Can playing video games improve multitasking ability?
It might depend on how games are categorized
LFG: Learning from Games is a series dedicated to making the complex world of video game research just a little easier to understand. I post one about 2-3 times a month in between my Science Shorts and Coming Soon series. LFG #40 is about inconclusive results when game categories are not specific enough.
šš¼Hello JOMT Reader!
Do you ever get the feeling that the more you read or learn about something, the more you start to notice it everywhere?
Thatās me and game categorization right now.
This phenomenon is also called the frequency illusion1, and itās messing with my head. But that isnāt necessarily a bad thing ā it has sparked some good conversation and thoughts about why overhauling the game categorization system matters.
Reason 1ļøā£: It can help with game discovery
When a game dev decides to make a game, they have to make a decision about how to categorize their game. It has far-reaching effects beyond coding the mechanics: for example, categorization tags will affect how a game appears on services like Steam or GOG.
These tags can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, players can immediately group games with similar tags together to get a sense of what a game is like before they play it. On the flip side, those same tags can exclude certain groupings of games.
Take Hades for example. Most lists of games similar to Hades include Dead Cells, Bastion, and Transistor. But Hades is also similar to Crown Trick, even though the latter game is turn-based. Thatās because both games are rogue-lite, dungeon crawlers.
How many games have we not discovered just because they werenāt categorized in a way that we could find them?
Reason 2ļøā£: It can help us make decisions about which games to play
Some of us can be triggered by elements of the video games we play. It can be triggering content or addictive game mechanics or in my case, getting motion sick in first-person views.
My personal trigger isnāt particularly difficult to address as first-person is a commonly used category type. But other triggers are much harder to find based on the current game categorization system.
Itās important to have this information for yourself but also if youāre making gaming decisions on behalf of others, i.e., as a parent. If we want to avoid these trigger traps, we need to reconsider game categorizations.
Reason 3ļøā£: It will help us understand the effects of video games
Finally, the current game categorizations makes it hard to compare the effects of video games properly. XCOM and Balatro are both turn-based games, but they (most likely) make you use different parts of your brain.
As youāll see in todayās research article, the lack of proper categorizations can lead to inconclusive results. And thatās because weāre trying to compare apples and oranges with respect to how these games can affect your brain.
With that in mind, letās look at what a team of researchers in Germany and Switzerland did to examine whether playing video games made you a better multitasker.
āļøResearchers acknowledge the limitations of the current game categorization system
Right off the bat, the researchers start by saying that some of the misses of gaming studies is because of how video games were incorrectly categorized:
ā¦video games would need to be āconstruct pureā, meaning that [each type of] video games should exhibit the same clearly defined game play characteristics distinguishing them from video games of other video game genres.
To help āpurifyā the video game categories, the researchers proposed the following broad categories:
But they didnāt end up using any of these categorizations in the final analysis. In their own words,
ā¦subgrouping individuals into video game player types may not illustrate a reasonable approach anymore as video game player classification is artificial and requirements for applying this approach are not (sufficiently) given.
š¤¹š»Playing video games improves multitasking abilityā¦
When the researchers asked participants to complete a test designed to measure multitasking ability, they found that gamers were better multitaskers than non-gamers. And it didnāt matter what type of game they played (since the researchers didnāt end up grouping participants that way).
š§ ā¦but doesnāt seem to have an effect on brain function
When the researchers looked at brain function measurements between gamers and non-gamers, there was no difference. This was a surprising result because previous research had shown that brain functions like short-term memory and attention were important for multitasking2. If video games had a positive effect on multitasking, there should have been an equal positive effect on these brain functions.
Whatās going on here?
The most likely explanation is that the test used for measuring multitasking requires a different kind of brain function than the ones used for playing video games. Even if there were video game categories that needed the same brain functions as the multitasking test, there were too few participants to see any reliable conclusions.
We need a better categorization system!
I feel like a broken record, after writing four posts on game categorization, but as the researchers noted, we need āa paradigm shift in future research on video gaming effects.ā
I now also realize that my own Periodic Table is probably too complex to be useful (so, after two posts, Iām abandoning the Table). The Onion (layers of game characteristics) might be better but I think I have to rethink how the layers are arranged. Stay tuned though because I will come up with one that makes sense!
If you want to read the article that inspired this post, you can read it here for free: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12559353
If you liked what you read, please consider giving this post a like and sharing it with your community!
There is a good explanation on the frequency illusion, also known by its fancy name, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, here: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/availability-heuristic
There are two research articles that show this effect:
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fxge0000219
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027719300939?via%3Dihub
I decided to translate something (using Gemini, for speed) I encountered at some point:
Here's the original: https://x.com/kwisc_/status/1708759214066184693 (I did make some shortcuts)
š® The Diagram Every Game Reviewer Should Know: A Possible New Review System
A few words on player engagement.
Games can engage us in many different ways. Jacek WesoÅowski, citing Mark LeBlanc, presents 8 such forms of engagement and illustrates them in the diagram below.
A designer can consider how their game should engage the player, select 3-4 methods from the diagram, and then focus on realizing them as effectively as possible. A great idea. But how can the diagram be useful to a reviewer?
First, let's explain exactly what LeBlanc's proposed forms of engagement are.
Player Engagement Forms
Submission (or Following/Habit): The game involves acquiring habits and performing them almost instinctively, e.g., Tetris. In such games, we switch off our brains and do everything almost in a trance.
Sensation (or Feeling/Aesthetics): We engage with the game through audio-visual stimuli. Whether it's the dark atmosphere of a horror game like Bloodborne, or the beautiful locations in GRIS. Our senses matter, and the game is like an exhibit we can't look away from.
Fantasy (or Make-Believe/World-Building): "The player engages in a consistently conducted thought experiment." That is, immersing oneself in a fictional world or an alternate version of history, e.g., WoW, Civilization, etc.
Narrative (or Story): We engage by participating in and following an interesting story that is a source of emotion, e.g., The Last of Us, Final Fantasy. This is the same way we are engaged by books or movies.
Challenge: The game demands our alertness and attention because we constantly have to deal with unexpected and new obstacles, e.g., Civilization, Dark Souls, Mario.
Fellowship (or Bond/Social): The game engages us by creating bonds between us and other players or characters, e.g., LoL, Baldur's Gate, XCOM.
Discovery (or Exploration): The game contains mysteries and puzzles that we want to uncover. These can be secrets/new lands in an exploration game or secret rules/mechanics that are not explained, e.g., Elden Ring, Fez, Zelda.
Expression (or Self-Expression/Creativity): The game as a means of player expression. We have the ability to create or make decisions, e.g., Dragon Age, Minecraft.
One game can combine various engagement methods, and these methods determine whether it has a chance of appealing to a specific person. And this is where the reviewer's role comes in.
š” A Great Tool for the Reviewer
Knowing the ways a game engages players and accurately identifying them in a given title allows us to:
More effectively advise the reader whether a game is right for them. This is much better than the once-popular system of rating by categories like graphics, music, or gameplay. It's also more precise than a simple genre classification or a 1-10 scoring system.
If a player receives accurate information about whether the game engages through Sensation or Challenge, and whether it executes these assumptions well, there is a good chance they will make a good purchase and will certainly know what to expect.
The right mindset and our expectations are immensely important for the reception of a game. We can perceive the same title completely differently if we play it thinking it's a "Challenge" game versus thinking it's a "Sensation" game, even if we enjoy both.
A low difficulty level may be a flaw for a game engaging through "Challenge," but if we are expecting a "Submission" or "Narrative" game, it may not matter to us at all.
Of course, it's one of the developers' tasks to skillfully convey what we should expect from their game, but they don't always succeed. A reviewer can take their place in this, and the LeBlanc diagram is an excellent tool for it.
The very process of considering what forms of engagement are important in a given game can help the reviewer better understand and evaluate it.
āØ A New Scoring System
I'm not a fan of scoring systems, but a system using the LeBlanc diagram could be much more useful than a standard rating scale.
Below the text, there could be a simple radar chart (like in PokƩmon) featuring only the most relevant engagement methods present in the game and their respective ratings.
Of course, as always, the score of a game is not the sum of the scores of its individual parts. Games are not that simple, and such a scoring system is still a simplification. The overall opinion of the reviewer is always subjective and most important. But IMO, looking at such a chart, it would be much easier for any player to assess whether a given game is for them.
---
I think it is known as Mark LeBlanc's 8 Kinds of Fun (Aesthetics).
Nice write up! The researchers complaining about assigning people gamer types is an odd choice to me. I worked in Bavelier's lab and we defined action video game players as players who played at least 40 hours per week of what we called action video games (not quite the same as the industry genre). Those people sometimes played other games as well, they were being compared to no action game play (these people could play other genres). It's gotten harder to define an "action video game", but there have been efforts to define it based on game mechanics: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10468781241290534
So researchers can ask how many hours per week a subject plays games with this list of attributes. They can also still do training studies where no one plays a lot of video games, but then get paid to play their assigned genre. The first effects can be seen after 10 hours of playing and most of the results can be seen after 25 hours of play.