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Description: Recent years have seen intense research, media and policy debate on whether amount of time spent playing video games (“playtime”) affects players’ wellbeing. Existing research has used cross-sectional designs with easy-to-obtain but unreliable self-report measures of playtime, or, in rare instances, obtained industry data on objectively-tracked playtime but only for individual games, not a player’s total playtime across games. Further, researchers have raised concerns that publication bias and a lack of differentiation between exploratory and confirmatory research have undermined the credibility of the evidence base. As a result, we still do not know whether wellbeing affects playtime, playtime affects wellbeing, both, or neither. To track people’s playtime across multiple games, we developed a method to log playtime on the Xbox platform. In a 12-week, 6-wave panel study of adult US/UK Xbox-predominant players (414 players, 2036 completed surveys), we investigated within-person temporal relations between objectively-measured playtime and wellbeing. Across multiple preregistered model specifications, we found that the within-person prospective relationships between playtime and wellbeing, or vice versa, were not practically significant—even the largest associations were unlikely to register a perceptible impact on a player’s wellbeing. These results support the growing body of evidence that playtime is not the primary factor in the relationship between gaming and mental health for the majority of players, and that research focus should be on the context and quality of gameplay instead.

License: CC-By Attribution 4.0 International

Wiki

This OSF project contains data, materials, and analysis code for our project on Xbox gaming and wellbeing. Please reach out with any questions or concerns to Nick Ballou (nick@nickballou.com).

Reproducing Results

To reproduce results, you should download the entire directory, then open the XboxPlaytime.Rproj file. This should:

  1. Set your working directory to the base directory of the downloaded fol…

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Gaming Confounds Template Analysis


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affectdepressiondigital trace dataneed satisfactionobjective measuresplaytimeregistered reportself-reportvideo gameswellbeingWEMWBSxbox

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