Can Open-Worlds Stop Chatter?

A study out of Imperial College London looked at what open-world games actually do for the people playing them, and the finding centred on relief rather than learning.‍ ‍

As you might imagine, I read a fair bit of research on game-based learning. Motivation, retention, engagement scores, the usual territory. Most of it is useful and most of it is, honestly, a bit samey.

Then I came across a study out of Imperial College London and the University of Graz that asked a completely different question. Not "do open-world games help people learn things." Instead: what does the open-world structure itself, the ability to wander, explore, and set your own pace, actually do for someone's state of mind while they're in it.

The researchers studied postgraduate students, not children, and they weren't measuring test scores. They were looking at something they call cognitive escapism, alongside relaxation and general wellbeing. The finding, in plain terms, was that the specific quality of an open world, the freedom to explore without a fixed task dictating every move, was itself doing psychological work. Not because of any curriculum layered on top. Because of the structure.

One line buried in the participants' own descriptions stood out to me more than any of the statistics. They experienced the games as a kind of "temporary refuge from academic pressure, anxiety, and repetitive worries."

That phrase, repetitive worries, is a fairly ordinary description of what psychologists call rumination, the looping, self-critical replay of a problem that refuses to resolve itself. I'd been turning rumination over anyway, having recently listened to Dr Ethan Kross, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan and director of its Emotion and Self Control Laboratory, discuss his research on The Mel Robbins Podcast. Kross calls this looping inner voice “chatter”, and a chapter of his book on the subject looks specifically at why time in nature seems to quieten it.

The mechanism he describes has a proper evidence base behind it, not just a nice metaphor. A Stanford study found that people who took a 90-minute walk through a natural setting reported less rumination afterwards, and showed reduced activity in a brain region linked to negative self-focused thought, compared with people who walked the same length of time through a city. Nature seems to absorb the senses gently, sound, light, texture, without demanding any effort, and that gentle absorption appears to leave less room for rumination to run.

It states:

“Rumination is a prolonged and often maladaptive attentional focus on the causes and consequences of emotions—most often, negative, self-relational emotions. This pattern of thought has been shown to predict the onset of depressive episodes, as well as other mental disorders.“

Whether the same mechanism is at work in an open-world game is a genuine unknown, and as far as I can tell nobody has tested it directly. But the parallel is hard to ignore. An open world absorbs attention in a similarly undemanding way, no walls forcing a single path, no test waiting at the end, just somewhere to look and somewhere to go next. If gentle, effortless sensory absorption is part of what nature does to a ruminating mind, it seems a fair question whether wandering an open digital world taps into something structurally similar, rather than something merely resembling it on the surface.

I want to be upfront about the study's limits. It looked at postgraduate students, not children. It measured wellbeing, not academic outcomes. And it's one study, not a meta-analysis. All of that matters if you're tempted, as I was, to reach for it as proof of something bigger, though it doesn't make the finding any less interesting.

Here's what I can't stop thinking about, though.

Most of the game-based learning research I read treats "the game part" as a delivery mechanism for the learning part. Points, feedback loops, levels, a reward structure bolted onto content that could, in theory, exist without it. A recent meta-analysis in the Natural Sciences found broadly positive effects of game-based learning on motivation and self-efficacy, which is encouraging, but it's still measuring the game as a wrapper around instruction.

“the implementation of game-based learning has a positive impact on motivation, self-efficacy, and academic performance in the teaching and learning of Natural Sciences content.”

The Imperial College study is asking something structurally different. It treats the openness of the world itself as the thing doing the work.

So here's my honest, unresolved question, and I don't have the research to answer it yet, because as far as I can tell nobody's done this study with children specifically.

If unstructured exploration in an open world produces measurable relief and wellbeing benefit in adults, what, if anything, happens when the explorer is eight years old rather than twenty-eight? Does that same freedom to wander do something similar for a child, something distinct from the learning value everyone usually measures? Or does a child's relationship with structure and freedom work completely differently, in ways that make the postgraduate finding irrelevant to them?

I genuinely don't know. My guess is that the honest answer sits somewhere between yes and no, and that anyone who tells you confidently which it is hasn't read the study closely enough. But it's exactly the kind of question that sits underneath a lot of what we're building with oodlü, an open world children can genuinely wander in, not just a curriculum with a game skin over it, and it's made me want to see this kind of research extended downward in age rather than just taking it on faith that it would transfer.

If anyone reading this has come across research on open-world exploration and wellbeing specifically in children, rather than adults, I would genuinely like to know about it. This feels like a gap worth someone filling.

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