Using substances while playing: Players’ motivations, perceptions, and experiences with psychoactive drugs during recreational gaming

Abstract

Research on psychoactive substance use during video game play has traditionally adopted a medical lens, focusing on the addictive potential of licit and illicit drugs and their pathological impacts on players. This framing highlights negative outcomes of the co-occurrence between excessive gaming and substance use, leaving the motivations, meanings, and perceptions that players themselves attach to substance use during recreational play under-examined. In this article, we explore a first-person perspective on substance-involved play through a qualitative study with 24 participants (11 Italians and 13 Americans) who reported using psychoactive substances during gameplay. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, which led us to develop three themes: first, adult players describe a “lost immersion”, an effortless absorption they remember from youth and no longer attain spontaneously, which leads them to deploy a repertoire of strategies, including substance use, to re-enter it; second, participants engage in “situated modulation”: they use substances as precise, context-sensitive levers for shaping experience, emotion, and cognition, aligning substance choice with game genre, in-game task, and the stakes of the session; third, participants perform legitimacy work around fairness, treating the same substance as benign in casual play and suspect in competitive play, and practicing situational rather than categorical self-restraint. Substance use also produced unintended effects that sometimes diminished, rather than enhanced, players’ agency over play and over their internal states. By foregrounding first-person accounts, this article contributes to HCI scholarship on digital games, altered states, and player agency in ways that complement the medical lens.