Moritz Edlinger

Wholesome Gaming: Identifying positive human-media interactions using community trace data (working title)

The overall objective of my PhD project is to develop and evaluate a new method to identify video games that have the potential to positively affect mental health using open community trace data. In particular, we will utilize openly available (gaming) community data that result from player-game interactions, such as user comments and reviews on digital ecosystems (e.g., Steam, Twitter, Reddit). These traces will be analyzed in terms of content (e.g., text mining and topic modeling) and interconnection (e.g., network analysis). The content analysis serves a (pre-)selection of games that have a higher probability of yielding positive mental health effects. The network analysis serves to investigate closeness and relatedness between games on a systemic level. These selected games and thereby this new method will be evaluated in short intervention lab studies with multi-modal methods.