Nick Ballou

Psychology of Video Games PhD Researcher

Queen Mary University of London, Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence Program

Hello! I’m a PhD researcher studying well-being and video gaming, with regard to both quantity and quality of play.

A primary goal of my work is to make psychological research on games more rigorous and trustworthy. I’m deeply involved in open science advocacy, training, and meta-scientific research. I serve on the QMUL Research Integrity Committee and as the Local Network Lead for the UK Reproducibility Network.

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

Feel free to contact me about my research or anything else here.

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 games
Digital trace data
Open research
Dysregulated (disordered) gaming
Self-determination theory
Intensive longitudinal methods

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