If you like video games, playing them might not be something you need to worry about.
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Despite being an oft-maligned pastime, playing video games actually seems to make people happier, a finding that comes from a unique study taking advantage of the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I believe that enjoying a hobby can have a positive effect on your health,” says Hiroyuki Egami of Nihon University.
In 2019, the World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its International Classification of Diseases. But research into the effects of playing video games has produced mixed results when it comes to mental health outcomes, with many studies unable to prove causation. Studies that aim to prove causation are typically conducted in controlled laboratory environments, which “are a far cry from the feeling of actually playing a video game,” says Peter Etchells of Bath Spa University in the UK, who was not involved in the latest study.
But between 2020 and 2022, Egami and his colleagues had a rare opportunity to investigate the causal effects of video games on people’s happiness in the real world. At the time, game consoles were in short supply, so lotteries were held in parts of Japan where people could enter to receive either a PlayStation 5 or a Nintendo Switch console.
The researchers surveyed 8,192 people aged between 10 and 69 who had entered such lotteries. Respondents answered questions about their gambling habits and levels of psychological distress, an indicator of mental health.
Egami and his colleagues found that people who won the lottery had slightly higher mental health scores than those who didn’t, but that their scores plateaued once they exceeded about three hours of total play time per day.
The team also used machine learning models to analyze the data and found that the effects varied by console type and owner demographics. For example, younger people who own a Nintendo Switch saw greater benefits compared to older people. The team also found that people without children saw greater benefits from owning a PlayStation 5 than those with children.
“This highlights the need to be nuanced and specific about what we measure and how we measure it if we want to understand how video games affect us,” Etchells said, though he said participants self-reported the amount of time they played, which may not be accurate.
Etchells and Egami also note that the data was collected during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have influenced people’s video game habits and health. Further research using this methodology could reveal whether the trends hold in other contexts.
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(Tag ToTranslate) Video games
