Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Pixel Parenting, the podcast where we blend science, research and real life parenting to help you raise kids in a world full of screens. We dive into the latest studies and share practical strategies using both evidence and curiosity. Today's episode is the first of a special two part conversation about video games and mental health. In this first part, we're focusing on how video game research is actually done.
You've probably seen headlines claiming that games are either saving or ruining our kids, but what's really behind those claims? We'll learn how researchers like today's guest study, video games and mental health, what kind of data they use, and why it's so important for parents to look beyond the headlines. We also get into industry collaboration, common myths in gaming research, and some surprising findings that even experts didn't expect.
So I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Nick Ballou to Pixel Parenting. Dr. Nick Ballou is a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute where he studies how games impact mental health, often working directly with companies like Nintendo and Xbox. His work relies on real world data and is grounded in transparency and open science. You can find his research featured in the Guardian, New Scientists or even on BBC Ideas. And I have to say that video game researchers like Dr. Ballou are rare, especially those focused on mental health using rigorous methods and collaboration with the industry.
Most of us hear opinions and headlines, but Dr. Balu brings hard evidence.
So thank you for being here. It is great to have you. I'm very excited. So what first got you interested in studying video games and mental health?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Definitely personal. I think you'll, you'll hear that from some researchers in the field alongside me. I grew up with games. Not the first generation to grow up with games, but maybe the second one to grow up with games in the home. And I really did feel that at different times in my life they were good for me. Sometimes they were the source of some of my most valuable social connections, like really sleepovers and pretending to go to bed and then waking up to play. Super Smash Bros are some of my most treasured memories. And there were other times during particularly my early adolescence where they were a little bit more problematic for me and I was playing them to excess and, and having some trouble.
And I didn't see that nuance represented in the scientific literature as I was sort of just casually reading and dipping my toe in. I didn't feel like I saw scientific evidence that could explain why sometimes I would be having these really positive experiences and sometimes I would have these really negative ones. And so I thought I Can I can help here? I can do, I can contribute something.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: And you made a career out of.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: It for now at least. Yeah.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: What was one of your all time favorite games that you remember?
[00:02:38] Speaker B: I'll give a more recent one or one that I've played off and on for well over five years.
Five years at this point. It's called Slay the Spire.
It's a really popular. The genre is called a roguelike deck builder. So every new run, every new time you start up the game, you play for about an hour. And that hour has all kinds of randomized decisions where you make this deck of cards that you use to fight enemies. And you're trying to build these creative synergies and finding cards that complement the ones that you already have in your deck. And it is so compelling. And so every time you finish, you just think to yourself, just one more.
And I, despite the universe of delightful games to play, I find myself returning to that one pretty frequently.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: I don't know that one, so I'll check it out.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Single player. Yeah. Please do. Well, do. But be warned that it can be, it can take over your life.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Thank you for the warning. It's one of those. There are those games. Yes. So let's jump into like research. Like how, how is research done? Because most of us only see the headlines about how bad video games are, et cetera, et cetera. But can you walk us through how research on video games actually works?
[00:03:44] Speaker B: So of course there are lots of different flavors of it. I would say perhaps the most dominant version of games research, the most common version that you'll see is a survey. Researchers go out and they recruit people from their university, they recruit people from the local community, often online via social media. And they have them fill in this questionnaire that says something along the lines of how much do you play video games?
Do you have a problematic relationship with video games? A lot of this will come under the heading of gaming disorder. Problematic gaming is what the really the dominant lens that people use to look at games and the effects of games. So they got a questionnaire asking, do you experience these symptoms? Do you experience withdrawal related to your video gameplay? Do you feel a need to play increasingly more and more as you, as you go through gaming? And then they will link that to something like depression or well being or social connection or life satisfaction. And they'll see sometimes there's a positive, slight positive correlation. Sometimes there's a slight negative correlation. The majority of the time you'll often find that there is no meaningful correlation at all. And that perhaps unfortunately is kind of the dominant body of work in the fields. But I will contrast that with what I think is sort of the next generation where what we're doing to improve that state of affairs and get conduct research that's a little bit more impactful, where instead of relying solely on survey data, we're using behavioral records. We're trying to through monitor exactly what people doing are doing when they're playing games. Sometimes with the help of games industry, sometimes around using creative methods that don't involve the game industry to see what are people playing, who are they playing it with, how are they performing in the game, who are they talking to. Those kinds of interactions that really do determine ultimately the effects of games. And then we linked up the survey data. We see something like, well, when you play for two hours on this day of this particular game and an hour the next day with these people at this time, then we start to observe some kind of pattern of you tending to feel better or tending to feel worse afterwards. I think those two sides of the coin characterize a lot of how games research in my field and psychology is done.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Okay, so you have the self reported data and you're trying to get data of the actual behavior during the gameplay. But I'm guessing that's hard to get. Like what does it take to collaborate with companies like Nintendo or Xbox?
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Yes, it is undoubtedly really difficult. I am talking from a position of privilege and luck in the sense that the lab that I am part of at the University of Oxford has had a little bit more success in negotiating these kinds of data sharing agreements with games companies than other labs and universities have been able to do. That is in part because it is extremely slow. It takes oftentimes years to build the connection and then additional years to formalize it in the context of a particular data sharing agreement. There's a legal contract that says here's the type of data that we will ask for from the games company, here's how they're going to provide it to us, on what form, here's how we protect privacy and all those things. It is super slow and limiting in the sense that you have to find a games company with enough buy in at all or many levels of their organizational hierarchy that believe that this is a worthwhile thing to do. And in many cases the upside for the games company is minimal. They might get a little bit of positive press if we happen to find something, something that shows this type of gameplay can be good for people, but they perhaps open themselves up more to the risk of, oh well, certain players, certain games, certain contexts, certain virtual environments are harming people and that could affect their bottom line. And so they tend to behave in a very risk averse way, which is perhaps understandable. But that means that when working with them there are constraints around the kinds of questions that you can ask, the kinds of data that you can ask for. For example, in our collaborations we are typically only able to get data from adults. The games companies are essentially across the board unwilling to share data on children, which are the group that I think most of us care most about. So we do have to, yeah, shape our collaborations in a way to make sure that we minimize conflict of interests and get the most valuable information out of them while also working on other ways to study the sensitive topics that are really the most impactful.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: So it's not that they work with you unless the results are only positive. Right. So the research is actually data driven and it's objective, let's say. Right.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: As much as any science can be. There's always subjectivity in science, but absolutely, that is a clear line in the sand that we will not participate in any collaboration unless we retain control of how we're asking the questions, how we're analyzing the results, how we're publishing the results, how we're discussing the results. Oftentimes we use something called pre registration, which is a tool where you say, here's essentially how I'm going to design my study and how I'm going to analyze my data and, and you timestamp that and lock it away in advance before the data is collected. And in that way you sort of tie yourself to the masts and say, well look here, here's a plan. We thought it was sensible. This is what we think will deliver us the most informative results once we actually have the data. And that way there, there's less pressure, less opportunity for inconvenient results to be swept away or suppressed in some way. So we make sure, we take a lot of precautions to make sure that we have the power and the ability to publish whatever we find interesting.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: And you get data from adults, so 18 + worldwide or are you working on certain specific area?
[00:09:07] Speaker B: When it comes to the collaborations with the games industry, those are again due to the legal restrictions, geographically limited. That's another constraints on the types of questions that you can ask. So we've been working mostly with US and UK participants, but that's another motivation for some of these open source tools, some of these alternative methods for tracking gaming behavior that we're developing that would then be applicable worldwide. But to date it has been very western and specifically US and uk.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Okay, that's really interesting. So, so why, why is it important for parents to know how research is done? Not just what the results say, but like.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to understand how research is done so that you can go just one level deeper than the headlines when you do see it reported in the news. There are, it is undoubtedly the case that the flashiest results are the ones that get reported most broadly, the ones that show something scary and frightening like gaming, causing violent behavior, which is essentially a debunked idea for the most part, but nonetheless lives this zombie life because it's, it's scary, it gets clicks, it gets views, it gets people worried in some cases needlessly.
And understanding a little bit about how research is done, what differentiates kind of trustworthy, nuanced and informative research from flashy research, but ultimately less trustworthy, trustworthy research I think gives you the tools to understand the advice that you're given from not just researchers, but those. The kind of the other people who help translate science into practical day to day tips.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. And then how can we tell if a study is trustworthy?
[00:10:45] Speaker B: So of course it's a little tough if you don't, if you're not ready or have the access to read the whole paper and the kind of the knowledge to interpret it. I think definitely look for behavioral data. I think if the study, this will often be reported somewhere, even in a news article, but certainly in the paper itself what kind of measure of behavior it used. If it just asks people how much time did you spend playing games in the last few weeks?
It's unlikely to give you very informative advice, certainly on a day to day level because we just know at this point that the effects of games are way more nuanced than that. They're way more time sensitive and environmentally contextual than that. It has to do with where you're playing, what you're playing, who you're playing with, not just how much you're playing. So that's a really, I think quite an obvious one to keep an eye out for and to not put too much stock into something that's just looking at screen time or gaming time in some undifferentiated, undifferentiated way. And this one's a little more subtle, but I think look for some indication of empathy with people who play games. There are research studies that sort of treat gamers as laboratory mice in a little bit or that's sort of the. The lens that they come with, that this is, what is this strange behavior and why are people doing it and how could it be harming them? Instead of, this is why gaming is so motivating to billions of people around the world. This is why so many people do it voluntarily, regularly for so much time. I understand that. And now we look at all right, here are some of the ways that that can go wrong. Here are some of the ways that can go really right.
And while it's hard for me to boil that down into a checklist of things to look for, I do think it comes through in how the research is presented. Whether the researchers understand the appeal of gaming and therefore know how to kind of balance that with the idea that it can be really good and really.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: Bad makes total sense.
And actually, that leads me to a question that I thought about earlier.
You talked about behavioral data working with industry companies.
How else can you get behavioral data in a lab? Or how.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: So we tried to really focus on what I'll call naturalistic data data from people playing games in their own environment, not because we asked them to play or not because we asked them to come to us and play in our. In our lab lab or anything like that.
So we use a couple different tools. One of the really powerful ones is from privacy legislation. So in many jurisdictions in the entirety of the. Of the EU under gdpr, in California, and by extension some other US States through the California Consumer Privacy act, and in other countries like Japan, you have legislation that allows users to go to a company and say, please give me a copy of all of the data you hold about me, everything that you've collected about my behavior that is linkable to me. I would like to see it. And that's enshrined under law. They have typically 30 days to comply, and they'll send that back to us, or they'll send that rather to the user. And the user can then turn around and say, all right, I'm happy to give you a copy of this myself, often with some privacy removal techniques that we used so that when they share what can be really sensitive data, including all of their financial and spending history in the game, what items are they buying or what games are they buying, their friends and social interactions. So we can take some steps to make sure that that is sensitively handled. But that gives us a really powerful way to study games at both kind of a wide level. If we look at an entire platform, so we look at, say, PlayStation, what are all the games you play? On PlayStation and a really narrow but deep level. If there's one game that you play a lot and for a kid, it might be Roblox or Minecraft or Fortnite, we can ask for a data request of that game and then get a history of that person's behavior in that particular game. So we're working these days a lot with that particular method of user driven data sharing in a way that industry is involved in by virtue of the fact that they are legally required to share it, but that they don't actively consent to.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: Super interesting. And I'm sure many parents would like to contribute to this research. And who do you reach out to get this data? How do you do it?
[00:14:44] Speaker B: It depends on the platform. Typically if you look for name of the game or name of the platform, data requests or privacy requests, you will find a link to their sort of privacy terms of service. You may have to scroll down a little bit and there will either be a button that says download my data. That's the nicest version. On platforms like social media platforms, it's a little more common On Facebook and Instagram you can just download your data TikTok as well. Sometimes you'll get a web form, you'll need to sort of log into your account and say I would like a copy and they'll send it to you a little bit later. And sometimes the most tedious one, you have to send an email with a particular template that just says I would like a copy of my data. And you can find examples of that template also by saying data request template. There's even a website I can dig up for you and link where it shows people how to. It kind of pre writes the email for requesting your data but it will unfortunately vary by by company.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: That was. That's very interesting but I was more thinking about how do you, how does your lab reach out? Like how does the data gathering work and who do do you reach out to? Reach out to parents, do you reach out to schools, who do you. How does it work?
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Yes, that's makes sense. At the moment. We often use online recruitment plat. This is just a way for us to scale our research a little more quickly and easily. So these are people that have already said I'm interested in participating in scientific studies. And then we send out to certain groups of those based on age or location. Here's a one study that you might be interested in. So we use platforms like that but we are actively looking to expand by recruiting in the local area around Oxfordshire. In the UK we're trying to recruit eventually parents and children in addition to the adults that we have for the last couple years been focused on. In some cases, the games companies themselves can help us distribute these these questionnaires. They can send out a notification or an email to their users that say here's a study that you might be interested in.
Those are really the main three. Occasionally there's a social media advertisements sort of a study wait list of people who are interested in participating in this kind of work but who haven't found an active study that they can yet participate in that we then would hope to contact later. So I'm very happy to leave that in the show notes if anyone wants to sign up for potential involvement in a future study of ours.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. We can put a link in there if you have one. So the way you're gathering behavioral data is asking the players about for their data. You know, they download it and they send it to you. But does that include only adults or parents can send their kids data? Like how does the privacy apply? Their can you study mental health and video games on users or players younger than 18 through this method?
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Yes, we haven't done it yet, but we are on the cusp. That is really where all of our effort is going at the moment. This is something anyone, the account owner, whoever that is, if it's under parental super controls, the account owner has the right to ask for a copy of that data and then use it how they see fit. So that we think this is a really promising tool for us to unlock child on gaming behavior in a way that to date has essentially been completely out of reach for sure.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Going back to the quality and transparency of research, have you come across any findings that really surprise you?
[00:17:55] Speaker B: So it didn't surprise me so much, but it did surprise some other people. I've hinted at it before. We found really robust evidence that the amount of time people play is not a meaningful predictor of how they're feeling. We we find people who are playing sometimes upwards of six hours a day that report being happy, that report being well connected to their friends and family, that report being successful at work and school. It can for some people just be the single dominant hobby in their lives. And that is fine, really dedicate themselves and still fit that in alongside the other responsibilities that they have in their life and continue to thrive. And meanwhile we have other people who play really quite infrequently that maybe only play an hour or two a week, but that still report some negative effects of that that feel when they go into a gaming space that they're perhaps feel excluded or that there's some toxicity or harassment that's occurring to them, or that because they're struggling with the skills themselves, their performance is not so good. And then they feel a bit of shame or guilt about why am I not doing very well when I see the people around me doing better. So there are negative effects at really small scale, positive effects even up to really, really highly engaged players.
And that really drove home the point for us not to focus on quantity and to really look at careful indicators of quality of play instead. And I'll highlight one other surprising finding just because I think this is one of the more interesting fun facts that we found from our recent research. We did a study that asked people during the course of their gaming session, so when they, when they loaded up the game, and then roughly every 10 minutes thereafter would ask them a little bit about how they're feeling, how they're enjoying the game. And we found by doing that that the positive influence of games on your mood. Just how positive, how do you feel right now? Very bad to very good. Happens in the first 15 minutes. So we found that most people, their mood went up quite dramatically in the first 15 minutes. About a 7% difference on a 1 to 100 scale. That doesn't sound like very much, but it actually is because people tend to sit in a very narrow range between sort of 60 and 80. Most people feel okay most of the time. So a seven point difference is actually quite big. And that was happening really during the first 15 minutes of play and then kind of plateauing after that. And then people were sort of maintaining their mood but no longer improving it. And so I thought that was a, an interesting thing to reflect on for my own gaming. Like would it, would I benefit more if I played less frequently or, sorry, more frequently, but for shorter amounts of time. If I played 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there, got the mood boosts and then moved on to something else. And for some people that might, might work.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: Yeah, depends on the game too, right? Because 15 minutes in some games you're just getting started. So we're transitioning to the part two of the episode which is more about the findings themselves. But like to end this part, what are, what's one thing you wish every parent knew about how gaming research is done? Just one thing they can take away.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: If I had to say one thing to take away, I would say the results that the kids who handle who integrate gaming most successfully into their lives are the ones that have an engaged community around them that understands what they're doing. And what I mean by that is for parents to be constantly asking and talking to their kids about what are you playing? Why do you like playing it? What is appealing to you about this? Why is it more appealing than this other thing? Why is it more appealing than this other thing at this particular moment? How does that relate to how you're currently feeling? And as kids get older and they're able to self reflect on those questions, those are the media literacy skills that we find most beneficial for developing healthy gaming habits. And that I think cultivating that habit is a much more impactful takeaway from the research than any kind of single fact about the amount or the a particular game that might be better or worse than others.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: It's a great one. And I 100% agree. Yes. And I know some parents have have challenges doing issues challenges doing these, because sometimes you don't if you don't play video games, you don't understand what your kid is talking about, basically. And you know, even if you don't understand the answer the first three times, you'll eventually understand what they're talking about because you'll eventually learn about the game. But yeah, I 100% agree about the talking. Yes, that's a wrap up for part one of our conversation with Dr. Nick Ballou. Huge thanks to Dr. Ballou for joining us and helping us demystify how video game research is actually done. Here are a few takeaways from this not all research is created equal. Surveys are common, but behavioral data tells a richer, more accurate story.
Screen time alone isn't a meaningful measure. It's about what, why, and with whom your child is playing. Collaborating with game companies is possible, but slow and limited, especially when it comes to data on children.
And most importantly, kids who integrate gaming most successfully tend to have parents who ask questions and stay engaged with what their kids are playing and why.
In part two, we'll explore 13 ways video games may impact mental some positive, some negative, and some that depend on context. We'll also bust a few myths and share practical takeaways for families trying to find balance at home. Until then, you can find links to Dr. Walu's work and how to get involved with his research in the show Notes and if you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend. Leave a review and follow Pixaparenting wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and stay curious.
