Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
Belonging to a D&D group tracks with well-being in 305 New Zealand players
Courtney Matthews surveyed 305 existing Dungeons & Dragons players and found their gaming group rated among the most positive and supportive in their own social networks. The study she wants next starts with people who have never played.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- A stronger sense of belonging to the D&D group was positively associated with the players' well-being and self-esteem scores.
- Seventeen percent of the participants identified as transgender or gender-diverse, although the study did not recruit specifically from those communities.
- Matthews's stated next step is to track people who have never played a tabletop role-playing game, measuring well-being and belonging before and after they start.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint The evidence supports a statement about people who chose the hobby and stops there, so a funder cannot cite it for an effect on anyone who has never played.
- decision Commissioners weighing a games-based loneliness scheme have to choose between acting on a correlation from current players or paying for the before-and-after study Matthews describes.
- capability Scoring a new group against a participant's existing family and friend groups, rather than against a fixed scale, gives programme designers a measurement anyone running a library or school pilot could copy.
- precedent A survey that reached transgender and gender-diverse players without trying points to recruitment channels traditional clubs may not use, and the proposed follow-up study can test whether they hold.
Matthews recruited 305 people who already play D&D through New Zealand's online community for the game [3], and asked them, once, about well-being, loneliness, self-esteem and how strongly they felt they belonged to their group [4]. Everyone in that sample had already decided the hobby was worth an evening. Anyone who tried D&D and disliked it is not in the denominator, and there is no comparison group of non-players.
So the association Matthews reports between belonging and higher well-being and self-esteem [7] is a correlation measured at one moment. It cannot separate a group that lifts people from people steady enough to get more out of a group. "Despite only spending a short amount of time with their D&D groups, that time had a lasting impact on people's lives outside of the game," Matthews said [8]. The survey took one reading. "Lasting" here rests on how players described their groups.
The most useful part of the design is the comparison inside each person's own network. Participants mapped their other groups and rated all of them on positivity, support and compatibility with the rest of their social lives [5], and the D&D group came out among the most positive and supportive even though people on average spent less time with it than with friends or family [6]. That partly answers the obvious objection, which is that contented people rate everything highly: the same respondent also scored the other groups, and those scored lower.
Seventeen percent of participants identified as transgender or gender-diverse, and the study did not recruit specifically from those communities [9]. On 305 respondents that is about 52 people [10]. Matthews said the result matters for reach: "If just organically, we have been able to recruit from these communities and they have found D&D groups engaging, and they take part in them, then I think this has huge potential for hard-to-reach communities" [12]. The sample was self-selected from one online community, so the percentage describes who answered the survey.
For anyone costing a loneliness programme, the attraction is that nothing has to be built. "Here is this cost-effective, widely available and accessible, established group activity that's already out there," Matthews said [11]. What she has published measures people who found the game on their own. Whether a table assigned to someone in a library or a classroom earns the same ratings is the question her proposed next study takes on: follow people who have never played a tabletop role-playing game, and measure well-being and belonging before and after they start [13]. She has said she wants to run that work in community settings including local libraries and secondary schools [14].
What to watch
- Whether the follow-up study of never-players gets funded, and whether belonging and well-being scores move after people start playing.
- Whether library or school pilots recruit outside the existing player base, since everyone in this sample was already playing.
- Whether loneliness or social-prescribing programmes cite this paper before any longitudinal work exists.