The Additive Effects of Interactivity, Immersion, and Eudaimonia for Stress Reduction and Mood Management: A Randomized Controlled Study on Games and Virtual Reality

This study examines whether eudaimonic virtual reality (VR) games are more effective than hedonic VR games, hedonic desktop games, or noninteractive, nonimmersive videos for daily stress reduction and mood management. To test this, we recruited university participants (N = 202), and randomly assigned them to one of these four conditions. Results showed that eudaimonic VR gaming, hedonic VR gaming, and hedonic desktop gaming conditions were effective for inducing positive moods, and providing recovery experiences compared to a (desktop) video-watching control condition. However, eudaimonic VR game condition performed best in terms of reducing stress and alleviating negative affect. Therefore, in addition to providing positive experiences, eudaimonic VR games also show promise especially when players seek to decrease stress and regulate negative emotions. The overall pattern for the postplay stress scores was in decreasing order from noninteractive to interactive, from nonimmersive to immersive, and from nonmeaningful to meaningful conditions for stress and negative mood and in increasing order for recovery and positive mood. This provided support to the idea that the qualities of interactivity, immersion, and meaningfulness have additive effects, and might incrementally accumulate and contribute to stress reduction. Implications and suggestions are presented, and future work is discussed.