Hello! I’m a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London studying well-being and video gaming, in terms of both quantity and quality of play. How do people use games to address frustrations in their day-to-day life, successfully or not? How do changes in how people are feeling affect gaming behavior, such as playing longer sessions or at different times of day?

I’m also committed to making psychological research on games more trustworthy and rigorous. I’m heavily involved in open science advocacy, training, and meta-scientific research, and serve as the UK Reproducibility Network Local Network Lead at QMUL.

I’m supervised by Prof Sebastian Deterding, Dr David Zendle, and Dr Laurissa Tokarchuk.

I’m always on the lookout for people with similar interests, so if you’d like to discuss my work, collaboration opportunities, or anything else, please do get in touch!

CV

Skills

Inferential Statistics in R

Process | Analyze | Visualize

Open Research

Open data/materials/code | Registered reports
Synthetic data | Team science

(Games) User Research

Digital trace data | Surveys | Engagement

Game Design

Ideate | Build | Test | Evaluate
Development in Unity (C#)

Motivational Psychology

Self-determination theory | Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation

Qualitative Methods

Thematic analysis | Grounded theory

Background

Interests
  • Video game play
  • Self-report vs “digital trace” play measures
  • Dysregulated (disordered) gaming
  • Self-determination theory
  • Psychometrics
  • Open research
Education

  • PhD, CDT in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence

    Queen Mary University of London

    2019–present

  • MPhil, Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

    University of Cambridge

    2018

  • BS, Linguistics and Environmental Studies

    Tulane University

    2016

Publications

For a complete and up-to-date list of publications, check out my Google Scholar.

Nick Ballou, Sebastian Deterding (2022). ‘I Just Wanted to Get it Over and Done With’: A Grounded Theory of Psychological Need Frustration in Video Games. Preprint.

Preprint OSF data

Nick Ballou (2022). A Manifesto for More Productive Psychological Games Research. Preprint.

Preprint OSF data

David Zendle, Catherine Flick, Darel Hargarth, Nick Ballou, Joe Cutting, Anders Drachen (2022). Understanding whether lockdowns lead to increases in the heaviness of gaming using massive-scale data telemetry: An analysis of 251 billion hours of playtime. Preprint.

Preprint OSF data

Emma Norris, Kait Clark, Marcus Munafo, Caroline Jay, Jessie Baldwin, Alexandra Lautarescu, Hugo Pedder, Mike Page, Eike Mark Rinke, Charlotte Burn, Will Cawthorn, Nick Ballou, Scott Glover, Samuel Evans, Stephanie Rossit, Mojtaba Soltanlou, Emma Wise, Mark Kelson, Nadia Soliman, Andrew Jones, Rianne Costello, David Smailes, Laura L. Wilkinson, Elena Serena Piccardi, Adam Michael Partridge, Charlotte Hulme, Anna Schultze, Charlotte Rebecca Pennington (2022). Awareness of and engagement with Open Research behaviours: Development of the Brief Open Research Survey (BORS) with the UK Reproducibility Network. Preprint.

Preprint OSF data

David Zendle, Paul Cairns, Rachel Meyer, Stuart Waters, Nick Ballou (2022). Response to Xiao et al.: If everything is a loot box, nothing is. Addiction.

Publisher (open access)

See all publications

Recent Posts

Negative Gaming Experiences, Expectations, and Disengagement
A layperson-friendly summary of a recent interview study about negative experiences in games, player expectations, and (dis)engagement.
Jul 25, 2022 10 min read
How to Foster Strong Academic Families
Some observations about the familial social circles academics form, inspired by the wonderful Dorothy Bishop Festschrift.
Jun 30, 2022 8 min read
See all posts

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