Study suggests playing video games may have mental health benefits under certain conditions

A team of mental health, human behavior and economics specialists affiliated with several institutions in Japan has found that, under the right conditions, playing video games can be good for mental health.

In their study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, The group sent questionnaires to people sequestered at home during the COVID-19 lockdown, some of whom were able to purchase video game consoles and games in a lottery.

Previous research has produced mixed results regarding the mental health effects of regular, long-term video game playing. Some have suggested that it can lead to symptoms of addiction; in adolescents, it can lead to social isolation and, in some cases, aggressive behavior. The World Health Organization has gone so far as to classify “video game disorder” as a mental illness.

Other studies have suggested that these results are exaggerated. One problem that researchers in the field have encountered when trying to study these impacts is the difficulty of quantification: most studies have been conducted in controlled environments, which could have affected the results.

For this new study, the research team found an opportunity to study the impact of video games on a large number of people outside of a lab setting — people stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic.

In Japan, during the lockdown, demand for video game consoles and related games skyrocketed. Console makers tried to make things fair by holding lotteries: winners could choose between a Sony PlayStation 5 or a Nintendo Switch; losers had to find other ways to have fun.

The research team realized this was an opportunity to test the impact of video games on a captive group of players. They created a questionnaire designed to measure mental health and time spent playing and sent it to people participating in the lotteries. They received 97,602 of them, completed and ready to be analyzed.

The research team observed a trend in the responses: People who played video games appeared to have a greater sense of life satisfaction, a key component of mental health, than those who didn’t play video games. They also found that the benefits had limits: Those who played more than three hours a day felt the same benefits as those who played only three hours a day.

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