Why Collaboration can Drive Massive-Scale Mental Health Research in Games

Playing digital games has become a mainline human activity carried out by billions across all geographical areas, cultures and demographics. Data about how we play games provide an unprecedented view on human behaviour. Telemetry from games is of unprecedented scale and granularity. Given the number of people involved, and the intricate way that gameplay data can tell us about how we handle challenges, social interaction and much more, such telemetry data form a vast, unexplored frontier for mental health research. By collaborating, games industry and academia have an opportunity to drive research and positively impact the lives of billions.

Games have gone from a niche industry to the core powerhouse of the entertainment sector in a few decades.

Where digital games used to be something relegated to a niche demographic, the medium has evolved rapidly in lockstep with technology, and today, games come in an incredible variety of forms and formats and are played by an estimated 4 billion people across platforms.

The global games industry is estimated to drive over 200bn USD in revenue yearly and is growing rapidly year over year. And yet there is a lack of hard numbers and at-scale evidence about the size of the games industry, how many games that exist (millions), how and why people play all these games, and what kind of impact – positive and negative – gameplaying has on people and society. Games research has historically not happened at this scale, although some very recent work of ours is trying to rectify this (Zendle et al., 2022a; Zendle et al., 2022b).

What we do know is that playing digital games has become a mainline human activity carried out by billions across all geographical areas, cultures and demographics. The sheer scale of gaming activity alone means that the sector is highly relevant to engage with, whether we use games as a way of studying mental health, as a tool for engaging with large-scale populations to inform our research, or for reaching people with new knowledge or even mental health interventions. Another important aspect is that the games industry holds enormous amounts of behavioural and demo- graphic data that cannot be generated through any other means. When you play a game, the actions you take in the game will commonly be tracked by the developer of the game.

Just like your regular online behaviour is tracked, so is your gameplaying activity (Seif El-Nasr et al., 2022). Not only is the scale of the behavioural data substantial, but consider that playing games involves decision- making, collaboration, tactics, strategy, communication and purchasing behaviours. There are many beneficial uses of such data, and generally, the games industry is focused on improving the customer experience through observing and studying how we engage with games. The data also provide an unprecedented view on human behaviour – as a view into how humanity behaves in different contexts, behavioural telemetry from games is of unprecedented scale and granularity.

These datasets can help inform us about problematic behaviours such as addiction, toxicity and at least some forms of mental health issues (although exactly which remains relatively unexplored). Given the number of people involved, and the intricate way that gameplay data can tell us about how we handle challenges, social interaction and much more, such telemetry data form a vast, unexplored frontier for mental health research (Johnson et al., 2013).

However, the benefits that can be reached from games and the people who play them will not be realized with- out collaboration across industry, academia, clinicians, policymakers and other stakeholders. To begin with, academic researchers cannot reach the data or the audiences – not at any meaningful scale.

The games industry is the gateway to these cross-cultural, cross- generational, global audiences and the data derived from their game-playing activity. Game companies can engage directly with their audiences through the games them- selves, the communities formed online and offline around those games, or directly through account emails. The lines of communication are very direct and helped by a historical collaboration between players and developers: In game development, the player communities are often listened to, engaged directly with and even directly involved in development or user research. This means that there is an overall strong relationship between players, developers and the games both of these stakeholder groups engage with and cherish.

Working directly with the industry, it is possible to work with the players – with the very people that we want to help with our research. Games touch billions of lives and game data give us insights into the behaviours – and to an extent the mind – of billions of people. While there are many practical challenges associated with academic-industry partnerships, such as confidentiality issues around behavioural telemetry and differential funding structures and incentives, there are ways to overcome these and build collaborations that benefit industry, academia and society.

In my experience, it is sometimes surprisingly easy – in games, we tend to want the same thing: for people to enjoy games and improve society along with that. Academia can work directly with the industry that reaches so many people to improve gaming experiences and the health and well- being of the people that engage with games. We can engage large-scale populations of participants with mental health research. We can deliver online interventions to billions by utilizing the communication channels that the games industry has established, to engage with players on mental health research and work together to improve lives.

Note: the above represent my personal opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, the University of Southern Denmark, or any other institutions and organisations that I am affiliated with.

References for further reading

Johnson, D., Jones, C., Scholes, L., & Carras, M. (2013). Video- games and wellbeing: A comprehensive review. Melbourne, Australia: Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/105915/

Seif El-Nasr, M., Nguyen, T.H., Canossa, A., & Drachen, A. (2022). Game data science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Zendle, D., Flick, C., Halgarth, D., Ballou, N., Demediuk, S., & Drachen, A. (2022). Transnational patterns in mobile play- time: An analysis of 118 billion hours of human data. Avail- able from: OSF Preprints, https://osf.io/jqune

Zendle, D., Flick, D., Halgarth, D., Ballou, N., Cutting, J., & Drachen, A. (2022). Understanding whether lockdowns lead to increases in the heaviness of gaming using massive-scale data telemetry: An analysis of 251 billion hours of playtime. Available from: OSF Preprints, https:// osf.io/td8q5

Licensing information

Journal Title – Child and Adolescent Mental Health Article Title – Games-based Collaboration as a

Driver for Massive-Scale Mental Health Research Article DOI: 10.1111/camh.12617 License: CC-BY-NC

Original article here: https://authorservices.wiley.com/api/pdf/fullArticle/17580480

Illustration: Photo by Marcel Strauß on Unsplash