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A team of mental health, human behavior, and economics specialists from several Japanese institutions have found that playing video games under the right conditions can have a positive impact on mental health.
In their study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, The group sent questionnaires to people who were isolated at home during the COVID-19 lockdown, and some of them were able to buy video game consoles and games through a lottery.
Previous studies have reached mixed conclusions about the mental health impact of regular, long-term video game playing. Some have suggested that it can lead to symptoms of addiction; in teenagers, it can lead to social isolation and, in some cases, aggressive behavior. The World Health Organization has even gone so far as to classify “gaming addiction” as a mental illness.
Other studies have suggested that such results are exaggerated. One of the problems that experts have encountered when studying such effects is the difficulty of quantifying them – most studies were conducted in controlled settings, which may have influenced the results.
For this new study, the research team took the opportunity to study the effects of video games on a large number of people outside of a laboratory – people who were stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic.
During the lockdown in Japan, demand for video game consoles and related games skyrocketed. Console manufacturers tried to ensure fairness by holding lotteries – winners had the choice of buying either a Sony PlayStation 5 or a Nintendo Switch; losers had to think of other ways to entertain themselves.
The research team realized this was an opportunity to test the effects of video gaming on a specific group of players. They created a questionnaire measuring mental health and time spent gaming and sent it to lottery participants. They received 97,602 questionnaires completed and ready for analysis.
The research team discovered a pattern in the responses: people who played video games seemed to have a higher sense of life satisfaction, a key element of mental health, than those who didn’t play games. They also found that the benefits had limits: those who played more than three hours a day experienced the same benefits as those who played only three hours a day.
Further information:
Hiroyuki Egami et al., Causal effects of video games on mental well-being in Japan 2020–2022, Nature Human Behavior (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01948-y
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Quote: Study suggests that video games can have positive effects on mental health under certain conditions (August 20, 2024), accessed August 20, 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-08-video-game-playing-mental-health.html
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