The psychological difference between playing video games to relax and playing to win

Video games offer adults a popular way to connect and unwind, but the specific reasons people pick up a controller can alter how they experience stress and life satisfaction. A new study reveals that playing primarily to win is linked to higher anxiety, while men and women often report different motivations for starting a game. These results were published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

People engage with digital worlds for many different reasons. Some look for a temporary escape from daily responsibilities. Others want to challenge their reflexes, socialize with distant friends, or experience an interactive story.

Psychologists categorize these motivations into a few broad buckets based on the rewards they provide. The most common reasons include playing to relax, playing to improve one’s skills, playing to simply have fun, and playing to win. The video game uses and gratifications theory proposes that players actively seek out different digital experiences to satisfy specific psychological needs. These diverse starting goals can strongly alter the emotional impact of a gaming session.

Many adults who play video games also experience mental health challenges in their daily lives. Generalized anxiety involves persistent, excessive worry about daily events that is difficult to control. Social anxiety centers on an intense fear of social situations and a strong desire to avoid them.

Digital environments can provide a safe space for people with social anxiety to interact with others from a comfortable distance. However, certain competitive environments might actually increase overall stress levels. Mental health outcomes in gaming also exist within a broad culture that frequently struggles with gender equality.

Movements within the gaming community have highlighted the severe online harassment directed at women. Women gamers often face a higher threshold to be accepted by their peers in digital spaces. They may endure sexual harassment or outright threats to their safety while just trying to enjoy a hobby.

Because of these negative experiences, women might approach online games with more caution than men. They might prefer quieter games or choose to avoid voice communication features entirely to protect themselves from verbal abuse. These environmental pressures could shape why different genders choose to play certain games.

Lead author Kayleigh Watters and co-author Mikael Rubin, both researchers at Palo Alto University, wanted to map out these relationships. They sought to identify how a person’s motivation to play connects to their anxiety levels, life satisfaction, and gender.

The researchers analyzed information from a publicly available database containing past survey responses from 13,464 adult gamers. The vast majority of the participants identified as men, while a smaller fraction identified as women.

Participants in the original database completed several questionnaires regarding their mental health. They answered questions about their social phobia, which included items about avoiding parties or fearing physical symptoms like trembling in public. They also filled out surveys detailing their general anxiety symptoms, such as feeling restless or being unable to stop worrying.

Most of the participants in this dataset primarily played League of Legends. This title is a hugely popular online multiplayer game where two teams of five players compete to destroy the opposing team’s base. League of Legends is broadly known for its intensely competitive ranking system.

Because players are assigned a rank based on their win and loss record, the pressure to perform is constant. Mistakes made by one player can cost the entire team the match. This dynamic frequently leads to frustration, anger, and verbal abuse in the game’s text chat.

Watters and Rubin used a statistical technique called network analysis. This method acts like a map of a city’s traffic grid, showing how a traffic jam on one street affects the flow on all surrounding streets. By controlling for all other variables at once, the researchers could isolate the specific relationships between gaming hours and mental health. This approach revealed a web of connections that traditional analysis methods might miss.

They created separate mathematical networks for players motivated by fun, relaxation, improvement, and winning. The data showed that playing to win created a distinct psychological pattern compared to the other three motivations. When people played to relax, have fun, or improve, avoiding social situations was strongly linked to playing more hours.

This pattern suggests that recreational players might use video games as a substitute for real-world social interactions. If they feel nervous about face-to-face gatherings, they can log more hours online to fulfill their social needs safely.

The dynamic changed completely for those who played primarily to win. In the win-motivated group, players did not show the same strong link between avoiding real-world social events and excessive gaming. Instead, higher levels of generalized anxiety in the competitive group were associated with playing fewer hours.

The researchers suspect that the pressure to perform well and the fear of negative evaluation from teammates might drive anxious players away from the game entirely. The study also found differences between men and women regarding their primary reasons for gaming. Women were more likely to report having fun or relaxing as their main motivation.

Men, on the other hand, more frequently stated that they played to improve their skills or to win. The researchers note that women might lean toward relaxation and fun partly because of the hostile environments they often encounter in competitive game modes.

Anxiety levels also differed across gender lines in the dataset. Women reported higher overall levels of generalized anxiety and social anxiety compared to men. Despite these differences, men and women reported similar levels of overall life satisfaction in their survey responses.

The researchers did find that higher generalized anxiety predicted lower life satisfaction for all players. This held true regardless of the participant’s original reason for booting up the game. This finding demonstrates the pervasive negative impact that chronic worry has on a person’s perceived quality of life.

The research team highlighted a few limitations in their work. The dataset contained a massive imbalance in gender, with nearly 13,000 men and only about 700 women. This large gap limits the strength of the conclusions regarding gender differences in gaming.

Future studies will need to intentionally recruit more women to ensure a balanced comparison. The results are also heavily influenced by the specific culture of League of Legends. Because this particular game is famously competitive and frequently toxic, the findings might not apply to other types of digital entertainment.

Other gaming communities, such as those centered around cooperative building games or single-player puzzle games, might show entirely different emotional patterns. The motivation to play and the resulting anxiety likely shift depending on the genre.

The authors suggest that mental health professionals should consider a patient’s specific gaming motivations when discussing screen time. Instead of treating all video game use as identical, tailored support strategies might yield better outcomes. For example, competitive players might benefit from strategies to manage performance anxiety, while recreational players might need help building social confidence in physical spaces.

The study, “Unique associations between different motivations to play video games and anxiety: Evidence from network analysis,” was authored by Kayleigh N. Watters and Mikael Rubin.