Last year, I did an informal experimental study about Starcraft 2, a highly complex real time strategy game. Your success in Starcraft heavily relies on multitasking (in it's every-day use). Multitasking in this sense means that you need to keep a complex mental loop for actions which need to be performed in a rapid succession. Professional-level players normally perform up two 300 actions per minute (actions = button presses).
The study had two main goals. First, to investigate
the relationship between playing Starcraft and multitasking abilities. Since I used a flash game and used self-report measures, the methodolgy in this part could potentially skew the results.
Second,
and this part was not announced, I read a lot of
complaints from people who play a lot of Stracraft 2 in forums. I wanted to check whether these qualitative statements had
some quantitative foundations. In specific, I investigated
whether the amount of playing SC2 is correlated with general satisfaction with life.
In total, 70 participants took part in the study. For investigation of multitask abilities I used the flash game
Multitask from Kongregrate.
The participants played 10 times and entered their results manually
into a google form in which I continued the study. Life satisfaction was
measured using the widely employed
Satisfaction with Life Scale
by Ed Diener. After that, participants filled out questions about their
playing behavior, most importantly how many hours per week the play,
and additionally demographical data.
RESULTS
From the
initial 70 participants, 20 had to be excluded from the study. Three
because of missing data and 17 due to outlier detection (mostly because
they reported several multitask results below 20 seconds whichmeans that
they didn't really play). That means, that 50 participants were
included in the final analysis.
Multitasking
The longest time reported was 262 seconds. The average of all participants was 70 seconds.
I didn't find any connection between "hours of SC2 played" and multitasking ability.
Linear models also revealed no interaction with league (which is an in-game indication of a player's skill). Either, playing
more doesn't improve one's multitasking abilities or it improves
multitasking abilities which are not measured by the Multitask game I
used or the results are skewed because I relied on manipulable
self-report measures and participants did not report the correct
results.
(Looks messy, doesn't it?)
I found a trend (p = .081) that
master's players (the highest in-game league) lasted on average 20 seconds longer in the multitasking game
compared to the other leagues. This is an indication that
multitasking abilities such as measured by the Multitask game are really reflected in Starcraft 2 skill. As expected,
age significantly correlates with multitask ability (p = .003; r = -.400). Those in their early 20s were best. (see What do the numbers mean? below)
Life Satisfaction
Playing Starcraft correlates negatively with general satisfaction with life
(p = .001; r = -.441). The more you play, the less satisfied you are.
Don't play so much! To give you an idea, most players in my data set
played around 15 hours per week (M = 14.60; SD = 11.9), the minimum was
around 1 hour and the maximum was around 40 hours. Also, not
surprisingly, the older you get, the less time you invest in SC2 in
total (p = .006; r = -.465).
What do the numbers mean?
The
p-value is the estimated probability of how likely we found a difference between two groups although there is none. For a p-value of .03 this would mean that if we generated results completely random, in 3% of the cases, we would find this "difference".
The
r-value is an estimate of how big the correlation between the two things is we measure. In the example above, we look at the variance in the satisfaction with life between the participants. Now we overlay this variance with the variance from the "hours of Starcraft played" and check how much of the variance in the one data set can be explained by the other. A value of .441 means that 44% of the variance in the satisfaction with life scores can be explained by the variance in the "hours of Starcraft played" data. Given that one's satisfaction with life can potentially influenced by thousands of things (like social life, sleep, achievements, job, etc) such a high correlation is astonishing!
I think that the connection between amount of hours of weekly play and life satisfaction is interesting, I don't believe that playing Starcraft causes one to be less satisfied with one's life. The more probable explanation is that, if you are less satisfied with your life, lack social inclusion or have problems at home, you tend to retract yourself from society, because it's the source of your problems, and approach alone-activities such as playing video games extensively.