Gaming Time Has "A Little To No" Impact on People's Well-Being

A new study conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that the amount of time people spend on gaming is not related to their well-being.

The data was gathered from players of seven well-known games from seven leading video game companies which included Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Apex Legends, Eve Online, Forza Horizon 4, Gran Turismo Sport, and The Crew 2. The researchers noted that it was the largest study of this kind that used real data on player behavior rather than self-reported play.

"This exciting study brings together significant amounts of real playing data collected by games companies and donated by players," said Professor Andrew Przybylski, who worked on the study. "Our work reliably measures how long people are playing these games across time, data which simply wasn’t accessible in the past."

Based on the results of 39,000 gamers over 18 years old who donated their play data for a six-week period for an independent analysis following which the researchers found "little to no evidence for a causal connection between gameplay and well-being" and concluded that "motivations play a role in players’ well-being."

The results, however, contradict similar research conducted in 2020 by the same department at the Oxford Internet Institute which claimed that time spent playing games positively impacts people's well-being.

"Common sense says if you have more free time to play video games, you're probably a happier person. But contrary to what we might think about games being good or bad for us, we found [in this latest study] pretty conclusive evidence that how much you play doesn't really have any bearing whatsoever on changes in well-being," Professor Przybylski said. "If players were playing because they wanted to, rather than because they felt compelled to, they had to, they tended to feel better."