Playing PowerWash Simulator improves mood, Oxford researchers find, though not as much as sex

I really appreciate the principled refusal of research scientists to let casual truths remain casual. A group at Oxford has asked, more or less: Do people feel good when they play PowerWash Simulator? And the answer they got was: Yep, over 70% of PowerWash Simulator players feel good when they play PowerWash Simulator.

Congrats to the PowerWash Simulator developers: How many games have been deemed fun by a team of Oxford scientists?

There's a bit more to it than that, of course. Videogame mood studies tend to focus on long-term effects, but that might be putting the cart before the horse, say the Oxford Internet Institute researchers behind the study, which was published in August. They think that understanding how games affect mood in the short term is necessary if we're going to understand their potential long-term mental health effects.

The researchers also have a few problems with previous studies on the mood-altering properties of games: The experiments often use heavily modified games or games designed specifically for the study rather than the actual commercial games people play for fun, they tend to take place in a lab setting rather than a normal context for playing games, such as at home after a stressful day at work, and they don't record how players are feeling in small enough intervals to find out, for instance, how long it takes a game to first affect someone's mood.

To address those problems, the Oxford team worked with PowerWash Simulator developer FuturLab to create a research branch of the game that asked players how they were feeling at regular intervals. 8,695 players delivered 162,325 "intensive longitudinal in-game mood reports" across 67,328 play sessions.

The result is that PowerWash Simulator can officially call itself a good time: 72.1% of players experienced "a small improvement of mood" while playing, and that boost mostly happened within the first 15 minutes of play.

"Our current study corroborates what qualitative research and reports from videogame players around the world have long suggested: People feel good playing videogames," said researcher Nick Ballou.

The reported mood improvement was small, but still larger than mood increases other studies have associated with watching television, reading, and shopping, according to the researchers. Compared to other studies, playing PowerWash Simulator did not beat things like listening to music, eating, taking a walk, or having sex, however. Maybe they'll get there in the sequel?

The unsurprising result is framed by the researchers as a stepping stone on the way to answering bigger questions about why games affect mood at all, and how short-term videogame "mood repair" can lead to long-term improvements. 

"We believe our findings are most consistent with the notion that gaming—for most people—is a recovery activity that helps to manage day-to-day stresses and mood fluctuations, without necessarily having substantial long-term impacts," said senior author Professor Andrew Przybylski. 

"The fact that we studied only one game—and one that is not likely representative of today's most commonly played games—suggests caution in generalizing from our findings to other games. Future work should consider the use of randomized controlled trials to evaluate the effect of playing PowerWash Simulator or other games compared to other leisure activities or therapeutic interventions."

Gaming's effect on mood is a hot topic: I recently reported on a Seattle-based company that just got FDA approval to treat stress with videogames that use its biofeedback SDK. The company sees games as an attractive way to treat mental health issues in part because, if they're genuinely fun, it's a treatment that patients will actually comply with.

You can read the full PowerWash Simulator study here for more on the methods and results. Its authors are Matti Vuorre, Nick Ballou, Thomas Hakman, Kristoffer Magnusson, and Andrew K Przybylski.