Publications

All BANG, Little Buck: Need-Related Experiences Are Weakly Linked with Behavior in the Video Game Domain
Psychological theories of media use often assume that subjective motivation affects observable behavior. Using video games as a test …
Nick Ballou, Tamás Andrei Földes, Matti Vuorre, Thomas Hakman, Kristoffer Magnusson, Andrew K Przybylski
Preprint Data
Open Play: A Longitudinal Dataset of Multi-Platform Video Game Digital Trace Data and Psychological Measures
Nick Ballou, Tamás Andrei Földes, Matti Vuorre, Thomas Hakman, Kristoffer Magnusson, Andrew K Przybylski
Preprint Data
Fundamental Flaws in the Design and Reporting of Chew and Neo (2024)
Loot boxes are products inside video games that consumers can buy to obtain random rewards. They are prevalently implemented in …
Leon Y. Xiao, Nick Ballou, Charlotte Eben
Publisher Version (Open Access)
How Do Video Games Affect Mental Health? A Narrative Review of 13 Proposed Mechanisms
Researchers have proposed a variety of mechanisms through which playing video games might affect mental health: by displacing more …
Nick Ballou, Thomas Hakman, Matti Vuorre, Kristoffer Magnusson, Andrew K Przybylski
Open Access Preprint
Reliving 10 Years Old: Descriptive Insights into Retro Gaming
As video games and players age, some are drawn to retro titles (defined here as games the 1980s–early 2000s), with nostalgia and the …
Nick Ballou, Nicholas David Bowman, Thomas Hakman, Andrew K Przybylski
Preprint Data
Claims for No Evidence Also Need Evidence
Veli-Matti Karhulahti, Nick Huntington-Klein, Nick Ballou
Preprint
Perceived Value of Video Games, but Not Hours Played, Predicts Mental Well-Being in Casual Adult Nintendo Players
Studies on video games and well-being often rely on self-report measures or data from a single game. Here, we study how 703 US …
Nick Ballou, Matti Vuorre, Thomas Hakman, Andrew K Przybylski
Open Access Data
From Social Media to Artificial Intelligence: Improving Research on Digital Harms in Youth
In this Personal View, we critically evaluate the limitations and underlying challenges of existing research into the negative mental …
Karen L Mansfield, Sakshi Ghai, Thomas Hakman, Nick Ballou, Matti Vuorre, Andrew K Przybylski
Publisher Version
How does Juicy Game Feedback Motivate? Testing Curiosity, Competence, and Effectance
‘Juicy’ or immediate abundant action feedback is widely held to make video games enjoyable and intrinsically motivating. Yet we do not …
Dominic Kao, Nick Ballou, Kathrin Gerling, Heiko Breitsohl, Sebastian Deterding
Open Access Data
The Basic Needs in Games Model of Video Game Play and Mental Health
How do video games affect mental health? A significant research literature has emerged to address this question, yet reviews routinely …
Nick Ballou, Sebastian Deterding
Open Access Preprint
Affective Uplift During Video Game Play: A Naturalistic Case Study
Do video games affect players’ well-being? In this case study, we examined 162,325 intensive longitudinal in-game mood reports from …
Matti Vuorre, Nick Ballou, Thomas Hakman, Kristoffer Magnusson, Andrew K Przybylski
Open Access Data
The Basic Needs in Games Scale (BANGS): A New Tool for Investigating Positive and Negative Video Game Experiences
Players’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are among the most commonly used constructs used in …
Nick Ballou, Alena Denisova, Richard Ryan, C Scott Rigby, Sebastian Deterding
Open Access Data
Registered Report Evidence Suggests No Relationship Between Objectively-Tracked Video Game Playtime and Wellbeing Over 3 Months
Recent years have seen intense research, media and policy debate on whether amount of time spent playing video games (“playtime”) …
Nick Ballou, Craig Sewall, Jack Ratcliffe, David Zendle, Laurissa Tokarchuk, Sebastian Deterding
Open Access Data/Prereg
The Relationship Between Lockdowns and Video Game Playtime: Multilevel Time-Series Analysis Using Massive-Scale Data Telemetry
Objectives: The primary objective of this study is to determine whether any specific lockdown policy led to meaningful increases in the …
David Zendle, Catherine Flick, Darel Halgarth, Nick Ballou, Joe Cutting, Anders Drachen
Open Access Data
‘I Just Wanted to Get it Over and Done With’: A Grounded Theory of Psychological Need Frustration in Video Games
Psychological need frustration—experiences like failure, loneliness, or coercion—is emerging as a promising explanation for why people …
Nick Ballou, Sebastian Deterding
Publisher Version Preprint Data
A Manifesto for More Productive Psychological Games Research
Despite enormous resource investment, researchers lack consensus on seemingly simple questions about how video games affect players. …
Nick Ballou
Open Access Publisher Version
No evidence that Chinese playtime mandates reduced heavy gaming in one segment of the video games industry
Governments around the world are considering regulatory measures to reduce young people’s time spent on digital devices, particularly …
David Zendle, Catherine Flick, Elena Gordon-Petrovskaya, Nick Ballou, Leon Y. Xiao, Anders Drachen
Publisher Version (Open Access)
Cross-Cultural Patterns in Mobile Playtime: An Analysis of 118 Billion Hours of Human Data
Mobile games are a pervasive and understudied facet of human culture. Here, we provide a first glimpse into cross-cultural patterns in …
David Zendle, Catherine Flick, Darel Halgarth, Nick Ballou, Simon Demediuk, Anders Drachen
Open Access
Pinpointing the Problem: Providing Page Numbers for Citations as a Crucial Part of Open Science
Open science is a movement that is transcending disciplines. As a legal scholar engaged in empirical research, I have adopted many good …
Leon Y. Xiao, Nick Ballou
Preprint
Awareness of and engagement with Open Research behaviours: Development of the Brief Open Research Survey (BORS) with the UK Reproducibility Network
Objectives: A need for Open Research practices exists, yet there remains a lack of validated questionnaires to assess Open Research …
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
Preprint Data
Response to Xiao et al.: If everything is a loot box, nothing is
Background and Aims Loot boxes are items in video games that may be bought for real-world money but provide ran- domized rewards. …
David Zendle, Paul Cairns, Rachel Meyer, Stuart Waters, Nick Ballou
Publisher Version
Self-Determination Theory in HCI : Shaping a Research Agenda
Self-determination theory (SDT) has become one of the most frequently used and well-validated theories used in HCI research, modelling …
Nick Ballou, Sebastian Deterding, April Tyack, Elisa Mekler, Rafael A Calvo, Dorian Peters, Gabriela Villalobos Zúñiga, Selen Türkay
Open Access Publisher Version
Do People Use Games to Compensate for Psychological Needs During Crises? A Mixed-Methods Study of Gaming During COVID-19 Lockdowns
Do people use games to cope with adverse life events and crises? Research informed by self-determination theory proposes that people …
Nick Ballou, Sebastian Deterding, Ioanna Iacovides, Laura Helsby
Open Access Publisher Version Data
A community-sourced glossary of open scholarship terms
Open scholarship is an umbrella term that refers to the endeavour to improve openness, integrity, social justice, diversity, equity, …
Sam Parsons, Flávio Azevedo, Mahmoud M Elsherif, Nick Ballou, …(113 total FORRT authors)
Publisher Version
“Clinically significant distress” in internet gaming disorder: An individual participant meta-analysis
Although the validity of internet gaming disorder (IGD) in the DSM-5 hinges on a relationship between 5 or more IGD symptoms and …
Nick Ballou, David Zendle
Open Access Publisher Version Data
Reforms to improve reproducibility and quality must be coordinated across the research ecosystem: The view from the UKRN Local Network Leads
Many disciplines are facing a “reproducibility crisis”, ushering in much discussion about how to improve research integrity, …
Suzanne Stewart, Charlotte Rebecca Pennington, Gonçalo Silva, Nick Ballou, Jessica Butler, Zoltan Dienes, Caroline Jay, Stephanie Rossit, Anna Samara
Published Version
Actions, not gestures: contextualising embodied controller interactions in immersive virtual reality
Modern immersive virtual reality (IVR) often uses embodied con- trollers for interacting with virtual objects. However, it is not clear …
Jack Ratcliffe, Nick Ballou, Laurissa Tokarchuk
Open Access Publisher Version
Not Very Effective: Validity Issues of the Effectance in Games Scale
Effectance—the basic positive experience of causing effects—provides a promising explanation for the enjoyment derived from novel …
Nick Ballou, Heiko Breitsohl, Dominic Kao, Kathrin Gerling, Sebastian Deterding
Open Access Publisher Version Data
A large-scale study of changes to the quantity, quality, and distribution of video game play during the COVID-19 pandemic
Video game play has been framed both as protective factor and risk to mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted an …
Matti Vuorre, David Zendle, Elena Petrovskaya, Nick Ballou, Andrew Przybylski
Publisher Version Data
Are You Open? A Content Analysis of Transparency and Openness Guidelines in HCI Journals
Within the wider open science reform movement, HCI researchers are actively debating how to foster transparency in their own field. …
Nick Ballou, Vivek Warriar, Sebastian Deterding
Open Access Publisher Version Data
The Hidden Intricacy of Loot Box Design: A Granular Description of Random Monetized Reward Features
Loot boxes are the focus of growing research and regulatory attention. While they are frequently treated as a monolithic feature of …
Nick Ballou, Charles Gbadamosi, David Zendle
Open Access Version Publisher Version Data
The relationship between mental well-being and dysregulated gaming: A specification curve analysis of five gaming disorder scales
Gaming disorder (also known as dysregulated gaming) has received significant research and policy attention based on concerns that …
Nick Ballou, Antonius J Van Rooij
Publisher Version Data
The Changing Face of Desktop Video Game Monetisation: An Exploration of Trends in Loot Boxes, Pay to Win, and Cosmetic Microtransactions in the Most-Played Steam Games of 2010-2019
It is now common practice for video game companies to not just sell copies of games themselves, but to also sell in-game bonuses or …
David Zendle, Rachel Meyer, Nick Ballou
Publisher Version
The Prevalence of Loot Boxes in Mobile and Desktop Games
Background and Aims Loot boxes are items in video games that may be bought for real-world money but provide ran- domized rewards. …
David Zendle, Rachel Meyer, Paul Cairns, Stuart Waters, Nick Ballou
Open Access Publisher Version Data