Is gaming good or bad for your mood? What diary studies show

Two measurement problems have dogged research on games and mood. The first is that people are poor at estimating their own screen time, a problem we cover in screen time myths. The second is that asking “how have you felt over the past month?” blurs together good days and bad, and whatever the game did disappears into the average.

Newer studies tackle both. Telemetry from game companies records when and how long people actually play. Experience sampling, sometimes called a diary method, asks people how they feel at many moments across days or weeks, so researchers can compare the same person when playing and not playing, or at the start and middle of a session. Neither method proves cause and effect, but together they are a big step up from a single questionnaire.

The most detailed look at mood during play comes from PowerWash Simulator, a calm game about cleaning things with a pressure washer. Vuorre and colleagues worked with the developer to ask players about their mood at intervals inside the game, collecting 162,325 reports from 67,328 sessions by 8,695 players.

On average, players reported slightly better mood during play than at the start of a session, a gain of about 3 points on a 100-point scale. The researchers estimated that around 72% of similar players would experience this lift, and that most of it arrived within the first 15 minutes. The authors are careful: one game, its own players, and no way to say whether the game caused the change or would have done the same in other games. It is still a rare look at mood measured during play rather than remembered afterwards.

Sources1Source 1Vuorre, M., Ballou, N., Hakman, T., Magnusson, K., & Przybylski, A. K. (2024). Affective uplift during video game play: A naturalistic case study. Games: Research and Practice, 2(3), 1–14.

If short sessions nudge mood upwards, do more hours mean more well-being, or less? Johannes, Vuorre and Przybylski combined logged play from Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons with player surveys. They found a small positive relation between play time and players’ affective well-being. Players’ motivations and the needs a game satisfied were related to well-being in their own right.

A larger follow-up by Vuorre and colleagues linked six weeks of logged play from 38,935 players, supplied by seven game publishers, with three waves of well-being surveys. It found little to no evidence that play time affected well-being, while motivations again seemed to matter. A registered report by Ballou and colleagues tracked 414 Xbox players across all their games for 12 weeks and found no practically meaningful link in either direction between play time and well-being.

Most recently, Ballou and colleagues studied 703 casual adult Nintendo Switch players across 150 games and more than 140,000 hours of play. Play time did not predict life satisfaction, mood, depressive symptoms or general well-being, at timescales from an hour to a year. What did predict well-being was gaming life fit: how well players felt games sat alongside the rest of their lives.

Taken together, these studies are unusually strong by the standards of the field: large samples, logged rather than guessed play time, several games and, in one case, a preregistered plan. They do not mean games affect nobody. They mean that for most players the number of hours is not where the story is. A person who plays three hours on a Sunday with friends and a person who plays three hours at night to avoid thinking about something are doing different things, and a time total cannot tell them apart.

Sources2Source 2Johannes, N., Vuorre, M., & Przybylski, A. K. (2021). Video game play is positively correlated with well-being. Royal Society Open Science, 8(2), 202049.3Source 3Vuorre, M., Johannes, N., Magnusson, K., & Przybylski, A. K. (2022). Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being. Royal Society Open Science, 9(7), 220411.4Source 4Ballou, N., Sewall, C. J. R., Ratcliffe, J., Zendle, D., Tokarchuk, L., & Deterding, S. (2024). Registered report evidence suggests no relationship between objectively tracked video game playtime and well-being over 3 months. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 5(1), 28–42.5Source 5Ballou, N., Vuorre, M., Hakman, T., Magnusson, K., & Przybylski, A. K. (2025). Perceived value of video games, but not hours played, predicts mental well-being in casual adult Nintendo players. Royal Society Open Science, 12(3), 241174.

Observational data can never fully rule out that happier people simply play differently. Egami and colleagues found an unusual way round that. During the pandemic, demand for game consoles in Japan was so high that retailers sold them by lottery, so whether someone got a console was partly down to chance. Analysing survey data from 97,602 people with methods designed for cause-and-effect questions, they found that owning a console, and the extra play that came with it, reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction.

The effects differed by console and by group, with one console showing smaller benefits for adolescents and women and the other larger benefits for adolescents. The study took place during an unusual period of isolation, when games may have filled a gap that would not exist in ordinary times. Even so, it is some of the strongest evidence yet that gaming, on average, is not bad for mood.

Sources6Source 6Egami, H., Rahman, M. S., Yamamoto, T., Egami, C., & Wakabayashi, T. (2024). Causal effect of video gaming on mental well-being in Japan 2020–2022. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(10), 1943–1956.

A review by Halbrook, O’Donnell and Msetfi argued that the effects of games on well-being depend on the player’s motivation, the social context, the content of the game and what else is going on in their life. The newer data fit that view. Playing is usually a small positive in the moment and neutral in the long run. The differences between people come from why and how they play, not from a number of hours.

That is the idea behind designing for the life players actually have, and it is why OutBrick makes no promises about your mood. The small in-session lift found in PowerWash Simulator also fits what we know about playing to unwind after work: a short, absorbing game can be a pleasant way to change gear, not a treatment. We aim for a game that is pleasant to spend ten minutes with and easy to put down. The same logic applies to any game: try a daily board or a board in your browser and notice how you feel before and after, rather than trusting a headline either way.

• Check your mood before and after playing, a small experiment of your own.
• Ask whether games fit well alongside sleep, work and people, not how many hours you log.
• If you notice you mostly play to escape feeling bad, and it no longer helps, talk to someone you trust.

Sources7Source 7Halbrook, Y. J., O’Donnell, A. T., & Msetfi, R. M. (2019). When and how video games can be good: A review of the positive effects of video games on well-being. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(6), 1096–1104.5Source 5Ballou, N., Vuorre, M., Hakman, T., Magnusson, K., & Przybylski, A. K. (2025). Perceived value of video games, but not hours played, predicts mental well-being in casual adult Nintendo players. Royal Society Open Science, 12(3), 241174.