999 words, 6-minute read
Imagine your phone buzzes—a game notification says your friend unlocked a rare item in a time-limited event. How does it make you feel? Are you excited to unlock it yourself, or do you feel pressured? However you feel, your social anxiety may be driving it….
🎮Online Games and Social Anxiety
Online games are a huge part of modern life. They are fun and help us connect with others.
But behind the excitement, many games use psychological tricks—daily rewards, time-limited events, social notifications—to keep players coming back. These “tricks” are called deceptive patterns; they deceive players into making choices that often benefit game companies. A powerful trick is using people’s “fear of missing out” (FOMO) to create urgency, making gamers feel like they might lose out on something special if they don’t play regularly.
For most people, these are just part of a game. But for those with social anxiety, the story can be very different. Social anxiety is a condition where people fear being judged by others. Socially anxious people often turn to online games to avoid face-to-face interactions and connect with others more safely.
However, the more someone escapes into online games, the more likely they are to be addicted. People still experience social anxiety in games too; they make fewer friends online and participate less in social activities.
@itsmej3l And when i do, someone always has smth to say abt my voice so i just shut up from now on💀 #roblox #socialanxiety #relatable #fyp
📖What Has Been Found?
- Social anxiety leads to conformity, especially when others can see their judgement. → Conformity can be affected by different types of stress deceptive patterns induce.
- FOMO-based deceptive patterns increase desire for belonging and fear of exclusion. → It can push us to buy things associated with their social circle.
- Despite being aware of game developers’ deceptive patterns, players still make choices influenced by these patterns. → Something more than simply being aware of developers’ tricks is affecting our in-game behaviours.
❓So… Why Does This Study Matter?
- This study aims to understand how and why people react to deceptive patterns in games. We asked for both numerical ratings and free responses to learn about gamers’ thoughts and emotional processes.
- This study focuses on FOMO in in-game context, unlike past research that has focused on out-of-game impacts like gaming/social media addictions.
- Social anxiety in online games has significant industrial/clinical implications. If we know where the gamers’ decisions come from, we can:
- Help balance game industry revenue and player wellbeing.
- Design effective ways of reducing gaming addiction/disorders.
📝What We Did
We surveyed 35 gamers with varying levels of social anxiety. We presented them with 10 scenarios that use deceptive patterns, which they might encounter whilst playing online games.
The scenarios included game-related (e.g. battle passes, daily quests/login bonuses) and friend-related designs (e.g. invitation to join the team event, notification of friends’ achievements).
Participants shared their reactions to the scenario and reasons behind them. They also rated how impulsive they were in making decisions, how much FOMO they felt, how pressured they were, and their emotional reaction.
Try yourself!
Try reading a scenario used in our survey, and decide: what would you do in this situation?
Do you want to log in to the game every day to complete the quests? Or do you just not care? Are you pressured? Anxious? Why did you decide to do something (or not)? Compare your reactions to our findings…
👋Want to find out your social anxiety level? Try here!
🔍What We Found
- People with higher social anxiety experienced significantly greater FOMO and pressure.
- People with higher social anxiety were significantly more aroused when encountering the scenarios.
While participants’ decisions in the scenarios varied, common reasons behind their reactions were:
- Feeling pressure: pressure “to get the quests all completed”, or “to make sure I wasn’t just freeloading”.
- Weighting the costs and benefits: participate “if the rewards are worth the price”, or “if I find them interesting”.
- Antipathy towards the game developers: offended by the deceptive designs, even “not play the game anymore”.
- Positively motivated: play the game regularly because there is “zero real effort for freebies”.
- Relying on friends: “because my friends have done it”.
Importantly, people with higher social anxiety:
- Relied more on their friends’ opinions before making decisions.
- Explicitly complimented their friends.
- Avoided engaging in scenarios involving social events, worrying about meeting strangers during the event.
❗️What Does This All Mean?
- Social anxiety increases FOMO and pressure by intensifying people’s unmet need for social relatedness.
- Heightened pressure may worsen fear of negative evaluation, encouraging them to rely more on and conform to their friends.
- Explicitly complementing others could be socially anxious people’s low-risk way of showing social support, helping them maintain social bonds.
💡What Can We Do With These Findings?
- For gamers, knowing the process of their in-game decision-making can help them consciously reflect and make more appropriate choices.
- For developers, we can suggest ways to balance engagement mechanics with mental health considerations (e.g. encouragement rewards than punishment).
- For researchers/clinicians, they can design tailored support for at-risk/pathological gamers based on individual characteristics (e.g. self-monitoring tools tracking time and detecting deceptions).
Now that you know why you were excited or pressured when your phone buzzed with the news, next time it happens you can ask yourself: is it the thrill of the game—or the FOMO monster plotting with social anxiety—calling your name?
If social anxiety tries to drag you into a dungeon of stress, equip your best self-care armour and take a step back for a breather. The real high score? Relishing games on your terms, not the game’s timer.
So, after all, enjoy gaming—and don’t let the game play you! 🎮
🙌Credits
🔗References
- Bongard-Blanchy, K., Rossi, A., Rivas, S., Doublet, S., Koenig, V., Lenzini, G., 2021. “I am Definitely Manipulated, Even When I am Aware of it. It’s Ridiculous!” – Dark Patterns from the End-User Perspective. DIS ’21, 763–776. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462086
- Gupta, M., & Sharma, A. (2021). Fear of missing out: A brief overview of origin, theoretical underpinnings and relationship with mental health. World J Clin Cases, 9(19), 4881-4889. https://doi.org/10.12998/wjcc.v9.i19.4881
- Kang, I., Cui, H., & Son, J. (2019). Conformity Consumption Behavior and FoMO. Sustainability, 11(17), 4734. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11174734