In a recent study published in the journal Technology Mind and Behavior, researchers investigated the relationship between video game playtime and well-being. The findings indicate that there is no significant overall impact, either positive or negative, of video game playtime on the mental well-being of adult gamers.
The impact of video gaming on mental health has been a subject of heated debate among parents, policymakers, and scholars. With billions of people engaging in digital gaming worldwide, concerns about the potential negative effects on well-being have grown. This concern intensified when the World Health Organization included “gaming disorder” in its International Classification of Diseases in 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic further increased average gaming time, raising additional alarms.
Previous research on the relationship between playtime and well-being has produced mixed results. Some studies have found negative associations, suggesting that excessive gaming could be linked to issues like anxiety and depression. Others have found minimal or no significant associations. On the flip side, some studies have suggested that gaming can be beneficial, helping people cope with stress, satisfy psychological needs, or enhance personal growth.
However, a significant limitation of previous research has been the reliance on self-reported data for playtime, which has been shown to be an inaccurate measure. The new study aimed to address this issue by using objective playtime data obtained directly from gaming devices.
“I play video games and have experienced them as both harmful and supportive for my wellbeing at different times in my life, depending on how I play. In this study, I was hoping to lay to rest the idea that time is an important factor in how play affects player’s mental health, and push the field towards more nuanced assessments of how the quality of gaming impacts wellbeing,” said study author Nick Ballou, a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.
“In contrast to some studies, where I don’t have a good sense of what’s going on and want to figure it out, this time I had a strong hypothesis that there would be no direct relationship between playtime and wellbeing, and hoped the data would back me up!”
The researchers conducted a 12-week panel study involving 414 adult Xbox players from the United States and the United Kingdom. Participants were recruited through paid advertisements on Reddit, social media, and Prolific screening questionnaires. To be eligible, participants had to be at least 18 years old, play video games primarily on Xbox, and play at least one hour per week on the platform.
Participants were required to complete surveys at six biweekly intervals, which included measures of their well-being and provided access to their gaming data by adding researcher accounts as friends on the Xbox network. This allowed the researchers to track playtime objectively using Python scripts that recorded players’ online status every five minutes.
The study measured three aspects of well-being: positive affect (how happy participants felt at the moment), depressive symptoms (feelings of sadness or hopelessness over the past week), and general mental well-being (overall psychological health over the past two weeks). Playtime was logged and analyzed over three time scales: the past 24 hours, the past week, and the past two weeks.
The researchers found no significant relationship between the amount of time spent playing video games and subsequent well-being. This held true for all three aspects of well-being measured. Even among highly engaged players who spent several hours a day gaming, there were no signs of impaired mental health.
For instance, an additional hour of daily playtime was associated with less than a 0.02-point change in well-being measures, far below the threshold for practical significance. Similarly, there was no evidence that changes in well-being influenced subsequent playtime. Players who experienced changes in their mood or mental health did not significantly alter their gaming habits in response.
“For most people, most of the time, how much time one spends playing video games is not a meaningful factor for wellbeing,” Ballou told PsyPost. “There are people who play lots and feel great, people who play little and feel poorly, and everything in between. I suspect this is because most of the time, gaming replaces other largely interchangeable activities — playing games instead of watching a series or playing a sport; playing with friends online instead of being social offline.”
“While not identical, these activities offer many of the same benefits to players, such as stress relief and escapism. Only in the much rarer cases where someone’s gaming is regularly replacing non-interchangeable activities like sleep, work/school performance, or relationships with friends/family should we start to worry.”
On average, participants played video games for about 2.1 hours per day. The distribution of gaming time among participants varied significantly. While some players logged only an hour or so per day, others played for much longer periods.
“I was surprised by how heavily engaged our sample was — because we sample on social media forums for video game players, our sample played games a lot,” Ballou said. “The average person in the sample played over 2 hours a day, and many averaged more than 5 hours a day across the entire 3-month duration of the study. And yet even the most heavily engaged players didn’t show signs of impaired wellbeing.”
But the study has some limitations to consider. One major limitation is the potential for time-varying confounders—factors that might influence both gaming and well-being over time. For example, a change in disposable income could affect both how much someone plays and their mental health. While the study collected open-ended responses about life events that might impact both gaming and well-being, these were not exhaustively analyzed.
Another limitation is the focus on a specific demographic: adult Xbox players in the United States and the United Kingdom. The results may not generalize to younger players, other regions, or players using different gaming platforms.
“Our sample includes only people who are 18+, and the average age was 32,” Ballou noted. “Children and adolescents have different demands on their time, and high gaming may be more likely to displace important activities than for adults who are able to arrange their schedule to accommodate high gaming. I hope to run similar studies with younger participants in the future.”
Despite these caveats, the findings challenge the notion that gaming inherently harms mental health and highlight the need for more nuanced research into the diverse experiences of gamers.
“I’d like to use this research to hold up a mirror for participants,” Ballou added. “It’d be great to give people better tools to monitor their own gaming, such as a dashboard that shows them how much they’ve been playing, whether this is increasing or decreasing over time, what times of day this is happening, and so on.”
“Researchers may not be able to say confidently which people will benefit or be harmed by their gaming, but players themselves certainly can identify it. We did a trial version of this by sending players a PDF report about their play at the end of the study, but I’d like them to have live access.”
The study, “Registered Report Evidence Suggests No Relationship Between Objectively Tracked Video Game Playtime and Well-Being Over 3 Months,” was authored by Nick Ballou, Craig J. R. Sewall, Jack Ratcliffe, David Zendle, Laurissa Tokarchuk, and Sebastian Deterding.