2025 wishlist for gaming research
Here's to another great year of research
Welcome to the last issue of Just One More Turn for 2024! It’s the end of another calendar year and that means I get to look forward to and put my wishlist for 2025 in terms of research using video games. Someone make my gaming research dreams come true!
Hello JOMT Reader!
Although fewer academic articles about video games were published in 2024 compared to other years, we were blessed with some very interesting findings in the video game world.
and I co-published some highlights for the year on so I would recommend you check out the linked post for those specific articles.
In this post though, I’m looking ahead into 2025. How could we improve upon what we learned in 2024? With that in mind, here is my shortlist of wishes for gaming research in 2025.
No more internet gaming disorder
PubMed is a large, searchable database of articles published in medicine and biological sciences. Within this subset of all published articles, just over 1000 contained the key phrase “video games” in 2024; of those, about 300 mention internet gaming disorder. It’s not an exact science, but that is a very high concentration of articles centered on one key word.
It’s not that the disorder isn’t important. But the vast majority of articles about internet gaming disorder are reporting on its prevalence — how frequently you can find someone with this disorder — and not how it could be managed or treated.
In 2025, I would love to see more researchers tackle deeper topics with respect to internet gaming disorder. Are there digital, behavioural, or biological flags that can alert us to someone who might be heading down the path of internet gaming disorder? If we could detect it early, what are the best ways to help steer that person away from the disorder?
Here’s to hoping for focus on early detection and prevention.
Causation not correlation
If you looked at the alarming number of people who got sunburned while eating an ice cream (correlation), you may be tempted to draw the conclusion that eating ice cream causes sunburns. But we know that isn’t the case: exposure to the sun is what causes sunburns (causation). Correlation doesn’t always mean causation.
But many of the studies I read this past year drew conclusions from correlations. Just like the ice cream example above, the danger lies in concluding causation from correlative data. One study looked at the relationship between video game addiction and sleep quality and found that those with higher video game addiction scores had poorer sleep quality.1 Although you might be tempted to draw the conclusion that video games lead to poor sleep quality, I think it would be a premature conclusion.
If you wanted to test whether playing video games caused poor sleep quality, one way to do it would be getting people to play video games and measuring their sleep quality. To make it even more compelling, you could have a portion of the people reading books, a portion of the people playing board games, and a portion of the people playing video games. All other things being equal, any difference in sleep quality could be attributed to reading books, playing board games, or playing video games.
Correlations are great for noticing things that we may not have otherwise. But to really test whether video games cause anything, researchers will need to do a different kind of study.
AI in video game research
I, like many of you I suspect, am experiencing AI fatigue as the world tries to figure out where it fits into our lives. But that doesn’t mean we should overlook the enormous impact AI could have on video game research.
Google shared a demo video of their newest version of the Gemini AI, which can understand what it “sees” on screen. In this video, the player and Gemini have a real-time conversation about strategies for how to build an army in the game Clash of Clans.
The most widely available versions of conversational AIs (like ChatGPT) require a lot of handholding to get them to do what you want. But Gemini requires very little setup — it could understand the game it was playing, the restrictions for building an army (looking at total money available and dividing that among units), and the best way to use the army (direction of attack, order of operations).
If Gemini could do all of that now, I don’t think we’re far away from using a technology like this to help with all aspects of our health.
Let’s say you could turn this health companion on right now while you play video games. It can be quietly gathering data (with all the privacy protections of course) like game based behaviour or how quickly you react to things on screen in your healthy state. This is your baseline data.
If these same behaviours or reaction times start to change from your baseline in the future, this health companion AI could detect it. If there was a database of anonymized data that the AI could compare your data to, it might be able to match your patterns to that recorded for a certain disease. At the very least you might have some early warning signs that you could use to start a conversation with your doctor.
Or maybe the same technology is embedded in your smartphone or smart glasses. With the right data, it could analyze things like how you walk or how steady you hold your phone, which could all be potentially linked back to aspects of your health.
Final remarks
Research can take a long time so many of my wishes may not come to fruition in 2025. But hopefully, as I continue to cover research using video games in the coming years, we’ll start to see more in-depth analyses and data that show the value of video games beyond entertainment. And I hope you’ll all join me on that journey!
A big, heartfelt THANK YOU to all of you who joined me on this journey this year! I loved the likes, restacks, comments, discussions, and collaborations with you all and can’t say enough how it has motivated me to continue writing. I hope to do some more in-depth coverage of the research world next year, so stay tuned!
Have a safe and happy holiday season and hope to see you all in the new year!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39445625/
The relationship between chronotype video game addiction and sleep quality in school-age children: A structural equation modeling approach
I am not arguing that the study is bad — only that we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw from it.