“Time Spent Playing Video Games Is Unlikely to Impact Well-Being”, 2021-10-11 (; similar):
[Previously: “Video game play is positively correlated with well-being”, et al 2021]
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 6 weeks of 38,030 players’ objective game-behaviour data, provided by 6 global game publishers, with 3 waves of their self-reported well-being that we collected.
We found little to no evidence for a causal connection between 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.
…Participants and procedure: We collaborated with game publishers who recruited players with emails to participate in a 3-wave panel study. 7 publishers participated with the following games: Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo of America; n = 13,646), Apex Legends (Electronic Arts; n = 1,158), Eve Online (CCP Games; n = 905), Forza Horizon 4 (Microsoft; n = 1,981), Gran Turismo Sport (Sony Interactive Entertainment; n = 19,258), Outriders (Square Enix; n = 1,530), and The Crew 2 (Ubisoft; n = 457). The emails targeted the general English-speaking player bases of these publishers in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States. Publishers invited active players of the selected game to participate. Active play was defined as having played the respective game in the past 2 weeks to 2 months; variability in this interval between publishers was due to differences in how many players regularly played a given game, so that an adequate sample could be invited.
…The RICLPM included other parameters of subsidiary interest. First, the autocorrelation parameters indicated that affect and life satisfaction were modest predictors of themselves (baffect[t-1] = 0.39 [0.28, 0.52]; blife satisfaction[t-1] = 0.20 [0.11, 0.30]). Second, the covariances of the random intercepts, indicating the extent to which people who tended to play more were also more likely to report higher well-being was statistically-significantly greater than zero only for Animal Crossing and Outriders, for both well-being measures, replicating our previous findings and extending them to the life satisfaction outcome [ et al 2021]. However, it was notable that the positive correlation was not replicated across the other game titles. Third, the within-person gameplay-well-being covariances were overall not statistically-significantly different from zero. See OSM for details on these parameter estimates.
…We also studied the roles of motivational experiences during game play. Conceptually replicating previous crosssectional findings [ et al 2021], we found that intrinsic motivations have a positive effect on well-being whereas extrinsic motivations have a negative effect. The effects of motivations were larger than that of video game play and our analysis suggests we can be confident in the direction of these motivation effects. In absolute terms, the effect of a one-point deviation from a player’s typical intrinsic motivation on affect did not reach the threshold of being subjectively noticeable (0.10 estimate vs. 0.26 threshold). However, we cannot be certain a one-point increase (out of a 7-point scale) is considered a large or a small shift—participants’ average range on the intrinsic motivation scale was 0.36. Until future work determines what constitutes an adequate ‘treatment’, these conclusions regarding motivations remain tentative.