Oxford study finds that playing PowerWash Simulator improves mood, though not as much as sex

I really appreciate the principled refusal of research scientists to let casual truths remain casual. A group at Oxford has asked, more or less: Do people feel good when they play PowerWash Simulator? And the answer they got was: Yep, people do feel good when they play PowerWash Simulator.

Congrats to the PowerWash Simulator developers: How many games have been deemed fun by a team of Oxford scientists?

There's more to it than that, of course. Videogame mood studies tend to focus on long-term effects, but that might be putting the cart before the horse, say the Oxford Internet Institute researchers behind the study, who think that understanding how games affect mood in the short term is necessary if we're going to understand their potential long-term mental health effects.

The researchers also have a few problems with previous studies on the mood-altering properties of games: They often use heavily modified games or games designed specifically for the study rather than the actual commercial games people play for fun, they tend to take place in a lab setting rather than a normal context for playing games, such as at home after a stressful day at work, and they don't record how players are feeling in small enough intervals to find out, for instance, how long it takes a game to first affect someone's mood.

To address those problems, the Oxford team worked with PowerWash Simulator developer FuturLab to create a research branch of the game that asked players how they were feeling at regular intervals. 8,695 players delivered 162,325 «intensive longitudinal in-game mood reports» across 67,328 play sessions.

The result is that PowerWash Simulator can officially call itself a good time: 72.1% of players experienced «a small improvement of mood» while playing, and that boost mostly happened within the first 15 minutes of play.

«Our current study corroborates what qualitative research and reports from video game players around the world have long suggested: People feel good