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Min-maxing your gaming to work for you

Welcome to Issue #21 of LFG: Learning from Games, the last one before I take a breather for the holiday season (there’s one more newsletter next week)! This one is timely as many of us are winding down for the holiday season. Make sure to get those relaxing gaming sessions in…but have a read through how you might be able to min-max those sessions to work for you.

Plowing snowfields to build a bustling city in Frostpunk 2.

Hello JOMT Reader!

As the holiday season approaches, we’re all (mostly) looking forward to disconnecting from work and giving ourselves the time and space to recover. It’s a great reminder that rest is an important part of how we remain productive and motivated. Despite what hustle-culture aficionados will tell you, we need time to recover from everyday physical and psychological demands.

Many of us participate in activities or hobbies that lets us rewind, recover, and rejuvenate. Most of the time, the activities/hobbies leave us feeling rejuvenated. But why is it that for some restful activities, we feel even more exhausted?

It turns out that not all rest is created equally. Researchers identified four key elements of rest (called the recovery experience) that leaves you feeling rejuvenated and ready to take on the world again.¹

1. Psychological detachment: Mentally disengaging from the pressures of work is a vital part of the recovery experience. It’s a lot harder than it sounds though, as those work-related thoughts always find a way to creep in.

2. Relaxation: Achieving positive feelings while doing low-energy activities (sometimes called low-activation positive affect or LAPA) and feelings of calmness all fall into the relaxation element of the recovery experience.

3. Mastery: Learning and developing skills outside of the work environment is a surprising but necessary part of the recovery experience. Aside from being a part of the recovery experience, this learning and development helps us gain new perspectives that might be helpful at work.

4. Control: Work can become stressful when we feel like we have lost our sense of control. Therefore, regaining that sense of freedom and autonomy is important for recovery.

How we achieve this mix of elements defines how successful the recovery experience was. But what activity would let you experience all four elements at the same time?

If you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough, you’ll know that the answer to that question is gaming. Many of us already use video games to recover from work. But why does playing video games have the effect that it does? Are there games or genres that are better for achieving recovery?

One study has already shown that some game genres, like FPS games, are better for recovery, while others, like fighting games, are not.² Two other studies have shown that people can have different recovery experiences even when playing the same game.³ It’s not very clear why games can help you unwind — we just know that they do.

So, this study dug a little deeper: were there characteristics of games that made them better for relaxation? Is it truly dependent on the person playing the game?

Any game works for relaxation?

The researchers gave participants a very simple mission: play video games to unwind from work. That’s it. No information about the elements of rest above were shared with participants. The goal was to have participants to come up with their own strategy for unwinding from work using video games.

Take a look at this ranked list of games that each participant played:

Table taken from https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659465#core-Bib0019. Look how much variation there is in the games that allowed people to relax (and Street Fighter is on there too)!

It’s not just cozy games that allow a person to relax: any game can be used to unwind from work. My personal number one choice probably wouldn’t be a cozy game either (it’s No Man’s Sky at the moment). Maybe an even larger dataset will start to show some patterns, but for the moment, it looks like any game will work for relaxation.

Two reasons why games can help you relax

When participants were asked about their top pick, two major reasons kept popping up. The first was that participants were tweaking the difficulty of the game as a strategy to unwind — in most cases, making the game easier to play (Spider-Man) or choosing a game where nothing can go wrong (New Star Soccer).

The second was almost the exact opposite: participants were throwing themselves into competitive gameplay modes in order to challenge themselves and make their brains work harder (Need for Speed, Call of Duty).

It’s easy to see how reducing the difficulty of a game can help you relax. Games like Candy Crush makes you feel good without much effort: it’s the LAPA concept mentioned briefly above. But why would competition and making brains work harder have the same effect?

It turns out that competitive gameplay forces you to focus and concentrate, which in turn leaves little room for intrusive thoughts about work. You can experience psychological detachment (one of the key elements of the recovery experience) by overloading your brain. You don’t need to be in a competitive game mode to overload your brain either: figuring out the best layout for your rollercoaster (Planet Coaster) was equally good at making people feel relaxed.

Winning a competition or overcoming a challenge also lets you experience mastery, another key element of the recovery experience. I definitely fall into this group: I love to think and strategize and keep my brain occupied in order to relax after work. It’s why I love turn-based games so much.

Gamers acknowledge their changing needs

Similar to previous research, the researchers of this study found that participants adjusted their strategies for unwinding from work depending on the needs of the day. The game they chose to play depended on the stresses of the day and “listening to yourself and your wants or needs or desires.”

But in all cases, participants were addressing one of the four elements of the recovery experience, as a part of their strategy. Mastery through progression, psychological detachment through competition and using more brain power, and relaxation from lower difficulty modes were common strategies when using video games to unwind from work.

These strategies can be used depending on the needs of the day and don’t depend on any game or genre. The researchers even suggest that “there is no pressing need for players seeking recovery to adopt a new gaming device or to begin playing a new game genre” and that players can “simply work with what they have to experience the recovery benefits.”

Gamers could start to choose the games they play, keeping specific recovery goals in mind, to get the most out of their session. We probably all do this subconsciously already: some days we feel like playing one game over another, and my guess is that it has to do with what your body needs to feel relaxed (unless you are playing games professionally).

What’s missing from this study?

The biggest missing puzzle piece in this story is more data. Only 11 participants were included in this study, and while there was a handful of games and genres that were represented, it is hardly representative of the larger population. A much larger dataset might tell us more about the strategies that are used or the games/genres that might have the most beneficial effects.

You could also make some inferences about the stresses of gamers just based on the games they choose to play. For example, if a gamer who normally plays Candy Crush (for relaxation) suddenly starts playing Call of Duty (for psychological detachment), it might signal a change in stressors for that person. Of course, we can’t make too many assumptions just based on this information alone, but gaming habits may be an untapped way to discover something about ourselves.

Final remarks

If some of the results and conclusions of this study seem obvious to you, you’re not alone. At first, I was confused about why this was considered a new finding. But the more I think about it, the more I’m realizing that this study helped to provide the words to describe the why.

I already knew (from experience) that games help me to relax. But now I can describe why, not only to myself but to others. Now I can talk strategy with others who want to use a similar framework to get the most out of their gaming sessions. And finally, we have another way to analyze our behaviours that will tell us something about our health.

Now we (or maybe just me) need a device that can track all of these things passively and ethically, so I can keep track of my health!

If you want to read more about this study, you can access the article here for free: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659465

If you liked what you read, please consider giving this post a like and sharing it with your community! How do you use video games to support unwinding from work? Feel free to share below!

1. https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2007-10372-002
This study (unfortunately paywalled) describes the process by which the researchers settled on the four key elements of the recovery experience.

2. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.12.006
This study looked at different game genres and how they were correlated with feelings of recovery. Unfortunately, Street Fighter is not a good game to play if you want to feel rejuvenated.

3. https://mental.jmir.org/2019/7/e12853
The first study was a comparison between video games and digital apps and their effects on the recovery experience. In the qualitative analysis section, the authors note that personal preferences could affect the effectiveness of a game to influence the recovery experience.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2011.573466#d1e1312
The second study compared interactive versus non-interactive entertaining media and their effects on the recovery experience. In the discussion section, the authors note that satisfying a need during exposure to video games is affected by the psychological state of the user.