3 Current Dissertation
Does Solo Gameplay Replenish Belonging After Social Rejection?
The bi-dimensional rejection taxonomy identifies disengaged-prosocial responses as an emerging category of behavioral responses to social rejection (Sunami, Nadzan, and Jaremka 2020). Since this category is novel, identifying new disengaged-prosocial responses benefits the literature. One potential unexamined disengaged-prosocial response is solo gameplay: gameplays without any other human players. Solo gameplay is disengaged and prosocial since players play alone by themselves and satisfy belonging in an indirect, passive, hands-off manner from the non-human entities in a game (Sunami, Nadzan, and Jaremka 2020). Theoretically, solo gameplay should replenish belonging via social surrogates (Gabriel and Valenti 2017). However, no quantitative studies have tested this possibility. In my dissertation, I examined whether solo gameplay can replenish belonging after social rejection.
In this chapter, I discuss a theoretical foundation for the hypothesis that solo gameplay can replenish belonging following social rejection. I first discuss the social surrogacy hypothesis (Gabriel and Valenti 2017). This hypothesis suggests that people can fulfill belonging from social surrogates: targets with only psychological bonds without actual social interactions. I focus on two types of social surrogates relevant to single-player games, namely parasocial relationships and social worlds. For each type of social surrogate, I draw from video game research to discuss how video games can provide a social surrogate. Finally, I introduce the research question and the hypotheses of my dissertation.
3.4 Focusing on Solo Play
Both single-player and multiplayer games can potentially provide parasocial relationships and social worlds. For example, players of massively online multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPG) can experience social surrogates by feeling a personal connection to Arthas Menethil in the World of Warcraft or feeling like a member of the race Lalafell in Final Fantasy IV. However, players can also interact with other real players in multiplayer and thus replenish their belonging via real social interactions, without social surrogacy (Kowert and Oldmeadow 2015; Vella, Johnson, and Hides 2015). Since the goal of my dissertation is to examine playing a video game as a disengaged-prosocial response without real social interactions, I exclusively focused on solo gameplay.
3.5 Focusing on Outcome, not Mechanism
In my dissertation, I focused on whether playing a single-player video game with social surrogates can increase belonging after social rejection. Since this is the first study to examine this novel possibility, I did not focus on examining the mechanisms in which social surrogates can increase belonging, an important area for future research. Multiple mechanisms are possible for social surrogates to replenish belonging following social rejection. Social surrogates can directly replenish belonging as the social surrogacy hypothesis suggests. Or, social surrogates can replenish belonging via other intermediary psychological processes. For example, playing a video game can make the player feel happy, competent, autonomous, self-confident, or even distracted following social rejection—all of which could increase belonging (Hales, Wesselmann, and Williams 2016; Leary et al. 1995; Wesselmann et al. 2013; Williams 2009). While these are all interesting possibilities, the goal of my dissertation is to test whether social surrogates are effective to replenish belonging in single-player games. Without knowing whether they can replenish belonging, any efforts to examine why they do so would be inefficient. If I find that the social surrogates replenish belonging in single-player games, then we can start investigating possible mechanisms. With that being said, I included a few ancillary measures that assessed some of these possibilities (e.g., enjoyment, valence, and dominance), but this was not the main goal of this dissertation.
3.7 Current Dissertation
In this dissertation, I asked whether solo gameplay can replenish belonging after social rejection—whether socially rejected people could restore their sense of belonging by playing a video game in single-player mode. I start my dissertation by validating a new measure of state belonging, the Heart Manikin (Study 1), because a flexible state measure of belonging does not currently exist. I used this measure as a primary outcome throughout my dissertation.
In Study 2, I asked rejected participants to write about a time they played a video game with social surrogates vs. a video game without social surrogates. I hypothesized that rejected people who write about their regularly played video game with social surrogates would report higher belonging than those who write about a regularly played game without social surrogates (Hypothesis 1).
Contrasting social surrogate video games and non-social surrogate video games in Study 2 provides preliminary evidence of whether rejected people can replenish their belonging by social surrogates in single-player games. However, whether parasocial relationships, social worlds, or a combination of the two influenced belonging remains unknown. To resolve these issues, I asked participants to play a novel, custom single-player game with higher vs. lower parasocial relationships and social world contents in Study 3. I hypothesized that rejected people who play a video game with higher parasocial relationship content would report higher belonging than those who play a video game with lower parasocial relationship content (Hypothesis 2). Similarly, rejected people who play a video game with higher social world content would report higher belonging than those who play a video game with lower social world content (Hypothesis 3). As an ancillary hypothesis, I expected an additive effect of parasocial relationships and social worlds: rejected people who play a video game with higher parasocial content and higher social world contents would report the highest belonging among all groups (Hypothesis 4).
3.8 Open Science Statement
To reduce biases from post-hoc, data-dependent inferences, and researchers’ degrees of freedom, I pre-registered my hypotheses and research plans on the Open Science Framework. To maximize the transparency and reproducibility of the results, I uploaded materials, analysis scripts, and de-identified data to the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/hydxk/) and GitHub (https://github.com/nsunami/dissertation) so that other researchers can reproduce and verify the results.
3.3 Social Worlds
3.3.1 Definition
Social worlds are stories, narratives, and collectives to which people assimilate (Gabriel and Valenti 2017). When consuming a narrative (e.g., reading or watching), people immerse themselves in the story and transport themselves into the social world described in the narrative (Gabriel and Young 2011). As a result, people can assimilate themselves as a member of the collective in the story—a process called narrative collective-assimilation (Gabriel and Valenti 2017; Gerrig 1993; Green 2004; Mar and Oatley 2008). For example, participants who read a passage from Harry Potter reported that they felt like a member of the magical world of Harry Potter—people felt like being British, able to move an object, and able to make themselves disappear magically (Gabriel and Young 2011). On the other hand, participants who read a passage from Twilight identified themselves as a vampire—people felt like having sharper teeth and being able to jump higher and stay awake longer. Thus, people can immerse and assimilate into a collective in a social world, and theoretically, can feel belonging. Indeed, people with a higher need to belong are more likely to immerse themselves in stories than those with a lower need to belong (Greenwood and Long 2009). Socially rejected people who recalled their favorite TV program (providing social worlds) reported higher belonging than those who recalled a non-favorite TV program (Derrick, Gabriel, and Hugenberg 2009).
Researchers have used different terms to describe the process by which people immerse in a social world, such as transportation, flow, cognitive absorption, and presence (Agarwal and Karahanna 2000; Csikszentmihalyi 2008; Green 2004; Green and Brock 2000; Patrick et al. 2000; Pine and Gilmore 1999). In my dissertation, I use immersion as an overarching term to describe the process whereby players immerse themselves and assimilate to the collective in a video game.
3.3.2 Social Worlds in Video Games
Like books, TV shows, and movies, many modern video games provide social worlds for players to immerse themselves in, assimilate with, and feel connected to the collectives in the stories (Bormann and Greitemeyer 2015; Domsch 2013; Green and Sestir 2017). For example, players can be a soldier of System Alliance in Mass Effect, a citizen of Tamriel in Elder Scrolls, a gang in Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto, and a boy from Pallet Town (Masara Town) in Pokemon. Video games often provide audio and visual cues that facilitate the player’s immersion into the social world. Players can hear the noises of busy streets, sounds of trees swinging by wind, or chatters of other characters. Players see roads, vehicles, houses, and buildings that represent a collective in the video game. They learn about the story and feel like being a character in the world as they experience those visual and audio cues.
Can people replenish belonging by immersing themselves in a social world in a single-player video game? In one study, half of the participants were told to ignore the story whereas the other half read a backstory of the game (Bormann and Greitemeyer 2015). Then, participants played Gone Home, a single-player adventure game with a rich narrative. Participants who read the backstory experienced higher immersion and higher belonging than those who ignored the story (Bormann and Greitemeyer 2015). Based on the social surrogacy hypothesis, I hypothesized that rejected people who play a single-player video game with higher social worlds content would report higher belonging than those who play a game with lower social worlds content.