During the early days of the coronavirus lockdown, Hiroyuki Egami worked desperately to Nintendo Switch.
He already had one handheld console, but with two sons old enough to fight over it, the only way to keep the peace in his Tokyo home was to buy a second one.
Many parents had the same idea, so the consoles quickly sold out in stores in Japan. When the consoles were back in stock, retailers held raffles to give everyone who wanted one an equal chance.
Egami, The economist at Nihon University in Tokyo quickly realized that the lottery system could also function as a natural experiment, shedding light on a long-standing question: Are video games actually harmful to players’ mental health?
“We often hear that video games are harmful and that kids should play less,” he says. “As a father, I wondered if that was true.”
And as a researcher, he said he felt “a certain responsibility” to examine the evidence.
A short time ago, the World Health Organization It sparked controversy By adding the condition Gaming Disorder The International Classification of Diseases defines it as gaming personality disorder, which refers to people who become so addicted to video games that they cannot control their playing behavior, even when it puts their health, relationships with family and friends, and livelihoods at risk.
The WHO’s action reinforces a long-held view that video games are dangerous. Over 3 billion people The number of people playing video games around the world has been steadily increasing over the past few years.
While titles like “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty” regularly make it onto bestseller lists, so do family-friendly titles like “Minecraft,” “Animal Crossing,” “Madden NFL” and “Mario Kart 8.”
Gamers play “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” on Nintendo Switch at Poway High School’s esports arena.
(Noah Harrell)
“Parents should know whether games are really dangerous,” Egami said, adding, “Parents should not feel unreasonable pressure.”
Studies looking at links between gaming and aggression, addiction, cognitive function and overall health have been inconclusive — partly because it’s hard to tell whether gaming itself makes people feel lonely, for example, or whether isolated people tend to gravitate toward video games.
To establish causation, you would randomly select groups of people, have some play video games, and have the rest serve as a control group that doesn’t play games, and if differences emerge between otherwise similar groups, they can be attributed to the games.
But these experiments don’t reflect how people play video games in the real world, Egami said. Typically, they ask university students to play video games in a lab at designated times, a research design that, while practical, limits the value of the findings.
That’s why Egami jumped on the video-game lottery bandwagon: By randomly selecting some people who wanted to buy consoles and denying others anything, retailers were unwittingly setting up the equivalent of a clinical trial.
Egami sprung into action immediately: He created a survey and got it into the field as quickly as possible, even though he was worried the gap would be filled before he could collect the data he needed.
“We were fortunate enough to be able to assemble a research team and start working on it,” he said.
Approximately 100,000 people responded to Egami’s survey between 2020 and 2022, including 8,192 people who participated in a video game lottery. More than one-third of the lottery participants were considered “hardcore gamers” who play games for at least 90 minutes every day. In addition to their gameplay habits, the survey also measured people’s psychological well-being and distress. They were also asked about a range of socio-economic factors, including age, gender, occupation and family structure.
After crunching all the numbers, the researchers concluded that the Nintendo Switch or Sony PlayStation 5 The devices given away in the lottery significantly reduced psychological distress in recipients, and owning and playing with either device improved the owners’ mental health.
What’s more, winning the chance to buy a PS5 in a lottery increased gamers’ life satisfaction, the researchers found, as did owning a console and playing games on it. (The team didn’t have the data to determine whether the results would hold for the Nintendo Switch.)
The increases in happiness were statistically significant, but not necessarily large enough for gamers to notice, Egami said.
The magnitude of change was calculated as the standard deviation, a measure used in statistics to describe how close together groups of data points are. Medical studies have shown that changes are noticeable when they exceed 0.5 standard deviations. By this standard, only the mental health benefits from owning and playing a Switch were large enough for gamers to notice.
The data also shows that after three hours of gaming per day, the benefits of spending more time playing video games are diminished, but there is no length of time after which gaming becomes “harmful to mental health,” Egami said.
of Survey results The findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
The exact magnitude of the effect is difficult to interpret, but “it appears to be large enough that the players themselves can sense it.” Matti Vuore, “In my opinion, this represents a pretty large effect,” said Jonathan Myers, a psychologist who studies video games and other virtual environments at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He said the findings make it harder to claim that “games are overall risky for the average player.”
Nick Barrow A postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute studying the effects of gaming on mental health expects the increase in well-being “will be small but noticeable,” but it’s unlikely to have a much larger effect than that, he says, because “gaming is only a small part of what contributes to a well-being life.”
Neither Vuole nor Ballou were involved in Egami’s research, but they worked together in 2021. Recorded a dramatic increase in gaming During the pandemic, multiplayer games have become more popular. This is especially true for multiplayer games, which have served not only as a source of entertainment but also as a venue for social connection.
“There’s a lot of evidence that people turned to gaming as a lifeline during the early stages of the pandemic,” said Ballou, who conducted the study. One such study was conducted in May 2020. He said he doesn’t expect the upside potential to be necessarily as strong in more general circumstances.
Egami agreed that some of the mental health benefits the team documented were likely due to the unique circumstances of the pandemic, but he doesn’t think those benefits have completely disappeared now that normal life has resumed.
“We hope to bring peace to ordinary people who enjoy playing video games,” Egami said.
