Science Shorts: Video games in research (Jan. 2025)

LEGO, open-world games, and Pacman take center stage in 2025

Welcome to the first (slightly delayed) issue of Science Shorts for 2025! If you’re new to the newsletter, every month, I round up a short list of interesting research using video games. I also rotate through some great game-focused writers for you to discover.

This month, check out

Margot

who writes

Margot Plays Video Games

. You’ll find tons of great reviews of indie games that she plays on her decked out Steam Deck. I love the honest thoughts and reviews, some of them mirroring my own feelings about the game. Don’t miss out and subscribe to the newsletter!

TL;DR

1. LEGO at night, especially if it is on the floor, sucks. But for children who are socially anxious, LEGO + video games might help them adjust a little bit better especially when compared to either intervention on their own.

2. Last week, I published a post on how DeusEx, an open-world game, was a key component of someone’s journey with major depressive disorder. This study provides more evidence for how escaping into an open-world game can be good for mental well-being.

3. Taking exams is never fun. But students at Indoamerica University (in Ecuador) might disagree — they played a modified version of Pacman instead of exams across a wide range of fields of study. That raw data was just released, which means some number crunching fun is on the way.

LEGO + video games = better outcomes

Photo by Daniel K Cheung on Unsplash

Link to article: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1423755/full
Title: The effects of interactive video games combined with LEGO game therapy on social anxiety in rural left-behind children

Parents (for the most part) foster an environment for their children to thrive. However, many parents have to leave their children in the care of others for extended periods of time while they work. In China, an estimated 42 million children (about 14% of all children in China) are left in the care of others in rural areas while their parents work in urban centers.

Without parental support, these children face psychological challenges including emotional instability, social withdrawal, loneliness, and feelings of inferiority. Cooperative playing with LEGO as well as playing video games have been separately suggested as treatments for some of these psychological challenges. The researchers wanted to know whether these two approaches could be combined for an even bigger effect.

84 students were assessed for social anxiety after being randomly placed into one of the following four groups: video game, LEGO, LEGO + video game, control (no video games or LEGO). The researchers found that the combination of LEGO + video game had the strongest effect of reducing social anxiety.

The reason for this effect, the researchers state, is that both LEGO and video games release chemicals in the brain that help with mood regulation and reducing symptoms of anxiety. This lowers the barrier for social interactions, which can promote healthy social connections. For video games, playing with others in the same room is what ultimately led to these effects.

Open-world games provide an escape

Photo by Mahavir Shah on Unsplash

Link to article: https://www.jmir.org/2024/1/e63760
Title: Open-World Games’ Affordance of Cognitive Escapism, Relaxation, and Mental Well-Being Among Postgraduate Students: Mixed Methods Study

Real-life can be stressful. As much as we might wish, permanently running away isn’t a real solution. But a temporary relief can provide a much needed break and recovery, to face these stressors again. Open-world games can provide that escape.

Open-world games give players freedom of movement and choice as well as an avenue for discovery that they might not otherwise experience in the real world. That freedom, along with just being able to exist in the game world, can help players temporarily escape their stressors, which leads to relaxation.

Researchers at Imperial College London and The University of Graz conducted three studies, two interview studies with about 15 participants each and a larger study with 600 participants, to understand how open-world games can lead to mental well-being.

These studies suggest that certain mechanics of open-world games, like exploration and discovery, the ability to get good playing the game, positivity, and allowing players to define their own purpose in the game, allowed them to escape reality and relax. As the popular idiom goes though, everything in moderation, as the researchers note that the long-term mental health effects of regularly escaping into open-world games are not known.

Play games to pass courses

Photo by Roger Ce on Unsplash

Link to article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235234092401179X
Title: Dataset of video game-based assessments in digital culture courses at Indoamerica University

I have a bad habit of getting really sleepy when I’m nervous, especially before and sometimes during tests and exams. On more than one occasion, I’ve caught myself about to drool on the test paper 🤤. Was there really no other way of testing me other than drooling on a piece of paper?

Students in Law, Medicine, Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Architecture, and Nursing programs at Indoamerica University think so. They were assessed with an exciting, modified game of Pacman. Questions were answered every so often as students raced Pacman around the maze to eat all the dots they could. Their attempts and anonymized scores have been published as a publicly accessible dataset.

So there aren’t any results to share with you, but that means we can ask our own questions to do some analysis. Maybe we can even write a community-driven research paper that answers your burning questions! The dataset contains the following information:

• anonymized student number

• date of test

• number of attempts

• gender

• field of study

• score

Leave a comment or send me a DM with any questions that you want to ask using the dataset and I’ll publish the combined results in a future post!

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