Exploring socioemotional skills and their effects on children’s social interactions in multiplayer video games

Socioemotional skills are increasingly being recognized as important for the development of children’s social relationships and positive life outcomes. The relation between socioemotional skills and social life outcomes has mainly been studied through self-report measures of socioemotional skills and the quality of social interactions. However, the relation between socioemotional skills and real-time social interactions within digital contexts, where many social experiences now take place, has received considerably less attention. In the present study we explore how children’s socioemotional skills are related to real-time verbal communication within an online multiplayer video game context. To this end we recorded and annotated multiplayer gameplay sessions of the applied gaming intervention Ruby’s Mission. The results revealed a small positive relation between a child’s socioemotional skills and their proportion of overlapping social interactions. Other factors also correlated to children’s social interaction. Personality scores showed a small negative association with children’s proportion of responses. Social familiarity revealed small positive effects for proportions of speech and proportion of responses. Furthermore, group size showed medium effects for the number of overlapping social interactions. Finally, asynchronous player roles showed a large effect, where children who were assigned the driver role had significantly larger proportions of responses. These insights may be insightful for understanding how socioemotional skills relate to real-time social interactions in online multiplayer video game environments.