Overview

Video games are extremely popular, but how they affect players is not yet scientifically understood. Health and welfare stakeholders and the global games industry urgently require a comprehensive understanding of games to regulate gameplay, advise parents and players, and
develop games responsibly.

Our team uses multiple strategies to capture data directly from games and platforms and thereby understand both the quantity (how much time people spend playing games) and the quality (what games people play, and what they do in-game) of gameplay. One such strategy involves collaborating with major players in the games industry including Nintendo and Microsoft to facilitate sharing of objective, industry-captured data on player behaviour. We link this gameplay data with mental health surveys to understand how players are feeling before, during, and after play, over months or years. Together, we seek to improve how social scientists study the influence of video games on mental health. Our work has three primary goals:

1. Provide tools and infrastructure for social scientists to obtain previously inaccessible
   objective data on the quantity and quality of gameplay.
2. Leverage best practices in transparent and open research to generate robust findings that
   explain for whom and under what circumstances games affect well-being.
3. Generate large-scale, freely available datasets on the longitudinal relationship between
   video game play and mental health, using representative samples of players