'A really nice balance': U of S researcher begins study on beneficial aspects of video games

A University of Saskatchewan researcher is breaking down stereotypes around video games.

Most people play games as an escape from reality and a way to have fun.

“It's a nice escape from your long busy day sometimes,” said Anthony Foster, owner of Next Level Game Exchange in Saskatoon. “You can pop in a game, drift off to another universe for 45 minutes or 4 hours, depending how much time you have.”

Cody Phillips and his team in the computer science department were recently given funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to find the game mechanics that are beneficial to productivity.

It’s estimated that up to a trillion hours a year are spent playing video games around the world.

“We really need to understand where that time is going, and how we can leverage that time for benefits,” Phillips told CTV News.

“The grant has a relative amount of flexibility because it’s a ‘discovery’ grant. We don’t know what we’re going to find when we explore in this space, but we have some pretty good ideas.”

Phillips says for knowledge workers, taking a one-hour video game break is like going for a walk to spark ideas.

“You can get into a play session, play for a little while, you’ll feel good because you’re beating obstacles in the game. Then you can pivot pack to whatever task you’re facing,” said Phillips.

“If you can be mindful about how you’re playing and how much time you’re putting in, you can be quite productive and find a really nice balance.”

But it may depend on the type of game you play.

“A lot of art games are really good for this type of thing,” he said. “They have lots of different open ended sort of parts and you kind of finished them there's a logical conclusion point for a lot of games,” he said.

“But some games don't have that logical conclusion point. You can play match after match after match. You can get caught in this cycle of saying, ‘I'm going to play one more round, I'm going to play to like get a win.’ Those tend to be the games where I think we start seeing some issues that arise and so we want to try to avoid those games wherever we can as well.”

Phillips and his team are deploying some bots on a popular social media application that will notify gamers how long they’ve been playing, and then using your own prompts, you’ll be reminded what your values are around gaming, hopefully nudging the person back to real world tasks.

During the pandemic, the social aspect of gaming has come to the forefront.

“Certainly over the past few years, I think the pandemic and lockdown helped change a lot of people's thoughts and perspectives on video games and video game players,” said Foster.

Phillips said that has added another element to his study.

“Suddenly, during the pandemic, we saw lots of people suddenly not have that feeling of social connection,” he said.

“So, we saw lots of games like Minecraft, Among Us, Animal Crossing being used and played so that people could kind of form those social connections.”

While the five-year study casts a wide net, Phillips hopes to make video games seen as a useful mental tool for knowledge workers, instead of a distraction.