Agenda

Counting gaming hours is like counting calories—easy to track, but it won’t tell you whether your diet is healthy. What really matters is nutrition: what, when, and why you play.

This session introduces the University of Oxford’s first-of-its-kind dataset tracking 3 million hours of multi-platform gaming, paired with 50k+ wellbeing surveys. Drawing on this unprecedented evidence, Nick shares three “core ingredients” of a healthy gaming diet:

Timing: Why late-night sessions affect only certain people’s sleep

Coping: How players use games after difficult days—and when this becomes risky

Variation: The benefits of switching games more often

The talk also explores how “nutritional needs” change across the lifespan—from social teens to caregiving adults to older players rediscovering retro classics.

Finally, Nick explains how researchers and the private sector can become collaborative “gaming dietitians” instead of offering generic advice, and how others can use the Oxford dataset.

Takeaway

Attendees will gain:

Clear, age-aware insights into what makes gaming healthy or unhealthy
Practical frameworks to reflect on your own “gaming diet”
A roadmap for using Oxford’s open data—and for building better industry–academic collaborations
A vision for future “nutritional labels” that make healthy play easier for everyone

Intended Audience

This talk will appeal to anyone interested in player mental health, open games data, or industry-academia collaboration, including but not limited to designers, user researchers, data scientists, lawyers, and executives.

No prerequisite knowledge is needed, though a basic familiarity with scientific research is helpful.