Playing alone, feeling connected: do single-player video games with social surrogates replenish belonging after social rejection
type: CreativeWork
description: People have a fundamental need to belong—to be accepted, loved, and cared for. The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened people’s sense of belonging; people had to isolate themselves from others due to the stay-at-home orders. At the same time in early 2020, people started to spend more time playing video games; sales and consumption of video games skyrocketed, breaking previous records worldwide. Existing theoretical perspectives suggest one possible reason for this popularity: video games, including single-player video games, may help people feel socially connected. For example, according to the bi-dimensional rejection taxonomy, solo gameplay is a disengaged prosocial response, an attempt to replenish belonging in a hands-off, indirect manner. Also, according to the social surrogacy hypothesis, solo gameplay can provide social surrogates, symbolic bonds that can replenish belonging. Players can form parasocial relationships (one-way psychological bonds) with a non-player character in the game; players can also immerse themselves in the social worlds and feel like a member of a collective presented in the video game. Although existing theories and qualitative evidence suggest that solo gameplay can benefit belonging, quantitative evidence is lacking to support this prediction. In this dissertation, I examined if solo gameplay could replenish belonging after social rejection. In Study 1, I validated the Heart Manikin—a single-item measure of state belonging, which I used in the subsequent studies. In Study 2, rejected participants recalled their time playing a video game with vs. without social surrogates. In Study 3, rejected participants played a custom video game that manipulates parasocial relationships and social worlds. Across studies, I found that rejected participants reported similar levels of belonging after being exposed to social surrogates in video games. The results move forward the discourse on the bi-dimensional rejection taxonomy, the social surrogacy h…
abstract: People have a fundamental need to belong—to be accepted, loved, and cared for. The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened people’s sense of belonging; people had to isolate themselves from others due to the stay-at-home orders. At the same time in early 2020, people started to spend more time playing video games; sales and consumption of video games skyrocketed, breaking previous records worldwide. Existing theoretical perspectives suggest one possible reason for this popularity: video games, including single-player video games, may help people feel socially connected. For example, according to the bi-dimensional rejection taxonomy, solo gameplay is a disengaged prosocial response, an attempt to replenish belonging in a hands-off, indirect manner. Also, according to the social surrogacy hypothesis, solo gameplay can provide social surrogates, symbolic bonds that can replenish belonging. Players can form parasocial relationships (one-way psychological bonds) with a non-player character in the game; players can also immerse themselves in the social worlds and feel like a member of a collective presented in the video game. Although existing theories and qualitative evidence suggest that solo gameplay can benefit belonging, quantitative evidence is lacking to support this prediction. In this dissertation, I examined if solo gameplay could replenish belonging after social rejection. In Study 1, I validated the Heart Manikin—a single-item measure of state belonging, which I used in the subsequent studies. In Study 2, rejected participants recalled their time playing a video game with vs. without social surrogates. In Study 3, rejected participants played a custom video game that manipulates parasocial relationships and social worlds. Across studies, I found that rejected participants reported similar levels of belonging after being exposed to social surrogates in video games. The results move forward the discourse on the bi-dimensional rejection taxonomy, the social surrogacy h…
author: Sunami, Naoyuki
keywords: Parasocial contact, Parasocial relationships, Relatedness need, Social rejection, Social surrogacy, Video game
date published: 2021
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:11:22Z
provider: University of Delaware
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Delaware

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.58088/87j0-ap63