The Psychology of Video Games

Andrew Miller, a guy I know,¹ spends his days in an office cubicle, working as a Procurement Officer for a large telecommunications company. Every day he spends his limited patience and good will towards humanity on arguments with various middle managers about why they can’t go out and buy this or hire a contractor to do that without following the company’s procurement policies. He also audits purchasing invoices, haggles with suppliers to get good prices, and tries to keep various budgets from into devolving into chaos. He’s good at his job, but by the end of the week he’s totally beat and ready to get away from work for a while. And so every weekend he goes on raids, rushes capture points, slays ogres, and battles to keep his place on the StarCraft II ladders.

And you know what? Come Monday morning he’s a better employee because he played video games. Science proves this beyond any argument. Well …science suggests it. I mean, a few psychologists have data saying it’s probably true. And they’re German psychologists, so it gets a little more awesome if you imagine them saying it with an accent.

Frankie says, Relax. And pw0n some noobs.

To whit, earlier this year Carmen Binnewies, Sabine Sonnentag, and Eva Mojza published a study² where they looked at what effect using the weekend to recover from work had on one’s job performance. The theory is that people have “resources” that they drawn on to do their job. These could be physical strength, attention, patience, emotional control, or whatever. Eventually those resources become sapped to the point where the person needs to recover them. Recovery happens when those resources are not being tapped, which most frequently happens during nights and weekends.³ But it just doesn’t happen magically; you have to engage in what’s known as “recovery experiences.”

There are supposedly three different kinds of experiences that lead to recovery: psychological detachment, relaxation, and mastery experiences. The first of these, psychological detachment, can be as simple as not gong in to work –it relies on the employee to do and think about something else for a change. Relaxation activities are those that most of us probably think of in response to the phrase “taking it easy.” These kinds of past times can be anything that the person enjoys and which is physically relaxing –reading, lounging, doing yard work, even exercising. Finally, mastery experiences are those that build new skills and a sense of accomplishment and maybe even add new skills to our repertoire.

Using a series of surveys that asked participants about what they did on the weekends while also gathering information about job performance and how grueling they found their work, the researchers found that yes, the types of recovery experiences described above led to feeling recovered on Mondays. And that state of being recovered in turn led not only to better job performance, but also feeling that doing well at work actually required less effort.

While reading this article, especially the parts about the recovery activities of psychological detachment, relaxation, and mastery experiences, I kept thinking, “Dude, video games. Playing video games could lead to any and all of those recovery experiences.” We play games to temporarily detach escape from reality, including our jobs or school. While some games leave us whit knuckled, others can be very relaxing. And at their heart, games are about mastery, developing new skills, or acquiring new knowledge.

So I did some more digging, and it turns out that I wasn’t the only one who had had those thoughts. Just last year, Leonard Reinecke had published a different study entitled “Games and Recovery: The Use of Video and Computer Games to Recuperate from Stress and Strain.”⁴ Building on the same body of research as the above authors, Reinecke also hypothesized that psychological detachment, relaxation, and mastery experiences could lead to recovery after a daily hassles and a stressful week at work, but he was specifically interested in these activities viz a viz video games.

And indeed, after surveying readers of a German language gaming website, he found that many of them routinely turned to games in response to stress, and that playing games was often experienced as acts of psychological detachment, relaxation, and skill mastery. This was, of course, particularly true for people who regularly turned to games in response to frustration or mental exhaustion. Interestingly, the more stressed by work people reported being, the less they reported playing video games –probably because their crappy jobs didn’t give them much time to play.

With all the typical media attention on the negative consequences of playing games –violence, warped racial and gender views, addiction, and time wasting– it’s nice to see some studies like the above suggesting the ways that video games can be good for your mental health. None of these researchers is saying that playing games is necessarily a better or worse recovery experience than, say, going to the gym or meeting up with some friends for drinks, but hopefully that research will follow. And besides, people differ; what does nothing to relax one person could really help our friend Andrew the Procurement Officer get ready for tackling his workload come Monday morning.

1. Well, not really, but roll with it. [↩]
2. Binnewies, C., Sonnentag, S. & Mojza, E. (2010). Recovery during the weekend and fluctuations in weekly job performance: A week-level study examining intra-individual relationships. Journal of Organizational and Occupational Psychology, 83(2), 419-441. [↩]
3. And yes, this is the point in the article by which you should have Loverboy’s “Workin’ for the Weekend” running through your head, NON STOP. [↩]
4. Reinecke, L. (2009). Games and Recovery: The Use of Video and Computer Games to Recuperate from Stress and Strain. Journal of Media Psychology, 21(3), 126-142. [↩]

For every one of us, making decisions is part of our daily human existence. Most of them are of little consequence –what to eat, what movie to see, what video game to buy– so we have developed an astonishing array of mental short-cuts to make these kinds of decisions comparatively quick, easy, and not too mentally taxing. We may eat what we have eaten and enjoyed in the past, and by and large we use simple decision rules such as “I like this genre” or “I like this developer” to choose movies or games.

Other decisions, though, are either much more important or much more public and thus we put more work into it. Whom should we date? What college should we attend? Which house should I buy? When faced with questions like these, many of us have probably drawn two columns on a piece of paper, labeling one “Pro” and one “Con” and then listing things in each column. When trying to decide whether to marry or stay a bachelor, famous biologist and five-time Counter-Strike world champion¹ Charles Darwin did exactly that, producing the list below.

The list admittedly looks a bit sexist by today’s standards, but it illustrates the idea well.² But is this sort of thing always a good idea? When video game reviewers ruminate over the merits of a particular title, they are often asked to consider standardized lists of features –graphics, sound, fun factor, multiplayer, value, extendibility, controls, and so on. Should they always try to analyze decisions across every possible variable? Is that the right way to review a game?

Researchers Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler probably wouldn’t think so, or at least they could imagine situations in which this type of approach could lead to poor evaluations. And here’s the best part: jam was involved. Delicious, strawberry jam.

In their study³ the duo were intrigued by a Consumer Reports ranking of 45 different brands of strawberry jam.⁴ Panelists in the study were trained sensory experts (i.e., professional food tasters) who sampled each of the condiments and rated them on 16 characteristics including sweetness, aroma, bitterness, spreadability, and others.

Man, those testers at Consumer Reports are creepy.

This is the kind of thing Consumer Reports does all the time, but Wilson and Schooler were curious about something. Some of their previous research had suggested than when asked to analyze their reasons for making decisions or ratings, people tend to screw things up. The theory goes that we are often aware of our preferences for products (or art, or whatever), but when asked to explain WHY, we often feel obligated to include the most salient (that is, apparent) and plausible explanations. Even if we would have otherwise ignored them.

So if asked to explain why you like Red Dead Redemption so much, you may think about what should be included in the checklist for evaluating an action game, come up with “the weapons,” and then feel compelled to award or take away points for how the game’s weapons feel and work. The problem is, the most salient and plausible factors may not be the ones that are really responsible for how much you enjoy the game. The weapons in Red Dead Redemption are largely unremarkable –the game’s appeal lies almost entirely in other areas and any weight given to how cool the weapons are is inappropriate at best.

So, thinking along these lines, Wilson and Schooler wondered what would happen if they asked normal people to recreate Consumer Report’s jam ratings. And what would happen if you asked them to ponder the reasons for their ratings the same way the Consumer Reports experts did?

So they fed some college students the 1st, 11tth, 24th, 32nd, and 44th best jams from the report to find out. Those in the control group were just asked to taste the treats and make their rakings. Those students actually did pretty well –their rankings were very close to the professional taste testers’ rankings. But the group that was asked to write down the reasons for their ratings did far worse. They may have favored the jams that the experts thought were gross and scrunched their noses up at the ones the experts thought were great.

Why? Because the subjects started focusing on factors that didn’t really matter. Smucker’s had more chunks of fruit in it, so it gets a higher rating. Wait, what? Is chunkiness really important for them? Doesn’t matter; it sounds plausible so it got factored in. When the XBLA shooter Monday Night Combat came out, some people lamented the small number of maps. Same thing –one could argue that because the gameplay requires a very specific setup, you don’t need –or even want– a lot of maps.

Over thinking it?

Puny humans are pretty bad at combining an array of weighted factors so as to arrive at a rating or decision –it’s just not how our minds were designed. Jelly or game review guidelines that require us to over analyze our decisions or check them off against a standardized list of factors (graphics, sound, etc.) can exacerbate this limitation and lead us to consider what should be irrelevant information when making our ratings. This corrupts the rating process and takes us farther from our “true” feelings or evaluations.⁵ This is one reason why I prefer more organic, experience-based evaluations of games from message boards or podcasts rather than formal game reviews. I feel like I can listen to someone talk in an unstructured way about how much the enjoy a game and get a much better idea of how much I might like it. Just consider what’s important and ignore the rest.

Now, go get yourself some jam –whatever kind you think tastes good.

1. If my notes are right [↩]
2. If you’re curious, Darwin decided to marry and, in very short order, found himself a bride in Emma Wedgewood, who by all accounts turned out to be a wonderful wife. She was also his cousin, which apparently didn’t made it into neither the “pro” nor “con” column. [↩]
3. Wilson, T. & Schooler, J. (1991). Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Qualities of Preference and Decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2), 181-192. [↩]
4. Strawberry Jams and Preserves (1985, August). Consumer Reports, 487-489. [↩]
5. This isn’t to say that meticulous decisions don’t have their place. I’d want a highly standardized process for deciding if a bridge is safe, for example, and as an Industrial-Organizational psychologist I make my livelihood off creating decision-making tools to make scrupulous, detailed accounts ratings for job candidates. But bridges and job requirements can be held constant and a standardized list of evaluations can be applied to them; games and jelly vary much more widely. [↩]

Do hardcore gamers have more bizarre but less threatening dreams than non-gamers? One of the things I love about academics is that if you chain a million of them to a million graduate students, then one of them –by pure chance alone– will study a question like that. For example, I’ve been reading about a research program by psychologists Jayne Gackenbach and Beena Kuruvilla about the ways in which the dreams of hardcore gamers differ from non-gamers.

Curious as this is, it’s actually not that off the wall if you do some digging. Research suggests that people, especially adolescents, use violent and/or scary media as a way to practice dealing with life’s comparatively mundane but nonetheless stressful situations. The theory goes that games (and other media like comics, movies, or books) give us a safe place to either become a little desensitized to anxiety-provoking ideas, or to develop cognitive strategies for coping with them. It’s like play fighting, but for your brain.

In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing that one of the studies by Gakenbach and Kuruvilla¹ looked at, except that they examined how our mind may do this mental preparation for real-world threats during our dreams. Termed “threat simulation theory” the idea is that our minds create dreams to simulate aspects of those threats so that we can practice dealing with them and be better prepared for the real deal in real life. So if we’re worried about crime, we may dream about our house getting broken into.

A typical gamer at rest.

Gakenbach and Kuruvilla figured that like dreams, video games, are fake realities into which we project ourselves. This is particularly true with highly immersive games where players start to feel like they are spatially present in the game world. The researchers hypothesized that intense gaming sessions can fill the role traditionally handled by scary and threatening dreams, and with lowered needs to practice dealing with real-life anxiety, there will be fewer threat simulation dreams.

And, lo and behold, when they studied the data from surveys asking participants to recount their dreams and game playing habits, Gackenback and Kuruvilla found that this was generally true. With regards to people’s dreams, the survey measured whether or not there was a threatening event, what it was like, who the target of the threat was, how severe it was, whether or not the dreamer was participating in the threat, and the dreamer’s reaction. In short, hardcore gamers² still had violent and threatening dreams –no surprise, since we often dream about what we encounter while waking, and for hardcore gamers that often includes video game violence– but they reported being less frightened by the dreams and were much less likely to characterize them as “nightmares.” Even more interestingly, this was especially true of those who played lots of first-person shooters.

But is that the only way that gamers dream differently? Nope. In a subsequent study,³ the same researchers also looked at how likely hardcore gamers were to have really bizarre dreams. And honestly, what I found most fascinating about this study was how they conceptualized bizarreness as consisting of three factors:

• Incongruity or mismatching features of dream images
• Uncertain or explicit vagueness of dream images
• Discontinuity or sudden appearance, disappearance, or transformation of dream images

Anyway, the researchers figured that since we see so many really weird things in our video games during our waking hours, that weirdness must seep through into our dreams. Turns out they were right. Upon analyzing more data from surveys asking participants to describe their dreams and gaming habits, the Gackenback et al. found that gamers tended to have dreams with more vague and incongruent content, especially as it related to people and places.

Again, maybe not surprising, but the authors have some interesting theories as to why this is the case, beyond the obvious explanation that we tend to dream about what we see while awake the day before. For example, the more bizarre dreams may happen because gamers’ minds may be conditioned to be open to and even expect unorthodox relationships between concepts and things. This jives with other research showing that playing video games may enhance nonverbal problem solving, especially as it relates to spatial reasoning. Additionally, greater creativity (which also requires one to “get” unorthodox relationships among different things) has been shown to greater dream bizarreness. So hardcore gamers, as a group, may be conditioned to be more creative and better at certain types of problem solving relative to casual gamers or non-gamers. Because …we have really weird dreams. Or rather, we have the weird dreams because of those other things.

At any rate, it’s an interesting line of research, if a little niche.⁴ Now, go to bed –you’ve got some really weird but strangely non-threatening dreams to get to.

1. Gackenbach, J. & Kuruvilla, B. (2008). The Relationship Between Video Game Play and Threat Simulation Dreams. Dreaming, 18 (4), 236-256. [↩]
2. The researchers actually called them “High End Gamers” but that label seems weird to me, like we’re luxury goods. [↩]
3. Gackenback, J., Kuruvilla, B. & Dopko, R. (2009). Video Game Play and Dream Bizarreness. Dreaming, 19 (4), 218-231. [↩]
4. Says the guy who has a blog about the psychology of video games. [↩]

Back in January 2010 when I launched this site, I laid out the things it could lead to on a continuim from low to high. On the low end was “Nobody likes it, everybody dies.” On the very top of the high end was “Book deal, everyone lives” and close behind that was “Someone hires me to write magazine articles about this stuff.” Well, there’s still no book deal but a few months ago GamePro’s John Davison contacted me saying that he liked the site and wanted to know if I was interested in writing for the GamePro print magazine.

After I finished fist pumping, I said that I most definitely was.

Fast forward to today and if you pick up this issue of GamePro you’ll see my article on the psychology of anonymity starting on page 49 and accompanied by some awesome artwork by Andrew Yang. Here’s the cover of the issue:

Just look for the murderous Alice and you'll find it.

Here’s a snip:

Psychologists actually have models of what anonymity tends to do to people because they’ve been studying its effects long before the first person ever rage quit a game of Pong. While little of that early research involved video games, it did employ painful electric shocks, children in Halloween costumes, and college co-eds dressed up as nurses –sometimes two of those things at the same time.

…But is “antisocial” our default mode when we bring up a web browser or multiplayer menu? Is donning a virtual version of Jack’s face paint by adjusting the “brow height” slider on a character creation tool sufficient in and of itself to make us punt all morals out the window? Psychologists say no, it’s not. According to recent research on the topic, there are additional factors at play, which redefine the whole issue.

I had written a bit on deindividuation and anti-social behavior here, but while conducting actual research for the article I found out that I didn’t know the entire story with the current state of research on deindividuation and anonymity. You can read the GamePro article for the whole thing, and if they ever put ito n GamePro.com I’ll certainly link to it there as well.

All in all it was a fun experience writing the article, with the not unsubstantial bonus that they paid me to do it. When the anonymity piece was done my editor Patrick went on to assign me a second article, which has at this point also been written, turned in, and scheduled to appear in next month’s issue.¹ And as of this moment I’m working on a third piece, so apparently they like what I’m doing well enough so far. If you like the anonymity piece or have something else interesting to say about it, please let GamePro know at feedback@gamepro.com. If you don’t like it, then write your Senator or something. I dunno.

While we’re on the topic, though, I really like changes that GamePro has made to its print magazine in the last several issues. They seem to realize that they can’t compete with websites for timely content or reviews, so they seem to be going for more in-depth stories that require some actual research and reporting. Stuff like the history of GameStop, the impact of Metacritic on the gaming scene, the nature of bug testing in games, the impact of piracy on the games industry, and more.

I’ve been published in “legitimate” outlets both online and in print before, but I’m still happy to be in the pages of GamePro. Blogging dreams do come true! Plus it’s nice that nobody has to die.

1. Print scheduling lag is weird. [↩]