A study of around 100,000 people in Japan has found that gaming may be good for players’ mental health, contrary to popular belief about the pastime.
While there is a common consensus that video games are bad for your health, and the World Health Organization has classified gaming disorder as a health condition, there is little scientific evidence to suggest a strong link between video games and mental health. In recent observational studies, researchers have documented both positive and negative effects.
The new study published in Nature Human Behaviour We used data from Japan’s shortage of gaming consoles during the pandemic to help understand whether gaming, Japan’s most popular pastime, is having a negative impact on mental health.
Between 2020 and 2022, Japanese retailers allocated two types of gaming consoles to consumers through a lottery. Hiroyuki Egami, an economist at Nihon University in Tokyo, and his colleagues tried to use this random distribution to understand how video games affect stress and life satisfaction.
“Amid growing concerns about the negative effects of gaming, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic temporarily thrust video games into the spotlight as a preferred pastime compatible with social distancing guidelines,” the paper said. “The number of people playing video games has reached nearly 3 billion worldwide, and gaming time is on the rise.”
The survey was conducted among 97,602 people aged 10 to 69 across Japan. Of this sample, 8,192 people participated in a lottery to win a console. The survey aimed to explore console ownership, gaming preferences, mental health, life satisfaction, and socio-demographic characteristics.
The analysis involved employing machine learning algorithms to uncover causal inferences in the survey data.
The researchers found that owning a retail gaming console and playing games was beneficial for mental health, but the additional benefits diminished for gamers who were tethered to their console for more than three hours a day. The study also found that simply owning a gaming console had a positive effect.
However, the researchers emphasized that the unique circumstances surrounding the pandemic may have influenced their findings.
“In our natural experiment, we found that video games had a positive effect on mental health, but that playing games for more than three hours reduced the psychological benefits,” the paper said. “Furthermore, we found that the magnitude of the effects of gaming was contingent on various socio-economic factors, including gender, age, occupation, and family structure. These findings highlight the need for further research into the mechanisms underlying the effects of video games on mental health and point to the importance of policy design that takes into account the differential effects of screen time for various digital media on different populations.”
While the findings are subject to uncertainty, they may bring balance to some of the hyped-up headlines surrounding the game. In the UK, for example, the Daily Mail Splattered “Video game-addicted kids are attacking their parents and taking away their consoles will only make them more aggressive, experts warn.”
Still, other risks remain. Harvard Health Reported Repetitive stress injury and other overuse disorders can be caused by gaming. The American Psychological Association defines Internet gaming disorder as experiencing effects such as preoccupation with gaming, social withdrawal, and loss of interest in other activities.®
