a small positive relation between game play and affective well-being. Need satisfaction and motivations during play did not interact with play 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.
The article’s introduction begins:
Video games are an immensely popular and profitable leisure activity. Last year, the revenues of the games industry were larger than the film industry’s and the number of people who report playing games has never been higher. Across the globe, the rise of games as a dominant form of recreation and socializing has raised important questions about the potential effect of play on well-being. These questions concern players, parents, policymakers and scholars alike: billions of people play video games, and if this activity has positive or negative effects on well-being, playing games might have worldwide health impacts. Therefore, empirically understanding how games might help or harm players is a top priority for all stakeholders. It is possible games are neutral with respect to health and enacting policies that unnecessarily regulate play would restrict human rights to play and freedom of expression. Decisions on regulating video games, or promoting it as a medium for bolstering health, thus come with high stakes and must not be made without robust scientific evidence.
Unfortunately, nearly three decades of research exploring the possible links between video games and negative outcomes including aggression, addiction, well-being and cognitive functioning have brought us nowhere near a consensus or evidence-based policy because reliable, reproducible and ecologically valid studies are few and far between. In recent years, researchers and policymakers have shifted focus from concerns about violent video games and aggression to concerns about the association between the amount, or nature, of the time people spend playing video games and well-being (e.g. in the UK). In other words, they are interested in the effect of game play behaviours on subjective well-being and by extension mental health. Yet, instead of measuring such behaviour directly, research has relied on self-reported engagement. Historically, this methodological decision has been taken on practical grounds: first, self-report is a relatively easy way to collect data about play. Second, the video games industry has in the past hesitated to work with independent scientists. As time has gone on, it has become increasingly clear that defaulting to self-report is not tenable. Recent evidence suggests self-reports of digital behaviours are notoriously imprecise and biased, which limits the conclusions we can draw from research on time spent on video games and well-being.
The lack of accurate behavioural data represents a formidable shortcoming that deprives health policymakers of the high-quality evidence they require to make informed decisions on possible regulations to the video games industry. A range of solutions have been proposed including active and passive forms of online engagement and measuring engagement using device telemetry (i.e. logged game play). Therefore, there is a need for directly measured video game behaviour to inform policymakers. To obtain such data, researchers must collaborate, in a transparent and credible way, with industry data scientists who can record objective measures of video game engagement. In this paper, we detail such a collaboration and report our investigation of the relation between the actual time people devote to playing a game and their subjective sense of well-being. We believe our study addresses the primary impediment to past research, delivers high-quality evidence that policymakers require, and provides a template for transparent, robust and credible research on games and health.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)