Don’t inform your teenagers, however gaming could be good for psychological wellbeing (and older brains can profit too!)

Exasperated parents may decry video games as a mind-destroying waste of time as they try to prise their children away from them. But could video games – whisper it – actually be good for us?

A new study from Japan suggests they can significantly improve mental wellbeing in children and adults.

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

The behavioural scientist, who analysed the effects of gaming on people aged from ten to 69, added that many parents ‘feel excessively worried about their children’s video game habits, fearing potential negative consequences’… but ‘our study now provides robust scientific evidence to ease some of those worries’.

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

Dr Egami’s team tracked the 8,192 people who took part in the ballot, sending them five rounds of surveys to check their gaming habits and psychological distress levels, a barometer of mental wellbeing.

They found that console ownership, along with playing more video games, significantly improved mental wellbeing.

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

This is not the first study to find a benefit to mental health from video games.

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

This follows previous research which found that while playing video games people’s autonomic nervous system – which controls blood pressure among other things – relaxed and their mood stabilised.

Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University, says: ‘Play is one of the most fundamentally important things that people, young or old, can do – and video games are no different from other conventional forms of play in that regard.’

He says many of the benefits can be explained through ‘self-determination theory’, which is the idea that humans have three basic psychological needs.

These are: the need for autonomy – so feeling like we have control over things; the need for relatedness – basically the need to connect with people (online gaming allows people to play and speak with others); and the need for competency, so we feel as though we’ve got a certain level of mastery over something, he explains.

‘Video games are perfect for hitting all three of those,’ he says.

As well as benefits for mental wellbeing, some video games have been found to have effects on our cognitive skills.

Research by the University of Geneva has found that ‘action’ games specifically can boost our perception and spatial cognition, attention and speed of processing.

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

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

‘Properly controlled studies have repeatedly demonstrated a causal link between [action] video-game playing and enhanced abilities,’ the Geneva researchers wrote in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2011.

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

It found that people aged 60-81 who predominantly played ‘puzzle’ games had superior working memory to non-players, equivalent to that of younger adults. And among people aged 18-30, those who predominantly played ‘strategy’ games – the type that involve planning and problem-solving – had better working memory.

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

‘But the downside is that someone needs to spend a lot of time playing video games to gain that skill. And it’s not clear how long that skill lasts or whether it’s transferable beyond video games.’

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

The Japanese study found that these tailed off after three hours – but playing for longer than this wasn’t harmful, just less effective.

‘To put it simply, our study found that playing for the 181st minute was still beneficial, though slightly less so than the 180th minute,’ said Dr Egami.

‘We did not find evidence that playing for more than three hours negatively impacted mental wellbeing.’

Another study, by Oxford University in 2022, which followed 12,000 secondary school-aged pupils, suggested that even ‘heavy’ gamers – those spending more than 3.5 hours a day playing – experienced no negative effects on their mental wellbeing.

One in 12 participants did, though, but researchers said these people ‘were also more likely to report previous experiences of abuse, anxiety or aggressive behaviours, suggesting that those with mental health issues may turn to gaming as a coping mechanism’.

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

The symptoms include giving up previously enjoyed activities due to gaming, needing to spend more time gaming to satisfy the urge, and using gaming to relieve negative moods, such as guilt or hopelessness. To meet the diagnosis, gaming must cause ‘significant impairment or distress’ in several 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 person’s individual characteristics, 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’s designed so you play again and again].’

Professor Etchells highlights games that use ‘loot boxes’ as a particular area of concern, potentially as a gateway to gambling. These involve the player paying, say, £1 to get an outfit for their character – but they may get a rare, desirable outfit or just a common, less desirable outfit.

‘So there is a randomised chance of getting 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 many problematic gambling behaviours you exhibit’.

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

He uses an example of how we consume food to explain this. With a high-energy, high-protein bar for instance, eating one after going for a run is good, but if we just scoff them in bed at night, they’re maybe not so good.

‘It’s not the case that after one, two or however many specific hours, the negatives suddenly start outweighing the benefits,’ he said. ‘Instead, it’s better to think about how video game play sits within our wider “diet” of activities.’

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

‘If the alternative feels more important or makes you feel better than gaming, that could be a warning sign and I’d recommend reducing the time spent on video gaming.’