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🔬 SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATION • CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
A New Theoretical Framework for the Psychology of Games
What makes an experience a game?
The psychology of games has generated an immense amount of research, yet it has frequently approached the phenomenon through fragmented perspectives: play and gaming, motivation, emotions, learning, decision-making, and social behavior have often been studied using disparate models and definitions.
In this paper, I propose a unifying framework for the psychology of games, developed to describe gaming as a complex and systemic psychological phenomenon, irrespective of the specific medium, genre, or context in which it takes place.
THEORETICAL ARCHITECTURE
The Four Core Psychological Dimensions
The model identifies four interconnected psychological dimensions that capture the playful experience in its entirety:
🌐 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.
🎭 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.
🎯 3. Goal-Organized Performance
The organization of action around goals, rules, and conditions for success.
Structures intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, channels attentional effort, and defines feedback loops.
🧠 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.
⚡ Dynamic Interaction and Systemic Nature
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.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
Why this framework?
The framework emerges from a deceptively simple question:
What happens psychologically when we play?
🧩 The Need for a Unified Psychological Vision
The study 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 theory of games, research findings risk remaining isolated, non-generalizable case studies. Establishing a unified psychological framework overcomes this fragmentation, providing scholars and practitioners with a robust foundation to systematically interpret, compare, and design gameful experiences.
🗺️ A Unified Research Agenda
This perspective opens an ambitious agenda for systematically investigating diverse phenomena across domains:
• 🎲 From analog tabletop games to digital video games;
• 🎓 From educational and serious games to narrative simulations;
• 🏆 From competitive esports to applied gamification.
All within a single, coherent theoretical architecture.
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT • OPEN ACCESS PRE-PRINT
The Scientific Paper
The manuscript has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale (APA / CPA).
This page provides the accepted pre-print version (accepted manuscript) of the article.
Redefining the Psychology of Games: A Unifying Framework Beyond Play and Gaming
Author: Alan D. A. Mattiassi, Ph.D.
Official DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/cep0000413
The document contains the scientific text in its version accepted by the editor and reviewers, but does not yet correspond to the definitive editorial version: typesetting, layout, page numbering, and other elements may differ from the journal’s published version.
📖 How to cite this work
Mattiassi, A. D. A. (in press). Redefining the Psychology of Games: A Unifying Framework Beyond Play and Gaming. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale. https://doi.org/10.1037/cep0000413
For citations and bibliographic references, it is recommended to use the official published version when available.
Manuscript Version Note: This is a copy of the accepted manuscript made available for scientific dissemination purposes. For the definitive version, the DOI and official bibliographic details refer to the journal publication.
About the Author
Alan D. A. Mattiassi, Ph.D. is a game psychologist, researcher, and consultant. His research and dissemination focus on game psychology, game-based learning, gamification, game design, motivation, and cognitive processes in playful experiences.
Interested in applying this framework to your organization or game project?
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