Full project title: Capturing the Digital Footprints of Video Game Play
The goal of this project is to develop, test, and deploy an open-source internet platform—Gameplay.Science—that enables researchers to directly study the effects of video games. Crucially, this platform does not require direct participation of games platforms. Instead, it empowers players to donate their video game behaviour data to independent researchers by building on existing legal and technical frameworks for data and account linking.
Current research relies heavily on self-reports, where players are asked to estimate their recent gaming behaviour, but these are known to be both simplistic and unreliable. Instead, scientists seek digital footprint data that captures the quantity (how much time people spend playing which games), and quality (what they do in-game, who they interact with, etc.) of play. Such data is held by the video games industry, but not widely shared outside of rare collaborative industry-academia projects.
However, there are other ways of getting access to this kind of data that do not require direct collaboration with the games industry. The first is account integrations, where players sign in to a gaming account such as Xbox or Steam, and give permission for another service to automatically access and store the data they generate while playing. The second is GDPR requests, where players exercise their legal right in the UK and EU to ask for a copy of the data that a (gaming) company holds over them, to ultimately share with researchers. Our project seeks to build the infrastructure to enable these methods to be used more widely.
Forthcoming
Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology
Project role: Principal Investigator
Professor Przybylski is a psychologist who studies how online social media and video games platforms influence users’ mental health. His research focuses on how data from these platforms can inform regulation, policymaking, and expert advice.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Project role: Co-Investigator
Nick Ballou is a postdoc researching how video games affect mental health both for better and for worse, and how to make psychological research on games more trustworthy.
DPhil Student
Project role: Research Associate
Thomas holds a joint honours degree in Liberal Arts & Sciences from the University of Amsterdam and VU University, where he combined Cognitive Neuroscience with digital media studies. He has experience in clinical research and the telecom industry.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Project role: Postdoctoral Researcher
Bridging psychology and neuroimaging of memory with a flair for open science. Expertise in R, Python and fMRI analysis.
Researcher in Clinical Psychiatry, Karolinska Institutet
Project role: Co-Investigator
Kristoffer is a clinical psychologist at the Stockholm Centre for Psychiatry Research, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. His work is mainly concerned with studying various aspects of gaming and gambling
Assistant Professor, Tilburg University
Project role: Co-Investigator
Matti is a researcher at the Department or Social Psychology, where he studies psychological functioning within the context of digital technologies and online/virtual environments.
