The Relationship Between Lockdowns and Video Game Playtime: Multilevel Time-Series Analysis Using Massive-Scale Data Telemetry.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 led governments worldwide to enact a variety of containment and closure policies. Substantial attention has been directed toward the idea that these public health measures may have unanticipated negative side effects. One proposed effect relates to video games. There is a nascent evidence base suggesting that individuals played video games for longer and in a more disordered manner during lockdowns and school closures specifically. These increases are commonly framed as a potential health concern in relation to disordered gaming. However, the evidence base regarding changes in gaming during the COVID-19 pandemic is based on self-report and, thus, is susceptible to bias. Therefore, it is unclear what the true consequences of lockdowns were for gaming behavior worldwide. OBJECTIVE: The primary objective of this study was to estimate whether any specific lockdown policy led to meaningful increases in the amount of time individuals spent playing video games. METHODS: Rather than relying on self-report, we used >251 billion hours of raw gameplay telemetry data from 184 separate countries to assess the behavioral correlates of COVID-19-related policy decisions. A multilevel model estimated the impact of varying enforcement levels of 8 containment and closure policies on the amount of time that individual users spent in-game. Similar models estimated the impact of policy on overall playtime and the number of users within a country. RESULTS: No lockdown policy can explain substantial variance in playtime per gamer. School closures were uniquely associated with meaningful increases in total playtime within a country (r2=0.048). However, this was associated with increases in the number of unique individuals playing games (r2=0.057) rather than increases in playtime per gamer (r2<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Previous work using self-report data has suggested that important increases in heavy gaming may occur during pandemics because of containment and closure ("lockdown") procedures. This study contrasts with the previous evidence base and finds no evidence of such a relationship. It suggests that significant further work is needed before increases in disordered or heavy gaming are considered when planning public health policies for pandemic preparedness.

Higher working memory capacity and distraction-resistance associated with strategy (not action) game playing in younger adults, but puzzle game playing in older adults.

Superior attention and Working Memory (WM) have been reported for habitual action video gamers compared to other gamers or non-players. With an online experiment we measured visuo-spatial WM capacity and ability to ignore distraction, and participants listed the video games they played. Categorising the 209 young adult participants (18-30 years) according to the game type they predominantly played revealed superior WM capacity for strategy and action gamers compared to non-players. However, re-categorising the games according to their constituent game types revealed superior WM capacity and distraction resistance associated with strategy but not action game components. In contrast to younger adults, data from 181 older adults (60-81 years) showed superior WM capacity and distractor-resistance for puzzle gamers, which was equivalent to that of younger adults. The results highlight the need to consider component game types in games research and inform the design of age-appropriate cognitive interventions.

Difficulty-skill balance does not affect engagement and enjoyment: a pre-registered study using artificial intelligence-controlled difficulty.

How does the difficulty of a task affect people's enjoyment and engagement? Intrinsic motivation and flow theories posit a 'goldilocks' optimum where task difficulty matches performer skill, yet current work is confounded by questionable measurement practices and lacks scalable methods to manipulate objective difficulty-skill ratios. We developed a two-player tactical game test suite with an artificial intelligence (AI)-controlled opponent that uses a variant of the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm to precisely manipulate difficulty-skill ratios. A pre-registered study (n = 311) showed that our AI produced targeted difficulty-skill ratios without participants noticing the manipulation, yet different ratios had no significant impact on enjoyment or engagement. This indicates that difficulty-skill balance does not always affect engagement and enjoyment, but that games with AI-controlled difficulty provide a useful paradigm for rigorous future work on this issue.

Nothing else matters: Video games create sustained attentional selection away from task-irrelevant features.

Feature-based attention allocates resources to particular stimulus features and reduces processing and retention of unattended features. We performed four experiments using self-paced video games to investigate whether sustained attentional selection of features could be created without a distractor task requiring continuous processing. Experiments 1 and 2 compared two versions of the game Two Dots, each containing a sequence of images. For the more immersive game post-game recognition of images was very low, but for the less immersive game it was significantly higher. Experiments 3 and 4 found that post-game image recognition was very low if the images were irrelevant to the game task but significantly higher if the images were relevant to the task. We conclude that games create sustained attentional selection away from task-irrelevant features, even if they are in full view, which leads to reduced retention. This reduced retention is due to differences in attentional set rather than a response to limited processing resources. The consistency of this attentional selection is moderated by the level of immersion in the game. We also discuss possible attentional mechanisms for the changes in recognition rates and the implications for applications such as serious games.