Video Games Are Good for Mental Health, Scientists Say

While some people blame video games for every problem in the world, scientists have found out that they are actually good for your mental health.

COVID made people play games like never before, which (together with the parts supply issues) resulted in a shortage of Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 consoles in Japan, as stated by Nature. In response, retailers introduced a lottery system that randomly selected people who could buy a console. Hiroyuki Egami, a behavioral scientist at Nihon University in Tokyo, and his colleagues used this as a research opportunity between 2020 and 2022.

They surveyed 8,192 people, aged between 10 and 69, who had entered the lottery, measuring their psychological distress and life satisfaction. It turned out that participants who managed to buy a console had greater life satisfaction and experienced a decline in their psychological distress compared to those who didn't win the lottery. "The mental-health benefits of owning a PS5 were more pronounced among men, hardcore gamers, and households without children," according to Nature. Switch, on the other hand, was more beneficial for family households and less-experienced gamers.

Playing games showed increased satisfaction among the participants, but improvements in mental health decreased for those who played for more than three hours a day, so long playtimes didn't mean better mental health.

One issue with this research is that it's very specific and fell on the pandemic, which might have affected the result. Still, we need such papers to shift the narrative from unfounded harm from video games to the real reasons behind aggression, crime, and whatever else people put on them.

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