Playing Alone, Feeling Connected: Do Single-Player Video Games with Social Surrogates Replenish Belonging After Social Rejection?
1 Overview
People have a fundamental need to belong—to be accepted, loved, and cared for (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Maslow 1943). Being forced to stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people experienced threats to belonging: an experience of feeling rejected, excluded, and unloved. At the same time, more and more people bought and played video games. Worldwide spending and Google search interests on video games hit an all-time high for March, April, and May in 2020, coinciding with the stay-at-home orders in the US (Beresford 2020; Shanley 2020; SuperData Staff 2020). Media reports have suggested that people play video games to cope with social isolation during the COVID-19 crisis (Baraniuk 2020; Gregory 2020; Langille, Daviau, and Hawreliak 2020; Lazarus 2020). Existing research supports that playing video games with others online (e.g., in a multiplayer mode) can increase belonging (Kowert and Oldmeadow 2015; Vella, Johnson, and Hides 2015). However, people can also play alone in a single-player mode (solo play), and whether solo plays can increase belonging remains unknown. Theoretically, solo plays can help people feel socially connected through social surrogates: parasocial relationships with non-player characters and social worlds where players can immerse themselves and feel like a member of a collective in the game. This raises an empirical question: Can a player replenish their belonging even when they play alone themselves? I designed my dissertation to answer this question.
I structure my dissertation as follows. In Chapter 2, I present my published work on the bi-dimensional rejection taxonomy (Sunami, Nadzan, and Jaremka 2020) to highlight the need for more evidence on the disengaged-prosocial responses: indirect, and hands-off attempts that increase belonging. In Chapter 3, I suggest that playing a video game in a single-player mode is an unexamined disengaged-prosocial response to social rejection. I draw from the social surrogacy hypothesis (Gabriel and Valenti 2017) and the video games literature to suggest that solo plays can fulfill belonging. In Chapter 4 (Study 1), I first validated the Heart Self-Assessment Manikin (Heart Manikin), a single-item pictorial measure of belonging that I used as a key outcome for Studies 2 and 3. In Chapter 4 (Study 2), I examined whether recalling a video game with vs. without social surrogates, would increase belonging following social rejection. In Chapter 5 (Study 3), I let participants play a custom-made, single-player role-playing game to examine whether parasocial relationships or social worlds replenish belonging after social rejection. In Chapter 6, I discuss the findings of my dissertation and future avenues for research.