How Couch Co-Op Games Help Your Relationship
57How do co-op games like Overcooked, Moving Out, and It Takes Two help bring us closer together? And what are the different ways they make us coordinate and think about each other? My spouse, Sif, a developmental psychologist, might have some answers...
Join us in our first collaborative video as we examine the psychology of multiplayer gaming together. We introspect about all the games we've tag teamed over the years, and link our findings to what exists in the larger psych literature. Belated Happy Valentine's Day!
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References:
Boothby, E. J., Smith, L. K., Clark, M. S., & Bargh, J. A. (2017). The world looks better together: How close others enhance our visual experiences. Personal Relationships, 24(3), 694-714.
Domberg, A., Köymen, B., & Tomasello, M. (2018). Children's reasoning with peers in cooperative and competitive contexts. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 36(1), 64-77.
Keller, P. E., Novembre, G., & Hove, M. J. (2014). Rhythm in joint action: psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms for real-time interpersonal coordination. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1658).
Knez, M., & Camerer, C. (2000). Increasing cooperation in prisoner's dilemmas by establishing a precedent of efficiency in coordination games. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 82(2), 194-216.
Lee, M., Ahn, H. S., Kwon, S. K., & Kim, S. I. (2018). Cooperative and competitive contextual effects on social cognitive and empathic neural responses. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 218.
McGloin, R., Hull, K. S., & Christensen, J. L. (2016). The social implications of casual online gaming: Examining the effects of competitive setting and performance outcome on player perceptions. Computers in Human Behavior, 59, 173-181.
O’Connor, Cailin. [UCI Media]. (2018, June 11). Cailin O’Connor, UCI: Discrimination and Collaboration in Science. YouTube. • Cailin O'Connor, UCI
O’Connor, Cailin (2019). The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution. Oxford University Press.
Török, G., Pomiechowska, B., Csibra, G., & Sebanz, N. (2019). Rationality in joint action: Maximizing coefficiency in coordination. Psychological science, 30(6), 930-941.
Verheijen, G. P., Stoltz, S. E., van den Berg, Y. H., & Cillessen, A. H. (2019). The influence of competitive and cooperative video games on behavior during play and friendship quality in adolescence. Computers in Human Behavior, 91, 297-304.
Wolf, W., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. (2016). Joint attention, shared goals, and social bonding. British Journal of Psychology, 107(2), 322-337.
Wolf, W., & Tomasello, M. (2023). A shared intentionality account of uniquely human social bonding. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 0(0).
Wolf, W., & Tomasello, M. (2020). Watching a video together creates social closeness between children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 189.
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BEHIND THE SCENES:
-- Initially, we also had whole sections scripted out on joint attention & backseat gaming, and joint attention & competitive — but decided it would make more sense to keep this focused strictly on co-op.