A New Theoretical Framework for the Psychology of Games
What makes an experience a game?
The psychology of games has generated an extensive volume of research, but has historically approached the phenomenon through fragmented lenses: play and gaming, motivation, emotions, learning, decision-making, and social behavior have often been studied using conflicting definitions and isolated paradigms.
In this paper, I propose a unifying framework for the psychology of games, developed to conceptualize gaming as a complex, systemic psychological phenomenon, irrespective of the particular medium, genre, or context in which it takes place.
The Four Core Psychological Dimensions
The model identifies four interconnected psychological dimensions that capture the playful experience in its systemic totality:
1. Regulated Symbolic Framing
The construction and maintenance of a regulated symbolic frame that distinguishes what occurs in the game from ordinary reality.
Establishes the psychological magic circle within which meanings, actions, and consequences attain specific validity, enabling players to act freely within shared constraints.
2. Altered Role Perspective
The assumption of a role perspective that alters how individuals interpret themselves, others, and the ongoing situation.
Enables identity experimentation, perspective-taking, empathy, and the recoding of social dynamics, offering a protected psychological distance to explore complex scenarios.
3. Goal-Organized Performance
The organization of action around lusory goals, rules, and conditions for success.
Structures intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, channels attentional effort, and defines feedback loops through the voluntary adoption of unnecessary obstacles to achieve the lusory goal.
4. Metacognitive Executive Monitoring
The conscious monitoring and regulation of one's own cognitive and behavioral processes throughout the experience.
Drives strategic reflection, real-time self-evaluation, error monitoring, and flexible behavioral adaptation under uncertainty, ensuring the player remains metacognitively aware while immersed.
These dimensions do not constitute independent components to be simply summed up to produce a “game level.” Instead, they interact dynamically and carry different relative weights depending on the game, the context, and the individual player.
The objective is to move beyond a conception of games based exclusively on observable manifestations and provide a solid theoretical foundation to study the psychology of games as such.
Why this framework?
What happens psychologically when we play?
🧩 The Need for a Unified Psychological Vision
The scientific investigation of games within psychology has historically rested on a deeply fragmented terrain: developmental psychology focused on play, media psychology on gaming, educational psychology on game-based learning, and organizational psychology on gamification.
In the absence of a unifying theoretical framework, empirical findings risk remaining isolated, non-generalizable case studies. Unifying the theoretical perspective equips research with a common vocabulary capable of reinterpreting existing empirical evidence and designing interventions firmly anchored in the core psychological processes that games activate.
🗺️ A Shared Research Agenda
This paradigm opens an ambitious research agenda to investigate seemingly distant phenomena within a comparable, systematic framework:
- •🎲 From analog tabletop board games to digital video games;
- •🎓 From educational games and edularp to relational organizational simulations;
- •🏆 From esports and competitive play to applied behavioral gamification.
All integrated within a single, rigorous, replicable theoretical model.
The Scientific Paper
The article is published in the prestigious journal Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale (APA / CPA).
Redefining the Psychology of Games: A Unifying Framework Beyond Play and Gaming
Author: Alan D. A. Mattiassi, Ph.D.
Journal: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale
Editorial Status: Published (Advance online publication)
Official DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/cep0000413
For academic citations and bibliographic references, please use the official version with the APA DOI.
About the Author
Alan D. A. Mattiassi, Ph.D. is a game psychologist, independent researcher, and consultant. His research, teaching, and science communication focus on the psychology of games, game-based learning, gamification, game design, motivation, and cognitive processes in playful environments.
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