Console yourself – research finds gaming may actually boost mental health

Digital athletes enjoy positive effects in Japan study, but too much screentime sees diminishing returns

A study of nearly 100,000 people in Japan has found that gaming may be good for the player's mental health, contrary to the prevailing narrative around the popular pastime.

While popular opinion holds that video gaming can be bad for you, and the World Health Organization has labeled gaming disorder as a health condition, there is little in the corpus of scientific evidence to suggest a strong link between video games and mental health. Recent observational studies have recorded both positive and negative impacts, researchers report.

A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour used data provided by the shortage of gaming consoles in Japan during the pandemic to help understand whether gaming, the most popular local form of entertainment, has ill effects on mental health.

During 2020 to 2022, Japanese retailers used lotteries to assign two different consoles to consumers. Hiroyuki Egami, economist at Nihon University in Tokyo, worked with his colleagues to use this random distribution to try to understand how video gaming might impact distress and life satisfaction.

"Amid escalating concerns about the negative effects of gaming, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that emerged in 2020 temporarily spotlighted video games as a preferred form of leisure that fit social distancing guidelines," the paper says. "The global number of individuals playing video games has reached nearly three billion, accompanied by an increase in gaming time."

The study surveyed 97,602 people across Japan between the ages of 10 and 69. Of this sample, 8,192 had been part of the console lottery. The survey sought to examine console ownership, gaming preferences, mental health, life satisfaction, and sociodemographic characteristics.

The analysis included employing a machine learning algorithm to figure out the causal inference on survey data.

The researchers found that owning one of the available consoles and playing games benefited mental health. But gamers who spent more than three hours per day plugged in saw diminishing additional benefits. The study also found that simply owning the console had a positive effect.

Researchers were, however, keen to point out that the unique circumstances surrounding the pandemic could have influenced the findings.

"Our natural experiment showed that video gaming positively impacted mental well-being, but gaming for over three hours had decreasing psychological benefits," the paper says. "Furthermore, the magnitude of the gaming effect was revealed to be influenced by various socioeconomic factors such as gender, age, job, and family structure. These findings highlight the necessity for further research into the mechanisms underlying video gaming's effects on mental well-being and point to the importance of policy design that considers the differential effects of various digital media screen time for diverse populations."

While there is inevitable uncertainty around the findings, they might provide some balance to the more hyperbolic headlines surrounding gaming. In the UK for example, The Daily Mail splashed "Children addicted to video games are attacking their PARENTS – and taking away their console only makes them MORE aggressive, experts warn."

Nonetheless, other dangers remain. Harvard Health has reported repetitive stress injuries and other overuse injuries can result from gaming. The American Psychological Association has also defined internet gaming disorder as experiencing effects including gaming preoccupation, withdrawal, and loss of interest in other activities. ®