Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being

Matti Vuorre1*, Niklas Johannes1*, Kristoffer Magnusson1,2, Andrew K. Przybylski1*

1
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 2Centre for Psychiatry Research, De-
partment of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, & Stockholm Health Care Ser-
vices, Region Stockholm

Video games are a massively popular form of entertainment, socialising, cooperation, and competition.
Games’ ubiquity fuels fears that they cause poor mental health, and major health bodies and national
governments have made far-reaching policy decisions to address games’ potential risks, despite lacking
adequate supporting data. The concern-evidence mismatch underscores that we know too little about
games’ impacts on well-being. We addressed this disconnect by linking six weeks of 38,935 players’
objective game-behaviour data, provided by seven global game publishers, with three waves of their
self-reported well-being that we collected. We found little to no evidence for a causal connection be-
tween gameplay and well-being. However, results suggested that motivations play a role in players’
well-being. For good or ill, the average effects of time spent playing video games on players’ well-being
are likely very small, and further industry data are required to determine potential risks and supportive
factors to health.
Keywords: Video games; well-being; play behaviour; human motivation;

Preprint under review.

Billions of people play video games 1 and their popular-
ity has led public stakeholders to express concerns, but also
hopes, about their effects on players. On the one hand, many
have sounded alarms about video games’ addictive qualities
and potential harm to players’ well-being, which has led to
far-reaching and widely contested health policy decisions 2,3.
On the other hand, video games may help players relax and
recover 4–6; they even may serve as a treatment to some psy-
chological disorders 7. Consequently, games have the poten-
tial to affect well-being on a global scale, for good or ill. It
is therefore critical that researchers provide robust, credible,
*MV, NJ, & AKP declare equal contribution to this work.
This research was supported by the Huo Family Foundation. The
raw data and annotated analysis code supporting this work are
available at https://osf.io/fb38n/. A public preprint of this work is
available at https://psyarxiv.com/8cxyh. The authors declare no
conflicts of interest. The funder had no role in study design, data
collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the
manuscript. The industry partners reviewed the study design and
assisted with play behaviour data collection and recruitment, but
had no role in collection of participant survey data, data analysis,
decision to publish, or preparing the manuscript.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Andrew K. Przybylski, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, United King-
dom. E-mail: andy.przybylski@oii.ox.ac.uk.
and relevant evidence to inform policymakers on whether to
regulate video games 8,9. However, current evidence doesn’t
meet these criteria and tells us little about the causal links
between video games and mental health 10,11.
Why is current evidence inadequate? On the theoretical
level, there are vastly different approaches to investigating
the effects of games. Researchers studying the psychology
of play highlight that games can help players try out differ-
ent social roles, experience power in a safe environment, or
experience a state of flow 12–16. Other approaches relying on
social learning have focused on how seeing violent behav-
iour rewarded can lead to real-world aggression 17—alt-
hough more recent studies found little to no link between
game play and aggression 18–20. Earlier research traditions,
such as work focused on television, invoke the displacement
hypothesis to explain the effects of media, taking for granted
the idea that engaging with media displaces face-to-face in-
teraction, leading to lower well-being 21,22. Yet again, recent
studies find little to no evidence for the hypothesis nor that
newer forms of interactive media have larger effects over
time 23–25. In contrast, research based on theories of human
motivation indicates the reasons why people use technology
(i.e., quality of behaviour) is more relevant to their well-be-
ing than the amount of time they spend engaged (i.e., quan-
tity of behaviour). The extent to which play is enjoyable and
intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically motivated is
 Preprint under review
a consistent predictor of players’ well-being 6,26–30. Taken to-
gether, these different approaches to studying games, and
mixed findings therein, have made it challenging to deliver
actionable evidence to health policymakers 9.
Compounding these theoretical challenges, there are four
notable methodological weaknesses present in the evidence
base. First, in typical studies, participants complete experi-
ments designed to imitate play 19. Such experimental manip-
ulations of game play facilitate causal inference but don’t
accurately capture play as it occurs naturally 31. Second, nat-
uralistic studies of game play have almost exclusively relied
on retrospective self-reports of play, which are biased and
inaccurate indicators of actual behaviour 32–35. Using self-re-
ports has been necessary because, until recently, video game
companies have declined to share objective game play data
to study player well-being. Third, even the few studies that
had access to accurate data were cross-sectional and didn’t
adequately address potential causal effects of games on
well-being 26. Fourth, investigations have typically been lim-
ited to a handful of specific kinds of games, rendering con-
clusions regarding general video game play tentative at best
36
. We didn’t plan to recruit a specific number of partici-
The present study addresses these limitations by a) stud-
ying naturalistic play and not artificial experiments; b) col-
laborating with game publishers to obtain accurate measures
of objective behaviour rather than relying on self-reports; c)
collecting three-waves of longitudinal data to go beyond
cross-sectional correlations; and d) examining a variety of
different games rather than focusing on a single title, genre,
or type of player. Going beyond these limitations we adopted
three goals for this study. Our primary objective was to esti-
mate the causal effects of video game play on well-being:
the extent to which the quantity of play—the average daily
hours played over a two-week period—impacts players’
well-being. Our secondary objective was to estimate the ex-
tent to which well-being affects subsequent video game
play, because reciprocal effects—that well-being affects
play—are likely 23,37. As a third objective, we followed re-
search emphasizing subjective experiences of players 30, and
investigated how the motivational dimensions of play re-
lated to shifts in well-being.
To address these objectives, we relied on a sample of
38,935 players of seven popular video game titles, who were
invited to respond to three surveys about their well-being
and motivational experiences over a span of six weeks. We
collaborated with the games’ publishers to get behavioural
data on the participating players’ play. Merging the longitu-
dinal survey responses with players’ behavioural data al-
lowed us to estimate the potential causal impacts of video
games on well-being over time.
2
Methods
Participants and procedure
We collaborated with game publishers who recruited
players with emails to participate in a three-wave panel
study. Seven publishers participated with the following
games: Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo of Amer-
ica; N = 13,646), Apex Legends (Electronic Arts; N = 1,158),
Eve Online (CCP Games; N = 905), Forza Horizon 4 (Mi-
crosoft; N = 1,981), Gran Turismo Sport (Sony Interactive
Entertainment; N = 19,258), Outriders (Square Enix; N =
1,530), and The Crew 2 (Ubisoft; N = 457). The emails tar-
geted the general English-speaking player bases of these
publishers in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zea-
land, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Publishers invited active players of the selected game to par-
ticipate. Active play was defined as having played the re-
spective game in the past 2 weeks to 2 months; variability in
this interval between publishers was due to differences in
how many players regularly played a given game, so that an
adequate sample could be invited.
pants, but instead aimed to collect the largest possible sam-
ple of players from each participating game publisher, given
their player base sizes and capabilities of contacting them.
The invitation email campaigns were carried out from
May to September in 2021, with different publishers inviting
between 30,000 and 1,729,627 players. The emails had short
invitations to the study and contained a link to our survey
hosted at our institution. Upon entering the survey, partici-
pants first read information on the purposes and procedures
of the study, were given the option to consent, and then pro-
ceeded to the survey measures. We counted anyone who
consented to the study and responded to at least one survey
item as a participant, but participants could leave responses
blank or quit or withdraw at any time. Therefore, the sample
sizes per analysis vary because of this variable missingness.
The publishers then recontacted all players who partici-
pated at the first wave two and four weeks later with invita-
tions to participate in the following waves of the study. Be-
cause of the technical implementations of the email cam-
paigns and late responding, the intervals between responses
were not exactly two weeks, but instead varied slightly (IQR
= [13.7, 15.9 days]). We didn’t implement a response win-
dow, but participants could complete the surveys at any time
suitable for them.
Initial response rates ranged from 0.1% to 3.0%, in line
with a previous study that used similar recruitment methods
26
, but retention rates were greater for the following waves
 Preprint under review
(21.2% to 92.1% between games and waves). At the conclu-
sion of the study, the publishers sent the behavioural data of
all consented participants to our team for joining with survey
data for analysis. At no point did we collect personally iden-
tifiable data or risked participants’ privacy. Instead, the sur-
vey URL captured a hashed ID per player. The game pub-
lishers created those hashed IDs for each player account. We
used these hashed, anonymous IDs to connect each player’s
survey responses to their behavioural data.
We were interested in studying active players, defined as
playing during the study period. Of the 108,880 consented
players, 85% responded to at least one well-being survey
item; of those, 42% had played during the study, leading to
a final sample of 38,935 active players. Of these players,
77% identified as male, 21% as female, 1.8% as third or non-
binary gender, with other responses missing or declined. The
participants’ median age was 34 years (interquartile range
(IQR) = [25, 42]) and they had a reported median 23 years
(IQR = [16, 30]) of experience playing games.
The study procedures were granted ethical approval by
our institute’s Central University Research Ethics Commit-
tee (SSH_OII_CIA_21_011). All participants provided in-
formed consent to participate in the study and to have their
gameplay behaviour data provided by the respective game
publisher and reported being 18 years or older.
Measures
Video game behaviour
Participating publishers provided us with each partici-
pant’s game play data from two weeks prior to the first wave
up to the third wave. Different publishers had access to data
at different levels of detail, but all of them provided the start
and end times (i.e., durations) of each game session. How-
ever, due to differences in the games and logging systems,
each game’s session start and end times were measured
slightly differently because different events could count as
session start and end indicators. A participant could have
multiple game sessions over the two-week period for each
wave. We therefore added their session durations to obtain
total game time in the two weeks preceding each survey
wave. In doing so we excluded all sessions with durations
below 0 or above 10 hours, as extreme values can sometimes
happen due to logging errors. In the analyses below, we used
the average number of hours per day in the two-week period.
Some games included additional behavioural data, such
as information on in-game achievement and social aspects,
but we don’t report on those variables here.
3
Well-being
In line with a previous study 26, we queried for partici-
pants’ affective well-being with the scale of positive and
negative experiences (SPANE) 38. Participants reflected on
how they had been feeling in the past two weeks, and re-
ported how often they experienced six each of positive (e.g.,
“Pleasant) and negative feelings (e.g. “Unpleasant”) on a
scale from 1 (Very rarely or never) to 7 (Very often or al-
ways). As recommended, we subtracted the mean of nega-
tive items from the mean of positive item to form a global
measure of affective well-being 38.
We also measured participants’ general life satisfaction
with the Cantril self-anchoring scale. This one-item measure
asked participants to “Please imagine a ladder with steps
numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of
the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the
bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for
you. On which step of the ladder would you say you person-
ally feel you stood over the past two weeks?”. Participants
responded on a scale from 0 to 10 39,40.
Motivational experiences
We also measured players’ experiences and motivations
with the player experience and need satisfaction scale
(PENS) 30,41. This scale asked participants to reflect on their
past two weeks of playing the game title, and reporting on
their experienced sense of autonomy, competence, related-
ness (only when they reported having played with others),
intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation on subscales
with 3-4 items. Participants responded on a scale from 1
(Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree). For the analyses
reported below, we created indicators for intrinsic and ex-
trinsic motivations by taking the means of the respective
subscales.
In addition, participants were asked to estimate their time
spent playing the specific title in the past two weeks in hours
and minutes.
Data, code, and materials
The data, annotated code required to process and analyse
them, supplementary analyses, and survey materials are
available at https://osf.io/fb38n/ (henceforth referred to as
Online Supplementary Materials, OSM). That page also in-
cludes details on the number of invitations and responses,
data processing such as how session durations were cleaned,
exact item wordings, complete surveys, and additional data
not analysed here.
 Preprint under review
Results
In the analyses reported here, the sample sizes vary be-
tween analyses/variables due to differential data missing-
ness. We used R for all data analyses 42. Below, numbers in
square brackets indicate 95% credibility intervals.
The amount of time played was variable across the
games and showed a small decrease on average over the
three waves, which was likely attributable to differential at-
trition (Figure 1, top panels; bwave = -0.09, [-0.15, -0.04]).
Players’ affective well-being decreased slightly (bwave = -
0.05, [-0.10, -0.01]) and life satisfaction slightly increased
(bwave = 0.05, [0.03, 0.08]) over the six weeks of the study.
Players’ intrinsic (bwave = -0.18, [-0.23, -0.13]) and extrinsic
motivations (bwave = -0.01, [-0.03, 0.01]) also slightly de-
creased over time (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Distributions of key variables (rows) over time and
by game (columns). We excluded hours of play per day over
3 (2.6%) from this figure for clarity.
Effects between play and well-being over time
This study was designed to take the first steps toward
identifying the real-world causal impacts of game play on
well-being over time. We reasoned that potential effects
would play out in the time span of the study, potentially cu-
mulate over successive sessions of play, and that a two week
period would best represent the trade-off between allowing
sufficient time for effects to manifest, but not long enough
for them to dissipate 43. Following this reasoning, we identi-
fied the following as the most plausible causal pathway: the
cross-lagged association between game play in the two
4
weeks prior to the period addressed by the survey questions
(e.g., game play during weeks 0 – 2 affecting well-being at
weeks 2 – 4). Scatterplots of data representing these lagged
associations are shown in Figure 2.
To best estimate this effect over time, we specified a bi-
variate random intercepts cross-lagged panel model using
average hours played per day and the well-being scores as
the target variables (RICLPM 44,45). We determined this
model as most appropriate because it separates stable traits
and their correlations from within-person differences over
time 46 and attempts to adjust for time-varying impacts on
game play and well-being by including their covariances.
We estimated the model separately for affect and life satis-
faction, and for each game. We constrained the (cross-)
lagged paths to equal across the two intervals because there
is no a priori reason to expect their variance over this time
period. We used the lavaan R package for estimation, and
treated missingness with full information maximum likeli-
hood methods 47.
Figure 2. Scatterplots of well-being scores and hours played
at the previous wave. Points are individual participants’
data, and lines and shades are generalised additive model re-
gression lines with 95%CIs. The x-axis is truncated at 3
hours per day for this figure for clarity.
Our investigation wasn’t about these specific games; in-
stead, we considered them a sample from a broader universe
of games. Therefore, we summarised the RICLPM parame-
ters across games with random-effects meta-analyses of the
unstandardized cross-lagged parameters (see OSM for the
corresponding standardized parameters). We focused on un-
standardized parameters because they facilitate understand-
ing magnitudes on the variables’ natural scales 48. For these
meta-analyses, we assumed weakly informative prior distri-
butions on the average effect (a normal distribution with
 Preprint under review 5

mean 0 and standard deviation of 0.5) and its standard devi-

ation between games (a Student’s t distribution with 7 de-
grees of freedom, mean of 0 and standard deviation of 0.25).
We then focused on our first research objective: deter-
mining the extent to which game play affects well-being.
The meta-analysis of play time and affect indicated that, on
average, video game play had little to no effect on affect,
with 67% posterior probability of a positive effect (Figure 3,
top left). The 95% most likely effect sizes of a one-hour
daily increase in play on the 13-point SPANCE scale indi-
cated that the effect was not credibly different from zero:
The magnitude and associated uncertainty of this effect sug-
gests that there is little to no practical causal connection be-
tween gameplay in the preceding two weeks on current af- Figure 3. Random effects meta-analytic estimates of the un-
fect. standardized cross-lagged effects of average daily hours
The meta-analysis of play time and life satisfaction indi- played on well-being (top left: on affect; top right: on life
cated similar results: Increasing one’s play by one hour per satisfaction), and well-being on average daily play time (bot-
day would lead to a -0.05 [-0.16, 0.07] point change in the tom left: affect’s effect on play time; bottom right: life sat-
11-point life satisfaction scale (Figure 3, top right). The pos- isfaction’s effect on play time). Shaded areas indicate pa-
terior probability for a negative effect was 83%. rameters’ approximate posterior densities. Percentages be-
To put these numbers in perspective, the average range low the average parameters indicate posterior probabilities
of changes in players’ average weekly hours of play in this of the effects’ directions. The points and intervals indicate
sample was 0.48 hours. Thus, if an average player went from posterior means and 95% credibility intervals (CI; repro-
their minimum amount of play to the greatest, their affect duced in text on the right).
would change by 0.013 [-0.04, 0.08] units on the SPANE
The RICLPM included other parameters of subsidiary
scale, and their life satisfaction by -0.02 [-0.07, 0.04]: On
interest. First, the autocorrelation parameters indicated that
average, the amount of time a person spends playing games
affect and life satisfaction were modest predictors of them-
is unlikely to have a meaningfully large impact on their well-
selves (baffect[t-1] = 0.39 [0.28, 0.52]; blife satisfaction[t-1] = 0.20
being.
[0.11, 0.30]). Second, the covariances of the random inter-
We then turned to our second research objective: inves-
cepts, indicating the extent to which people who tended to
tigating the reciprocal effects of affect (Figure 3, bottom left)
play more were also more likely to report higher well-being
and life satisfaction (Figure 3, bottom right) on play. The
was significantly greater than zero only for Animal Crossing
average meta-analytic estimate across games indicated that
and Outriders, for both well-being measures, replicating our
a one-unit increase on the 13-point SPANE affect scale
previous findings and extending them to the life satisfaction
would lead to a 0.01 [-0.03, 0.04] hour per week change in
outcome26. However, it was notable that the positive corre-
play. Similarly, life satisfaction had a practically zero effect
lation was not replicated across the other game titles. Third,
on game play (0.00 [-0.01, 0.01]). This suggests little to no
the within-person gameplay-well-being covariances were
practical causal connection linking well-being to subsequent
overall not significantly different from zero. See OSM for
gameplay.
details on these parameter estimates.
In sum, analyses testing our first two objectives provided
little evidence in favour of the idea that shifts in time spent
playing games, on average, has negative or positive effects
on players’ well-being, or that well-being directly affects
how much time individuals spend playing games.
Role of motivational experiences in well-being
We then turned to our third research objective; investi-
gating the roles of motivational experiences during play in
players’ subsequent well-being. We conducted additional
RICLP models and used intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
 Preprint under review
scores (subscale means) in place of play time in the model
with well-being scores. These data are shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Scatterplots of well-being scores on intrinsic (top)
and extrinsic (bottom) motivation in the previous wave.
We ran four models: Affect predicted by each motiva-
tion, and life satisfaction predicted by each motivation. As
above, we constrained the lagged and cross-lagged coeffi-
cients across waves. After conducting these models sepa-
rately for each game, we then aggregated the results with
random effects meta-analyses as above. The results of these
analyses are presented in Figure 5.
First, there was an average positive effect of intrinsic
motivation on both affect and life satisfaction, with posterior
probabilities in excess of 96% in favour of a positive effect
(Figure 5, top row). These effects were consistent across
games in both magnitude and direction and indicated that on
average a one-unit increase on the intrinsic motivation scale
would translate to a 0.10 [0.00, 0.19] increase in affect and
0.18 [0.07, 0.30] unit increase in life satisfaction.
6
Figure 5. Random effects meta-analytic estimates of the un-
standardized cross-lagged effects of intrinsic motivation
(top) and extrinsic motivation (bottom row) on well-being.
Second, extrinsic motivation impacted affect and life sat-
isfaction negatively, such that a one-unit increase in extrin-
sic motivations was associated with a -0.9 [-0.21, 0.03] unit
change in affect, and -0.10 [-0.26, 0.05] unit change in life
satisfaction (Figure 5, bottom row). Similar reciprocal ef-
fects of affect and life satisfaction on subsequent intrinsic
and extrinsic motivation were also in evidence (see OSM).
These parameters indicated smaller but positive effects of
well-being on subsequent intrinsic motivation, and negative
effects of well-being on extrinsic motivation. In contrast to
the play time results, these analyses provided consistent ev-
idence that the motivational quality of video game play was
reliably linked to player well-being. Play experienced as a
volitional experience was positively predictive of subse-
quent well-being whereas the opposite was true of engage-
ment characterised by a sense of compulsion.
Discussion
Given their ubiquity and prominent place in the global
health conversation it is crucial to understand whether video
game engagement, on its own, influences psychological
well-being. However, evidence so far has suffered from sev-
eral limitations, chief among them inaccurate measurement
and a lack of explicit and testable causal models. Here, we
aimed to remedy these shortcomings by pairing players’ ob-
jective behavioural data with self-reports of their psycholog-
ical states over six weeks. Our study provides a preliminary,
yet essential link in a new chain of evidence which will help
us understand how time spent playing games influences the
health of players.
Across six weeks, seven games, and 38,935 players, we
report results demonstrating our most pronounced hopes and
fears surrounding video games may be unfounded: Overall,
 Preprint under review
time spent playing video games showed limited if any im-
pacts, positive or negative, on players’ well-being. This lack
of an effect held across both aspects of well-being measured
here: how players feel and how they evaluate their lives.
Similarly, well-being had little to no effect on the time peo-
ple spend playing video games. The best predictors of play-
ers’ affective states and life satisfaction seemed to be their
previous affective states and life satisfaction, respectively,
with game play contributing little if at all.
We conclude the effects of playing are negligible be-
cause they are very unlikely to be large enough to be subjec-
tively noticed. For example, Anvari and Lakens 49 demon-
strated that the smallest perceptible difference on the
PANAS scale, a measure similar to SPANE, was 0.20 (2%)
on a 5-point Likert-scale. We found that an hour per day in-
crease in play resulted in 0.03 unit increase in well-being:
Assuming linearity and equidistant response categories, the
average player would have to play 10 hours more per day
than is typical for them to notice a change in their well-be-
ing. Similarly, the meta-analytic model indicated 99.7%
probability that the effect of a one-hour daily increase in play
time on affect is too small to be subjectively noticeable (life
satisfaction: 99.6%). Viewed in context, the effects of game
play time we observed are small indeed, and in a range sim-
ilar to other screen-based activities, such as those estimated
in social media research 50.
We also studied the roles of motivational experiences
during game play. Conceptually replicating previous cross-
sectional findings 26, we found that intrinsic motivations
have a positive effect on well-being whereas extrinsic moti-
vations have a negative effect. The effects of motivations
were larger than that of video game play and our analysis
suggests we can be confident in the direction of these moti-
vation effects. In absolute terms, the effect of a one-point
deviation from a player’s typical intrinsic motivation on af-
fect did not reach the threshold of being subjectively notice-
able (0.10 estimate vs. 0.26 threshold). However, we cannot
be certain a one-point increase (out of a seven-point scale)
is considered a large or a small shift—participants’ average
range on the intrinsic motivation scale was 0.36. Until future
work determines what constitutes an adequate ‘treatment’,
these conclusions regarding motivations remain tentative.
Taken as a whole, our findings suggest that amount of
play does not, on balance, displace time which would other-
wise be allocated to more rewarding activities and thus un-
dermine well-being. By the same token, our results do align
with a perspective that the motivational quality of experi-
ences during play, on their own, may benefit their well-being
30
. The extent to which such an effect generalises or is prac-
7
tically significant remains an open question for investiga-
tion. That said, these results indicate that games on average
do not cause great fluctuations in psychological well-being.
For the average player in our sample the data indicated the
subjective quality of play behaviour may be more important
than quantity.
Previous studies of player well-being relied exclusively
on self-reported behaviour. We studied actual behaviour and
found exceedingly small effects. This contrast suggests that
if a self-report measure is biased, even a small amount of
bias might inflate estimates of the association between play
and well-being. In our supplementary analyses (see OSM),
we found that participants on average overestimated their
play time. This finding underscores the importance of mov-
ing beyond self-reports of play—or of at least better under-
standing error in self-reports 33.
This study presents a first step in explicitly stating and
empirically evaluating the real-world causal effects of play-
ing video games on well-being over time. We collected ob-
servational data, requiring us to state the assumptions under
which causality holds 51: the absence of time-varying con-
founders, no selection bias, and a correct time lag. In our
main analyses, we were unable to control for other variables
that could potentially create a spurious relation between
game time and well-being 52,53. Figure 6 depicts how an un-
known time-varying confounder (U) could bias the effect of
play on well-being. For example, the amount of leisure time
people have might increase both their play now and their
well-being at the next wave. This would bias a truly negative
effect of play on well-being toward the null. Confounding
may be even more complex: More leisure time could also
mean more boredom, which increases play time, but de-
creases well-being, which could bias a truly positive effect
of play toward the null. Although we account for some stable
confounding by separating between-person characteristics
from within-person changes 44, within-person changes in
third variables may still lead to within-person confounds.
Without theoretical and empirical identification of these
confounds, our and future studies will likely produce biased
estimates of the underlying causal effects.
 Preprint under review
Figure 6. Illustration of a causal model where play and well-
being have reciprocal effects over time. The RICLPM can
deal with C (time-invariant unknown covariates that affect
play and WB [well-being]), but not an unknown time-vary-
ing variable (U) that confounds the effect of play on well-
being. t1 = first time point.
Closely related to the question of confounding via a third
variable is self-selection bias. We observed low response
rates and notable attrition over waves. It is probable that self-
selection introduced bias into our estimates. The simplest
example of self-selection is that older and more experienced
gamers could be more passionate about helping researchers.
It is also plausible that older and more experienced gamers
have figured out a way to fit games into their lives, so that
games won’t have a negative impact on their well-being. Un-
der this self-selection, a truly negative effect of play on well-
being would be biased toward the null. Similarly, dropout
between the waves could be caused by unobserved variables,
which would violate the missing at random (MAR) assump-
tion. For example, missingness could be related to lower
well-being and more play during the wave for which data is
missing. This type of missing data mechanism could mask a
negative effect of play on well-being. To get better esti-
mates, we need better measures, which in turn requires sam-
pling strategies that rely less on self-selection.
Last, we chose a two-week time lag, extending our pre-
vious work 26. Such a large time frame ensured capturing
enough play for sufficient variance. However, any actual ef-
fect’s temporal properties may differ from our assumptions,
and be either too short-lived to be detected with our design,
or accumulate over longer periods of time 54. The exact tem-
poral properties of games’ impacts must be investigated in
future work. Taken together, the causal effects we present
depend on our stated assumptions, which future work will
address in detail.
Likewise, although we studied the play behaviour and
well-being of many thousands of people across diverse
games, our study barely scratches the surface of video game
play more broadly. Online games platforms like the Xbox
Network, PlayStation Network, Nintendo Switch Online,
and Steam connect hundreds of millions of players to tens of
8
thousands of distinct video games. In this study we were
only able to study how playing a sample of seven games in-
fluenced well-being. This limitation constrains the generali-
sability of our findings 36. To truly understand why people
play and what the impacts are, we need to study a much
broader variety of games, genres, and players. Moreover, we
analysed total game time, which is the broadest possible
measure of play behaviour. Although it is necessary to begin
at such a broad level to build an evidence base of video game
effects 9,55, future work must account for the situations, mo-
tivations, and contexts in which people play 56. Although we
used an appropriate and established statistical model to
study our assumed effects, it required us to assume that play
time follows a normal distribution, which is unlikely to be
true. Future statistical work in this area should also examine
different distributional assumptions 55. Finally, measuring
objective behaviour with industry provided telemetry comes
with its own measurement error and differences between
publishers. Independent researchers must continue working
with industry partners to get a better understanding of be-
havioural data and its limitations.
Billions of people play video games, and policymakers,
healthcare professionals, and those who make games ur-
gently need to know if this form of recreation influences the
well-being of players. This study provides evidence on the
causal impacts of play on well-being using objectively
logged gameplay behaviour. Our results provide evidence
that the impact of time spent playing video games on well-
being is too small to be subjectively noticeable and not cred-
ibly different from zero. Therefore, it is essential to cast a
wider empirical and theoretical net and maximise the value
of future studies by focusing on the qualities of diverse play
experiences, in-game events, and players for whom effects
may vary. Until then, limiting or promoting play based on
time alone appears to bear neither benefit nor harm.
Author Contributions
A.K.P.: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investi-
gation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Su-
pervision, Visualization, Writing - original draft, and Writ-
ing - review & editing. K.M.: Data curation, Formal analy-
sis, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization, and
Writing - review & editing. M.V.: Conceptualization, Data
curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Pro-
ject administration, Software, Validation, Visualization,
Writing - original draft, and Writing - review & editing. N.J.:
Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodol-
ogy, Project administration, Software, Validation, Writing -
original draft, and Writing - review & editing.
 Preprint under review
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