Playing alone, feeling connected: do single-player video games with social surrogates replenish belonging after social rejection
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 hypothesis, and the video games literature.
Parasocial contact, Parasocial relationships, Relatedness need, Social rejection, Social surrogacy, Video game
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations