Registered Report Evidence Suggests No Relationship Between Objectively-Tracked Video Game Playtime and Wellbeing Over 3 Months

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.

近年来，关于游戏时长（以下简称“游戏时间”）是否影响玩家福祉的议题，在学术界、媒体及政策层面引发了热烈的讨论与研究。现有研究多采用横断面设计，采用易于获取但可靠性不足的自我报告式游戏时间测量方法，或者在极少数情况下，获取了客观跟踪的游戏时间数据，但仅限于个别游戏，而非玩家在所有游戏中的总游戏时间。此外，研究者们对发表偏倚及探索性与证实性研究之间缺乏区分提出了担忧，认为这削弱了证据库的可信度。因此，我们尚未明确知晓福祉是否影响游戏时间，游戏时间是否影响福祉，抑或是两者相互影响，亦或均无影响。为追踪玩家在多款游戏中的游戏时间，我们开发了在 Xbox 平台上记录游戏时间的方法。在一项为期 12 周、包含 6 个波次的针对以 Xbox 为主要游戏平台的成人美英玩家的面板研究中（参与者 414 人，完成调查问卷 2036 份），我们探究了客观测量的游戏时间与福祉之间的个体内部时间关系。在多个预先注册的模型设定中，我们发现，游戏时间与福祉之间，或反之，的个体内部前瞻性关系在统计学上并不显著——即使最大的关联也难以对玩家的福祉产生可感知的影响。这些结果支持了日益增长的证据，表明对于大多数玩家而言，游戏时间并非游戏与心理健康之间关系的决定性因素，研究焦点应转向游戏背景与游戏质量。