Don’t tell your teens, but gaming can be good for mental well-being (and older brains can benefit too!)

Annoyed parents may view video games as a mind-destroying waste of time as they try to take their children away from them. But can video games – whisper it – actually be good for us?

A new study from Japan suggests they can significantly improve the mental well-being of children and adults.

“These games can serve as a distraction or emotional release, providing stress relief, mood improvement and a sense of accomplishment,” Dr. Hiroyuki Egami, an assistant professor at Nihon University and lead author of the study, told Good Health.

The behavioral scientist, who analyzed the effects of gaming on people aged ten to 69, added that many parents are ‘overly concerned about their children’s video game habits, fearing potential negative consequences’… but ‘our study now provides robust scientific evidence’ to allay some of those concerns’.

While many video game studies take place in a laboratory, Dr. Egami’s research had the advantage of being a real-world experiment. It took place between December 2020 and March 2022, when there was a console shortage in Japan due to the Covid-19 pandemic and retailers decided to use lotteries to allocate available PlayStation 5s and Nintendo Switches.

The team of Dr. Egami tracked the 8,192 people who took part in the vote and sent them five rounds of surveys to check their gaming habits and psychological problems, a barometer of mental well-being.

They found that owning a console, along with playing more video games, significantly improved mental well-being.

Dr. Egami added: ‘Our natural experimental design allows us to confidently say that gaming actually leads to better well-being, rather than just being associated with it.’

This isn’t the first study to show a mental health benefit from video games.

For example, 2020 research from the University of Oxford involving 3,270 adults found that time spent playing games was a small but significant positive factor in people’s well-being.

This follows previous research that showed that while playing video games, people’s autonomic nervous systems – which, among other things, regulate blood pressure – relaxed and their mood stabilized.

Pete Etchells, Professor of Psychology at Bath Spa University, says: ‘Playing is one of the most fundamentally important things that people, young or old, can do – and video games are no different in that respect to other conventional forms of play. ‘

He says many of the benefits can be explained by “self-determination theory,” the idea that people have three basic psychological needs.

These are: the need for autonomy – so feeling like we have control over things; the need for connection – basically the need to connect with people (online gaming allows people to play and talk with others); and the need for competence, which makes us feel like we have a certain level of mastery over something, he explains.

“Video games are perfect for playing these three,” he says.

In addition to benefits for mental well-being, some video games have also been found to have effects on our cognitive skills.

Pete Etchells, professor of psychology at Bath Spa University, says: ‘Play is one of the most fundamentally important things that people, young or old, can do.’

Research from the University of Geneva has shown that ‘action’ games can specifically stimulate our perception and spatial cognition, attention and processing speed.

And while many assume that staring at a screen is harmful to our eyesight, studies have shown that gamers actually have better eyesight than non-gamers, especially due to their ability to see small details in the context of clutter (e.g. reading small print on a medicine booklet). bottle) and in being able to distinguish between different gray levels, which can help, for example, when driving in fog.

And, crucially, it’s not just that people with better observational skills naturally choose to play these games in the first place.

“Well-controlled studies have repeatedly shown a causal link between playing (action) video games and improved skills,” the Geneva researchers wrote in 2011 in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Meanwhile, a 2023 study from York University examined gamers’ working memory capacity, that is, holding short-term information in your head while using that same information to complete a task.

It found that people aged 60 to 81 who mainly played ‘puzzle games’ had better working memory than non-players, similar to that of younger adults. And among people between the ages of 18 and 30, those who played mainly “strategy” games – the kind that involve planning and problem solving – had better working memory.

And when it comes to our attention spans, “there is research showing that playing video games increases people’s skill at multitasking,” says Gloria Mark, a professor of computer science at the University of California and author of Attention Span and Multitasking In The Digital. Age.

“But the downside is that a person has to spend a lot of time playing video games to acquire that skill. And it’s not clear how long that skill lasts or whether it’s transferable outside of video games.”

So is there a point at which the benefits for most people come to a standstill?

The Japanese study showed that these disappeared after three hours, but playing longer was not harmful, just less effective.

“To put it simply, our research found that playing the 181st minute was still beneficial, albeit slightly less than the 180th minute,” Dr. Egami said.

‘We found no evidence that playing for more than three hours has a negative effect on mental well-being.’

Another study conducted by the University of Oxford in 2022, which followed 12,000 secondary school students, suggested that even ‘heavy’ gamers – those who game more than 3.5 hours a day – had no negative effects on their mental wellbeing experienced.

One in 12 participants did, but researchers said these people were “also more likely to report previous experiences of abuse, anxiety or aggressive behavior, suggesting that people with mental health problems may turn to gaming as a coping mechanism.”

A World Health Organization report from September this year suggested that 12 percent of adolescents were ‘at risk of problematic gaming’ – defined as reporting five or more symptoms of ‘internet gaming disorder’.

Symptoms include giving up previously enjoyed activities due to gaming, the need to spend more time gaming to satisfy urges, and using gaming to relieve negative moods such as guilt or hopelessness. To meet the diagnosis, gaming must cause “significant impairment or difficulty” in various aspects of a person’s life.

Professor Mark Griffiths, director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, said there are ‘dozens of factors that explain how and why individuals can become addicted to video games’.

‘It comes down to an interaction between the individual characteristics of the person, the situational characteristics in the person’s environment (e.g. advertising, peer pressure, accessibility) and structural characteristics of the video game (i.e. how it is designed so that you can use it all the time). can play again). ‘

Professor Etchells points to games that use ‘loot boxes’ as a particular focus, potentially as a gateway to gambling. These mean that the player pays, for example, £1 to get an outfit for their character, but he or she can get a rare, desirable outfit or just a regular, less desirable outfit.

“So there’s a random chance to get something that’s desirable,” he said. “That looks and sounds like gambling.”

While much more research needs to be done, he said, preliminary studies have found a “small but consistent correlation between how much you spend on loot boxes and how much problematic gambling behavior you engage in.”

While many critics argue that time limits should be placed on gaming, Professor Etchells thinks this is the ‘wrong way to think about the way we interact with games’.

He uses an example of how we consume food to explain this. For example, with a high-energy, high-protein bar, it’s good to eat one after a run, but if we just scoff them in bed at night, they might not be so good.

“It’s not that after one, two or however many specific hours the negatives suddenly start to outweigh the benefits,” he said. “Instead, it’s better to think about how playing video games fits into our broader ‘diet’ of activities.”

Dr. Egami adds: ‘As some experts in this field suggest, it’s useful to ask yourself, “What would I do if I wasn’t playing video games?”

‘If the alternative seems more important or makes you feel better than gaming, that could be a red flag and I would recommend reducing the time spent on video games.’