Can gaming make us happier?

Mike:

Pokemon is a global franchise founded in 1996, and it's become a huge part of popular and gaming culture ever since. There have been films, a TV series, a trading card game and over 20 different video games. The Pokemon franchise includes the world's top selling toy brand and even has its own theme park. The main aim of players in the Pokemon universe is to find and capture as many Pokemon as possible.

This can be done by exploring different areas and trading with other players. People fell in love with the idea of being able to collect their favourite Pokemon. So when Pokemon Go was created in 2016, there was no doubt that there was already a massive, dedicated fanbase. You might remember that summer as the time hordes of people flooded local parks looking almost zombie like, in how they were fixated to their phones while running around chasing invisible creatures.

This is what Pokemon Go did to people. The location based mobile game encouraged players to get up off their sofa and explore the real world around them by finding and catching their favourite Pokemon. But there were questions about the release of yet another game in the franchise and Pokemon Go received some negative press. Was this just going to be another addictive game?

Would the location based aspect, put people in harm's way by encouraging them to concentrate on tracking down a virtual creature rather than paying attention to their surroundings. Or could there be an upside?

Welcome to LSE iQ, the podcast where we are social scientists and other experts. To answer one intelligent question. I'm Mike Wilkerson from the iQ team, where we work with academics to bring you the latest research and ideas. Up until now, I've been mostly behind the scenes editing episodes, but this month I'm asking, can gaming increase happiness? In this episode, I'll be hearing from one of our academics looking to find out how a game affects the people that play it.

And later, I'll speak to a Pokemon Go player about how the game changed her life. But first, I wanted to know more about what made this game so popular. So here's Michael Steranka the product director at Niantic, the company behind the game. Pokemon Go 2016 was such an incredible time that summer. It was such a phenomenon. Yeah. Pokemon Go.

Some quick stats that I kind of saw. Fastest game, mobile game to earn $100 million. Most downloaded game in the first month ever. Yep. Yep. Why do you think it got such a huge, huge amount of reception with a global audience?

Michael:

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a lightning in the bottle moment, right, where it was a mix of this incredibly beloved IP and franchise in Pokemon with a brand new technology in augmented reality gaming and specifically location based gaming. Right to where it just had like a unique concoction and mixture there that it was so easy for anybody to just like pick up and check out and understand.

And I think because of that, you saw a huge breadth of people, whether that be, you know, children, toddlers all the way up to, you know, grandparents being able to, you know, take out their phones, go on a walk go to a park, see, you know, hundreds of other people out and about and and just participate in the fun.

So, yeah, I do think kind of that mixture of beloved IP, new emerging technology that had a real novelty to it and also just this total ease of accessibility all played into that, you know, concoction that that made that the probably, you know, the most magical summer of my life personally.

Mike:

It was such an oddity of the fact that people who didn't even know each other were meeting up in a park.

Michael:

And actually, I think that also contributed to that that hype. And and, you know, everybody wanting to participate because unlike other games, which also see, you know, tens of millions of players, oftentimes these are people, you know, sitting on their couch, you know, in their car on the way, you know, being driven to school or whatnot. But when people are out there playing Pokemon Go, there's sort of this social validity where you can look around you and see everybody else enjoying the game.

And so, you know, it definitely had a built in organic virality to it where just the sheer nature of playing that game was an advertisement for the game in and of itself.

Mike:

Why did Niantic go down this location based route, Pokemon had done such an incredible job being kind of this kind of open world ish game on Nintendo Switch on Game Boy, it was already a brilliant game. Yeah. Why go down location based gaming?

Michael:

Yeah. So John Hankey, our CEO, basically founded Niantic as an incubator within Google, I think back in 2012, I want to say. And the reason he founded this incubator was honestly, he was kind of sick and tired of seeing his kids at home, glued to the TV, glued to the computer screen, knowing that there is this beautiful world around them right there, like parks to go play out and explore and, you know, art installations in the downtown city areas to go check out.

And so his vision for Niantic was to leverage technology to instead keep people instead of keeping people glued to their computer screen or their TV. Leverage technology on mobile devices to get them out into the real world and, you know, experience all that there is around them.

Mike:

Was their thought pre-launch of the mental health effects you just talked about the director thinking about getting his kids out and playing the game. Was their thought pre-launch into wow this could really actually help people?

Michael:

I don't know whether or not mental health specifically was, you know, an explicit goal of this game, but there definitely was always this intent to bring people outside, check out different cool places around them, but more importantly, foster this sense of real world communities and real world social interactions with one another. I think the indirect output of that is an increased, you know, mental health.

Mike:

This real world social interaction that Michael talked about is something that I've also experienced having played the game. It's pretty obvious to spot a group of Pokemon Go players. They're normally stood in a circle, ferociously tapping on their phone screens with cables leading to external power banks that they can play for that much longer. There have been times I've gone up to these strangers to collaboratively take on a Pokemon gym or raid.

This is where you try and catch a legendary Pokémon, the rarest type of Pokémon, which can only be caught by raiding with other players. No other game consistently creates this safe space for people like me to do this in the real world. There's a real feeling of community between players. You can probably hear that I have a real love for the game.

But I wanted to know, whether the academic research backs up my positive personal experience with gaming, often being criticized for having negative tendencies when played online with things like trolling and online abuse. I wanted to know if Pokemon Go was different. I spoke to LSE assistant professor of Information Systems and Innovation. Dr. Aaron Cheng, who looked at the impact of Pokemon Go on people's mental health.

He did this by analysing depression related search terms in specific countries. Just after the game was released. I was interested to see how a game that centered so much on a real world interaction impacts people. Aaron’s Research found that there was a significant short term decrease in depression related search terms after the release of the game, suggesting that playing Pokemon Go has a positive impact on people's mental health.

Here's Aaron to talk more about this.

Aaron:

Let's first talk about like traditional games we played, for example, we have X-Box or PS four or five. This console game, we basically play it at home. It's like indoor isolated setting. Even though you play with your friends, it's online, you cannot see their facial expressions. You still enjoy the gameplay, but sometimes you feel fatigue and you do not move a lot.

So maybe you do not think a lot and then you feel sometimes numb. But when you play the location based game, you have to be alert of everything surrounding. And it actually helps those people who have issues with like social withdrawal or for those kind of people, they do not have that opportunity even excuse to get out of their room, get out of their house.

So so I think this is really important. I think now we are not talking about the game. We also talk about how the game actually improve happiness and healthy life, right, psychology, literature and public health literature suggests that we have to do so, move around, think more, and that's really helpful to do. stimulate some positive changes in our brain.

But sometimes we we know that we have to like we discussed before, we know we have to to move around, but we just don't have this good kind of reason for that. So location based mobile game, uh, help you do that? Get out of your door and get out of your comfort zone.

Mike:

Aaron is talking about the physical benefits of the game and how it gently nudges you to go outside to play, which is vastly different to most of the games where you play on a screen indoors. And earlier we heard from Michael about the benefits of face to face socialization and how Pokemon Go makes you feel part of this real world community within a game.

I asked Aaron to elaborate on this and why it's beneficial to your mental health.

Aaron:

Face to face interaction is much more, I would say, effective than online interactions because it gives you more social cues for you to embed yourself in in the real world. This is the first thing. Face to face interaction. The second is more about socialization. It's linked to face to face interaction. It's really about building relationships, having a sense of community.

And because the social activities you experience due to the game play can actually make you feel happy. And oftentimes when we play the game, we enjoy the gameplay, but it's like individual playing the game. You interact with virtual creators, but location based a game goes goes beyond that. So you have virtual creatures to to interact with, but you play with your friends and you share ideas and feelings with your friend.

When you play the game, you enjoy the game and you also enjoy the experience playing the game with your friends. And the last thing I would mention is outdoor activities, right? So it's quite different. Indoor you do not move physically, but outdoor you bring some positive changes in, not your brain but also your body. You feel more energetic and you find that maybe this is the panacea to your mental health and you are try it again.

And then as you see that this game actually promotes like a loop for you to get into this healthy habit.

Mike:

You're listening to an LSE iQ. With me, Mike Wilkerson. This month we are asking, can gaming increase happiness? So location based gaming clearly has many benefits to its players. So why is Pokemon Go such an outlier? Why aren't there more location based games? Here's Michael again.

Michael:

I think part of the challenge that other products face is hitting a critical mass. Right. You really do need to have a certain amount of players around the world in order to create those magical moments with each other. Right. If there are only ten people playing a location based game in a city, the odds of them bumping into each other, no matter how many raids or gyms we place throughout that city, are just very low.

Right. But with Pokemon Go, you have such a large audience that you can more easily a facilitate those those moments with people. So yeah, it's hard to get that critical mass, but I do think that once you have it, it then has a snowball effect, right where now not only am I seeing other people playing Pokemon Go, which helps with my social validation, but other people who aren't playing Pokemon Go see this group of people having fun together out in the real world, out at like a beautiful park and are kind of wondering what's going on there.

I think having that critical mass, that tipping point is pretty critical for for something like this to really succeed. And, you know, fortunately for Pokemon Go, we are there.

Mike:

And as you mentioned, that kind of that beautifully unique story within gaming for me where you can be in the real world and be playing a game and like you say, a stranger can walk past and then join in with a game. That's just it's never really been within the gaming sphere before. Yeah. And you know, one of the you talked about three pillars at the start and one being this.

Michael:

Real world social.

Mike:

Yeah. Yeah. And that's such a beautiful thing to bring into a game. Yes. You know, long gaming as a whole has had a negative connotations in the past.

Michael:

Yeah. I mean, the the critical thing there, right. Is the real world part of real world social. Every other game out there or every other multiplayer game out there really leans into the social aspects of it, whether it's collaborative, social game play or player versus player social game play. But so much of that takes place online. Right. And unfortunately, a lot of the worst in people can can come out in these, like, online environments where you're hidden behind a computer screen or, you know, you know, that there's no, I guess, danger of like physical harm to come from you.

You'll just say whatever negative things will can come out of your mouth due to like a heightened emotion or what have you.

Mike:

Michael makes a really good point here. Online gaming can have such a toxic nature to it. People are so quick to get annoyed and be abusive to strangers for just losing on a game. It's almost become the norm, an acceptable behaviour in the gaming world. And really, few people would behave like this to someone in person. Michael explains a bit more about why Pokemon Go players don't face as much of this toxic behaviour.

Michael:

But when you focus on the real world, part of real world social interactions, a lot of that negativity sort of naturally goes away. Right. Even if you're on team instinct and I'm on Team Valor and we're kind of vying for control over this gym, I'm not going to verbally assault you if you're, like, right there in front of me.

Right. So it definitely creates just added, you know, at the very default stage, a much more friendly and welcoming environment because when you put to people despite their, you know, differences in background or whatever in the same vicinity as one another, it's really hard to actually be mean and be toxic, you know? You definitely are more likely to encounter people that are are nicer and welcoming because of the type of gameplay that we foster.

Mike:

Don't worry. I'm team Valor.

Michael:

No. Nice. Yeah, me too. You made the right choice.

Mike:

I thought so too. I spoke to Joanna Ferrara, who lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. She wrote an article about how Pokemon Go helped her battle her social anxiety.

Joanna:

I found that when you go like to community, the business.

Mike:

Community days are special days and Pokemon Go that happen every couple of months. It basically means there are more of a certain type of pokemon and more chances to catch a shiny version of them. A shiny being. An even rarer version of that pokemon which players love to collect. Back to Joanna.

Joanna:

If you see people playing in, you can just go to them and talk to them and just have like a five minute friend. You just look around and you think, Oh, no one else is playing. And then the community day starts and just see everyone like from really old people to young people just. Yeah, you think? No, this person is just like really trying to click the, like, button on something and then they're like shiny new.

Oh, they're playing Pokémon. It's really funny. And you have like a lot of different types of friendships through the game live different types of community in the game. Your friends are people you randomly meet when you're playing. It's people who you've never met and you're playing with them, too. It's it's really, really nice.

Mike:

And how does that make you feel that you kind of built this community through Pokemon Go and also within a game you have like a community of people that you don't even know yet but will play the same game as you are all outside walking, trying to achieve the same thing as you. How does that make you feel as a gamer?

Joanna:

That brings back a feeling I only had when I was the few times I went to see a football game. You feel that you're part of it, like people just look at your shirt and you're just same team as them and they're just nicer to you. It's it's like I can't explain the feeling because it's something like, they've never met you, they don't know you, but you're part of their family.

And I've only experienced it through those sports events. But now I've been experiencing it, experiencing it. And in Pokémon Go, it's like people see that you're playing and they're actually just smile at you. They're like, they see that you're playing. They see the moment you do. And when you send the ball and just like, Oh, you play too.

And they are just really happy that they found another player.

Mike:

And we talked a little bit about, you know, especially through COVID, it was a time that gave a lot of people anxiety and not knowing when they could leave the house or how long COVID as a whole and the pandemic was going to last. And in your blog that you wrote about Pokemon Go, about how Pokemon helped you at least leave the home again and start that process of kind of getting back outdoors.

Can you just tell me a little bit about how the game itself helped with your mental health during that time?

Joanna:

If if you can't leave your house from a certain period, then you get used to being at home and you just lose the motivation to go outside even when you can, you just go like, I don't know, like inertia. You. Yeah. I'm just going to go to sleep and just not exist for a while. And Pokémon Go was like my way of looking at the game and just, okay, I have this gym and this gym and this gym.

And I was like, first day I went outside to play, Okay, I'm just going to go to that gym on the end of my road, the gym I've never conquered, and I'm going to do that for the first time. And it's actually just like ten steps or something like that.

Mike:

Pokemon Gym isn't an actual gym. Players can conquer gyms by battling Pokemon left in that gym by other players. If you manage to do so, you gain rewards. But as with all things in Pokemon Go, the gym is in real spaces around your neighbourhood, whether that be a local park, a library or random bench. You have to stand close to it in order to challenge.

Back to Joanna.

Joanna:

And when I reached that gym, I saw it was like, Oh, there's a Pokestop nearby. Maybe I'm just going to spin that stop and go back and just I went to that stop.

Mike:

The Pokestop is a circular sign that you can spend in the game that correlates to a real world location. Pokéstops give you things like Pokéballs which are essential. If you don't have any of those, you can't catch Pokémon, which is a nightmare.

Joanna:

And then there was another one near that one. So I went to that one and my like path, my Pokémon journey started to go grow bigger and bigger and bigger as I went outside.

Mike:

So was this ability to kind of go, it was almost not forcing you out, but you had a reason to go outside and play.

Joanna:

Right? Yeah, I had a goal and I set my goals. So it was not something that I had to do. If I didn't want to go conquer the gym, I wouldn't go conquer the gym. If I didn't want to go spin more stops, I would stay at home and not spend those stops. So it was something I wanted to do.

I chose to do those stuff, those things, those those milestones. I didn't have to like something you choose to. It's it's your choice, how you play the game.

Mike:

Here's Michael again.

Michael:

I mean, it's the first company that I've worked at where, you know, part of the different OKRs and goals that we set for ourselves are how many kilometers are people traveling on a daily basis through our game, how many unique locations are people visiting? How many real world interactions are we fostering through through this game? And it really is just as important to us as, you know, our user numbers and our revenue and things like that.

Like we literally hold them on equal footing to those things and we want to make sure that we're not just developing things that are going to generate more revenue for the game. We really want to be developing features that put the users first, like you mentioned, and, you know, help them explore the world in a in a way that's going to increase their mental health and physical health at the same time.

Mike:

Something else I wanted to ask Aaron was What does the future of gaming look like? Would more gaming companies thought to consider the user's mental health when thinking about their game design?

Aaron:

So so I think Pokémon Go is a global phenomenon that encourages more and more mobile apps to rethink game design.

Mike:

Niantic The developers of Pokemon Go, have asked the to come in and do presentations on several occasions. He mostly talks about his research and gives expertise about mental health and game design. Back to Aaron.

Aaron:

And when I did talk to Niantic, I said that maybe they they were not aware of what their game design means. But I think that is a landmark of game design. I call it a humanity centric design because all the functions of the app of the game encourages the basic human needs and the ones who want to socialise with others, who want to go outside, explore the nature.

And we want to be physically active and energetic and passionate about what we do every day. And this game just magically integrates all of these kind of basic elements in humanity.

Mike:

So I'm going to go full circle and ask you the question, which is the title of our episode? Do you think I know we've looked at Pokemon Go specifically here, but can gaming increase happiness?

Aaron:

In general, I think game gaming brings pleasure to to human, but to thinking in the long run how game improve well-being. Right. So this is what I want to emphasise. It does not make much sense about the relationship between the game and the well-being because a game can be designed in different ways. What we should emphasise is how to build a game, how to build the gaming experience so that it can improve well-being.

Mike:

Clearly, not all online games increase our happiness, but Aaron’s research shows that the way Pokemon Go has been designed, which is prompt to get outside and even meet people, does seem to increase a player's sense of well-being. Michael talks about his personal experience with the game.

Michael:

What's really cool and unique about games like Pokemon Go is it's almost like a it's almost like an excuse to hang out with each other right in the real world. One of my favourite personal anecdotes of Pokemon Go is from the Swablu community day that happened earlier this year and to be honest, I don't really care about Swablu

I already had the shiny. It's not a pokemon that's of particular interest to me, but I called up one of my friends and said, Hey, do you want to play community together? And we were walking around just catching up. It's been so long since, you know, we'd hung out in person together and we sort of stumbled upon this brand new soccer field that was built since the last time we'd been in the area.

And someone had left a soccer ball there. And we just started kicking the ball together, right. And playing soccer while it was also a community day and that type of experience doesn't happen without something like Pokemon Go, pushing people out into the real world to discover things around them with others. And I came home from that community day feeling just so happy, right?

And I had such a beautiful day shared with one of my good friends. And, you know, that was all possible because Pokemon Go gave us an excuse to go out and hang out together. So, yes, I absolutely do think that games, especially location based games like Pokemon Go, that also have these social hooks to them, can absolutely improve people's mental health.

Mike:

This episode of LSE iQ was produced by me, Mike Wilkerson, with help from Anna Bevan, Ollie Johnson and Sue Windebank. If you'd like to find out more about this episode, please head to the show notes. If you enjoy LSE iQ, please leave us a review. We're having a break from iQ next month, but we'll be back in February in the next episode.

Just Winterstein asks Do we always need to pay our debts.

Joseph:

If we go back in time to the 18th century, when bankruptcy introduced the idea of debt discharge or debt cancelation, it also introduced the death penalty for fraudulent debtors. Right. So there's always been this idea that bankruptcy from the get go has balanced the benefits with these very harsh penalties for abuse of the process. Right. So I don't think we need to worry about this idea of someone entering into bankruptcy on a willy nilly basis really.