Video games provide adults with a popular way to connect and unwind, but the specific reasons people pick up a controller can change how they feel stressed and life satisfied. New research reveals that playing primarily for the purpose of winning is associated with increased anxiety, but men and women often report different motivations for starting gaming. These results were published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
People engage with the digital world for a variety of reasons. Some people seek a temporary escape from their daily responsibilities. Others want to challenge their reflexes, connect with faraway friends, and experience interactive stories.
Psychologists classify these motives into several broad categories based on the rewards they provide. The most common reasons include playing to relax, playing to improve your skills, playing just for fun, and playing to win. Video game use and gratification theory proposes that players actively seek out different digital experiences to satisfy specific psychological needs. These diverse starting goals can significantly change the emotional impact of a gaming session.
Many adults who play video games also experience mental health issues in their daily lives. Generalized anxiety disorder involves persistent and excessive worrying about everyday events that are difficult to control. Social anxiety centers on an intense fear of social situations and a strong desire to avoid them.
Digital environments provide people with social anxiety with a safe space to interact with others at a comfortable distance. However, certain competitive environments can actually increase your overall stress level. The mental health impact of gaming also lies within a broader culture that often struggles with gender equality.
The movement within the gaming community has highlighted serious online harassment against women. Female gamers often face a higher threshold to be accepted by their peers in digital spaces. They may endure sexual harassment or outright threats to their safety while just trying to enjoy a hobby.
Because of these negative experiences, women may approach online gaming more cautiously than men. They may prefer quiet games or choose to avoid vocal communication features altogether to protect themselves from verbal abuse. These environmental pressures can shape why different genders choose to play certain games.
Lead author Kayleigh Watters and co-author Michael Rubin, both researchers at Palo Alto University, wanted to explain these relationships in more detail. They sought to determine how a person’s motivation to play is related to anxiety levels, life satisfaction, and gender.
Researchers analyzed information from a publicly available database containing past survey responses from 13,464 adult gamers. The majority of participants identified as male, but a minority identified as female.
Participants in the original database completed several questionnaires regarding mental health. They answered questions about social phobia, including items about avoiding parties and fearing physical symptoms such as shaking in public. They also completed a questionnaire detailing common anxiety symptoms, such as restlessness and constant worrying.
Most of the participants in this dataset primarily played League of Legends. This is a very popular online multiplayer game in which two teams of five players compete to destroy the opposing team’s base. League of Legends is widely known for its highly competitive ranking system.
Players are assigned ranks based on their win-loss records, so there is always pressure to perform. If one player makes a mistake, the entire team can lose the match. This dynamic often leads to frustration, anger, and abuse in the game’s text chat.
Watters and Rubin used a statistical technique called network analysis. This method works like a map of a city’s traffic grid, showing how traffic congestion on one road affects the flow of all surrounding roads. By controlling for all other variables at once, the researchers were able to isolate the specific relationship between gaming time and mental health. This approach revealed a web of connections that traditional analytical methods might miss.
They created a separate mathematical network for players motivated by fun, relaxation, improvement, and winning. The data showed that playing to win produces unique psychological patterns compared to the other three motivations. When people played games to relax, have fun, or improve, avoiding social situations was strongly associated with spending more time playing.
This pattern suggests that recreational players may use video games as a substitute for real-world social interaction. If you’re nervous about gathering in person, you can log more time online to meet your social needs safely.
The dynamics of those who were playing primarily to win have completely changed. In the win-motivated group, players did not show a similarly strong association between avoidance of real-world social events and excessive gaming. Rather, the higher the level of generalized anxiety in the competitive group, the shorter the playing time.
Researchers believe that the pressure to perform well and the fear of negative feedback from teammates may cause anxious players to withdraw from the game altogether. The study also found differences between men and women regarding their main reasons for playing games. Women were more likely to report having fun and relaxing as their main motivations.
Men, on the other hand, more often said they played to improve their skills or to win. Researchers note that women may be more inclined toward relaxation and fun due to the often hostile environments encountered in competitive game modes.
Anxiety levels also varied by gender in the dataset. Women reported higher overall levels of general anxiety and social anxiety compared to men. Despite these differences, men and women reported similar levels of overall life satisfaction in their survey responses.
The researchers found that higher general anxiety predicted lower life satisfaction for all players. This is true regardless of the participant’s initial reason for launching the game. This finding indicates that chronic worry has a pervasive negative impact on a person’s perceived quality of life.
The research team emphasized that their study has several limitations. This dataset contained a large gender imbalance, with nearly 13,000 men and only about 700 women. This large gap limits the strength of conclusions regarding gender differences in gaming.
Future studies will need to intentionally recruit more women to ensure balanced comparisons. Results are also heavily influenced by League of Legends’ unique culture. This finding may not apply to other types of digital entertainment, as this particular game is known to be competitive and often harmful.
Other gaming communities, such as those centered around cooperative building games or single-player puzzle games, may exhibit quite different emotional patterns. The motivation to play and the anxiety that comes with it can vary by genre.
The authors suggest that mental health professionals should consider patients’ specific gaming motivations when discussing screen time. Rather than treating all video game usage as the same, a customized support strategy may yield better results. For example, competitive players may benefit from strategies to manage performance anxiety, whereas recreational players may need assistance building social trust in physical spaces.
The study, “Unique Associations Between Different Motivations for Playing Video Games and Anxiety: Evidence from a Network Analysis,” was authored by Kayleigh N. Watters and Michael Rubin.
