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A recent study published in Evolution and Human Behavior provides evidence that the social benefits of playing games depend heavily on the context, such as the skill levels of the players and the risks present in their environment. Scientists found that while playing games might not immediately forge new friendships in a low-stakes laboratory setting, computer simulations suggest gaming could have evolved as a way for early humans to identify highly skilled allies for dangerous tasks.
Playing and gaming are universal human activities, but they differ in important ways. Playing involves spontaneous activities without specific goals, which is common in human infants and many animals. Gaming consists of trying to overcome rule-bounded challenges, often involving competition in scenarios that resemble warfare or hunting.
Because gaming emerges later in development and appears unique to humans, scientists wanted to understand the selective pressures that drove its origins. The researchers proposed the competition-for-allies hypothesis, suggesting that gaming evolved as a strategic tool for individuals to compete, form, and maintain new relationships.
“I have long been interested in gaming and noticed early on that it is more prevalent among boys and men than among girls and women,” explained lead researcher Yago Lukševičius de Moraes, an assistant professor at Fundação Santo André and author of the Psychoandrology Substack. “In 2014, I began studying male psychology, and in 2019, during my Master’s, I examined whether gaming contributed to male mating or parenting success. The evidence suggested that gaming is more relevant for friendship formation than for mating, which motivated me to pursue this topic in my PhD.”
To test this hypothesis, the scientists conducted two complementary studies. The first study included 40 individuals aged 18 to 40, who were divided into same-sex pairs of strangers. The scientists used same-sex pairs because the competition-for-allies hypothesis suggests that males might show stronger alliance-oriented gaming dynamics due to ancestral differences in physical competition.
Before interacting, participants completed questionnaires designed to measure two specific concepts. The first concept was the perceived value of their peer, which involved rating their partner on traits like intelligence, charisma, and cooperativeness. In an evolutionary context, a peer’s value refers to attributes that would historically increase a person’s chances of survival or success.
The second concept was relational proximity, which measures the level of closeness and intimacy developing between the strangers. After the initial survey, half of the pairs played a match of Nine Men’s Morris, an ancient abstract board game where players take turns placing and moving pieces to capture their opponent’s pieces. The other half of the pairs engaged in a non-game role-playing activity, acting as two friends with opposite desires who had to reach a consensus.
After completing their assigned activity, the participants filled out the questionnaires again. The pairs returned to the laboratory 14 and 28 days later to complete the activities in a reversed order and take the surveys once more. The scientists expected that playing the board game would accelerate the bonding process, helping participants stabilize their views of each other’s value and grow closer more quickly than the role-playing activity.
However, the data did not support this expectation. While participants did update their impressions of one another over the repeated sessions, these shifts were driven by simply spending time together rather than the specific activity they performed. Gaming did not produce stronger or faster changes in perceived peer value or relational closeness compared to role-playing.
Because laboratory settings often lack the high stakes of ancestral human environments, the researchers conducted a second study using an agent-based evolutionary model. This is a computer simulation that allows scientists to program artificial individuals, or agents, with specific behavioral rules and observe how their interactions unfold over many generations. Each simulated population consisted of 100 agents, featuring 99 native non-gamers and one mutant gamer who carried the specific trait for gaming.
Every generation, the agents sought a single cooperative partner to face a task representing ancestral activities like hunting or warfare. The likelihood of surviving this task depended on the combined skills of the two partners and the environmental hazard level, which represents the deadly risks of failing the task. The simulations revealed that gaming only spread through the population under very specific conditions.
Gaming became a successful evolutionary trait only when the initial gamer possessed above-average skills. If the first gamer had poor skills, the gaming trait consistently disappeared from the population. “One unexpected finding was that simulations showed gaming could evolve even without individuals remembering past partners,” de Moraes told PsyPost. “This suggests that the social benefits of gaming do not necessarily depend on long-term relationships, but can emerge from short-term interactions.”
The simulations also showed that the environmental risks needed to coevolve with the population’s skill level. This means that as the agents became more skilled, the survival tasks had to become more dangerous for gaming to remain advantageous. When the environment remained static and risks did not increase, the gaming behavior tended to drift and fade away.
“Although people report feeling more connected after gaming, this effect is not automatic,” de Moraes noted. “It depends on factors such as the type of game, players’ skill levels, and the interaction context. The simulations support the idea that gaming may have evolved to promote social bonding, but only under specific conditions, such as when skilled individuals are relatively rare and environments involve meaningful levels of risk.”
The researchers noted a few limitations to their work. “This is an initial study, and both the experimental and simulation components require replication and extension,” de Moraes explained. “The experimental design would benefit from larger samples, longer interaction periods, different types of games, and more standardized measures. The simulation results should also be tested across a broader range of parameters and alternative assumptions.”
Looking ahead, the researchers aim to refine their computer models. “I plan to expand the theoretical model to incorporate mechanisms such as social learning and genetic relatedness,” de Moraes said. “Empirically, I plan to address current limitations and test additional hypotheses, including whether gaming functions as a non-violent mechanism for resolving social conflicts.”
“Gaming is a complex and widespread human behavior, yet research on it remains fragmented across disciplines,” de Moraes added. “Progress in this area will require more comparative studies across different types of games, including sports, video games, board games, card games, tabletop RPGs, and games of chance.”
The study, “Evolutionary and social functions of gaming: Integrating experimental evidence and mathematical modeling,” was authored by Yago Lukševičius de Moraes, Marco Antonio Correa Varella, Leonardo Cezar Silva Costa, Nayara Teles, and Jaroslava Varella Valentova.