Playing together apart: how games kept people connected

The broadest early picture comes from Matthew Barr and Alicia Copeland-Stewart at the University of Glasgow, who surveyed 781 players during the first lockdown. Seventy-one per cent said they were playing more than before. Fifty-eight per cent said games had affected their well-being, and the overwhelming majority of those described the effect as positive.

When the researchers sorted the free-text answers, seven themes came out, including cognitive stimulation, reduced anxiety and stress, a sense of escape and, prominently, opportunities to socialise. People described games as a place to keep up friendships that had nowhere else to go: a weekly session with old university friends, a regular match with a sibling in another city.

It is worth being clear about what a survey like this can show. The respondents chose to take part, most were already keen players, and the answers are their own account of how they felt. That does not make the findings wrong, but it does make them a description of how many players experienced the period rather than proof that games improved anyone’s mental health.

Sources1Source 1Barr, M., & Copeland-Stewart, A. (2022). Playing video games during the COVID-19 pandemic and effects on players’ well-being. Games and Culture, 17(1), 122–139.

Two studies went further and measured loneliness directly, and both found that the kind of play mattered more than the amount. Steve Nebel and Manuel Ninaus surveyed German-speaking players during social distancing. On its own, gaming frequency had a small positive correlation with loneliness: people who played more were, if anything, slightly lonelier. But when they looked at why and how people played, the picture split. Players with a strong social motive reported less loneliness. Players whose main motive was escape reported more.

Joanna Lewis and colleagues found a similar pattern with 1,053 Animal Crossing: New Horizons players. More time in the game and related activities predicted higher anxiety and was somewhat related to loneliness, which the authors read as people using the game to cope with a hard time. Yet one specific social behaviour, visiting other players’ islands, was associated with lower loneliness.

Both studies are cross-sectional, so they cannot say which way the arrows point. Lonely people may seek out escape; sociable people may seek out company in games as elsewhere. The practical reading is modest and still useful. If a game is going to help with isolation, it probably does so through other people, not through hours alone.

Neither study measured people before and after they started playing, so neither can show that games reduced or caused loneliness.

Sources2Source 2Nebel, S., & Ninaus, M. (2022). Does playing apart really bring us together? Investigating the link between perceived loneliness and the use of video games during a period of social distancing. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 683842.3Source 3Lewis, J. E., Trojovsky, M., & Jameson, M. M. (2021). New social horizons: Anxiety, isolation, and Animal Crossing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2, 627350.

Katy Pearce and colleagues at the University of Washington interviewed 27 families, 33 parents and 37 children, about how they used Animal Crossing during the pandemic. Some of what they found was individual: parents and children each used the game to take their minds off things. Some was protective, with parents using the game to shield children from the stress around them.

The most striking finding was what the researchers call communal coping. In some families the game became a shared project with shared ownership: everyone contributed to the same island, took turns, and talked about it at dinner. The problem they were coping with was collective, and the game gave them a collective way to face it.

That is a useful corrective to the picture of screens as the thing that splits a household into separate rooms. A game can do that, and it can also be the one activity that a seven-year-old and a forty-year-old are genuinely equal at. We look at the everyday side of that in Animal Crossing and the architecture of shared time.

Sources4Source 4Pearce, K. E., Yip, J. C., Lee, J. H., Martinez, J. J., Windleharth, T. W., Bhattacharya, A., & Li, Q. (2022). Families playing Animal Crossing together: Coping with video games during the COVID-19 pandemic. Games and Culture, 17(5), 773–794.

Long before the pandemic, Nicolas Ducheneaut and colleagues logged play in World of Warcraft and found that the social side of big online games had been overestimated: many players spent much of their time playing alone, surrounded by others rather than grouped with them. Their phrase for it, “alone together”, was a warning to designers who assumed that putting people in the same world was enough.

Read now, it is also a reminder that company comes in degrees. Seeing that friends are playing, knowing they cleared the same level yesterday, or swapping a screenshot can all give a sense of others being there without a formal session together. For people who are tired, shy or short of time, that light presence may be exactly the right amount.

Sources5Source 5Ducheneaut, N., Yee, N., Nickell, E., & Moore, R. J. (2006). “Alone together?” Exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 407–416). ACM.

The lockdown studies describe people who were stuck in the same place at the same time as everyone they knew. Much ordinary isolation looks different: the friend who moved to another continent, the grandparent who goes to bed at nine, the colleague on night shifts. For them, the hardest part of playing together is not distance but the clock. Arranging a live session across eight time zones is a project in itself.

This is where asynchronous play earns its place. Turn-based games, shared worlds that wait for you, and puzzles that everyone plays on the same day but at a time of their choosing all let people meet in the same game without meeting in the same hour. A shared island, like the ones the families in the Pearce study built together, is this kind of space: it holds what each person did until the next person arrives.

There is a quieter benefit too. Asynchronous play removes the pressure to perform on cue. Nobody is waiting for you to take your turn, and a slow evening does not let the team down. For many people, especially those who find live multiplayer stressful, that is the difference between joining in and staying out. We look at why a common daily puzzle works so well as a meeting point in why a daily puzzle becomes a shared ritual.

Sources4Source 4Pearce, K. E., Yip, J. C., Lee, J. H., Martinez, J. J., Windleharth, T. W., Bhattacharya, A., & Li, Q. (2022). Families playing Animal Crossing together: Coping with video games during the COVID-19 pandemic. Games and Culture, 17(5), 773–794.

The lockdowns are over, but the lessons travel to anyone who is isolated for other reasons: a move to a new city, a long illness, caring for someone at home, a friend group scattered across time zones. The research suggests a few plain things.

At OutBrick the core game is solitary, so the social part lives around the board. The daily board gives everyone the same puzzle on the same day, wherever they are, and you can send your stars to a friend without giving the answer away. If you are looking for gentler ways to play with people, our guide to friendly competition without the pressure picks up where this leaves off.

• Favour games you play with or alongside people you know over games you use to shut the world out.
• Notice your motive: if you are mostly playing to escape, it is worth also reaching out to someone directly.
• Look for shared projects, a common island or the same daily puzzle, that give you something to talk about afterwards.
• Light contact counts. A shared result or a quick message about a level keeps a thread going.

Sources2Source 2Nebel, S., & Ninaus, M. (2022). Does playing apart really bring us together? Investigating the link between perceived loneliness and the use of video games during a period of social distancing. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 683842.4Source 4Pearce, K. E., Yip, J. C., Lee, J. H., Martinez, J. J., Windleharth, T. W., Bhattacharya, A., & Li, Q. (2022). Families playing Animal Crossing together: Coping with video games during the COVID-19 pandemic. Games and Culture, 17(5), 773–794.