The video game industry is booming, and that probably won’t change anytime soon. Gaming is a great form of entertainment. Games are fun, challenging, and take players to worlds that are completely different from their everyday lives. But games can also be addictive and violent.
That’s why the debate over the benefits of video games continues: some argue that games affect the physical and mental health of players, especially those who spend long periods of time on game consoles, computers and smartphones, while others claim that video games have beneficial aspects for overall health and even cognitive performance.
Not surprisingly, researchers have tried to study the impact of video games on mental health. Some studies have concluded that gaming may be bad for your health, while others have found the opposite. However, Cypost They point out that some of the previous studies have a flaw: they rely on self-reported data on playtime.
The latest study from the Oxford Internet Institute took a different approach: They observed a group of participants over a 12-week period, tracking their gaming habits in real time. Led by postdoctoral researcher and study author Nick Barrow, the scientists also interviewed participants at various points throughout the study to determine their mental health.
Ultimately, it turns out that video games have no positive or negative impact on mental health, regardless of how long players spend playing their favorite titles.
The researchers recruited 414 adults from the UK and the US, with an average age of 32. They were all Xbox owners who agreed to befriend the researchers’ accounts. The scientists observed the players’ online status to precisely track their playing time. The researchers analyzed play sessions over three timescales: the past 24 hours, the past 7 days, and the past 14 days.
Gamers had to fill out a questionnaire every two weeks to measure their mental well-being. The researchers looked at three aspects: “positive affect (how happy participants felt at that moment), depressive symptoms (feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past week), and overall mental well-being (overall mental health over the past two weeks).”
The researchers looked for correlations between time spent gaming and participants’ self-reported well-being. They found no association between the two in any of the three dimensions they measured, nor any evidence that changes in well-being influenced subsequent playtime. Players who experienced changes in mood or mental state did not significantly change their gaming habits.
This conclusion is even more significant when you consider that the amount of time spent gaming was not uniform: While the average playtime was about 2.1 hours per day, the distribution of gaming time varied widely: some people logged on and spent about an hour, while others played video games for more than five hours a day.
Barrow and his team also found that an additional hour of gaming time translated into less than 0.02 percentage points in changes in happiness.
Like any research, this study has limitations. First, it only looked at adults in the United States and the UK, excluding children and teenagers, a significant portion of gamers. Also, the researchers focused on Xbox gamers, and owners of competing platforms were not included in the study. Therefore, the results cannot be generalized to all regions or populations.
Moreover, the study did not take into account factors that may simultaneously affect gaming time and mental health, such as economic events. A lack of income can not only prevent people from playing games, but also affect their health. Also, although the researchers collected open-ended responses about life events that may affect mental health, they did not analyze them in depth.
One other caveat: The study’s conclusions may not apply to people who enjoy gaming to an extreme extent, such as those who use it to replace work, sleep or other activities.
“It’s not the same, but [gaming] “Gaming provides many of the same benefits to players, including stress relief and escapism,” says Ballou, who describes himself as a gamer. “Only in the much rarer cases where gaming is regularly replacing activities that are inseparable from gaming, like sleep, performance at work or school, or relationships with friends and family, should we start to worry.”
Nonetheless, the findings are important and may provide a basis for further research and prompt additional studies on the benefits and harms of video game playing and mental health.
The full study has been published in the journal Neuroscience. The heart and soul of technology.
