Playing video games for a few hours a day can improve mental health, such a study in Japan during the Covid 19 pandemy 1 .

The investigation - which was carried out from December 2020 to March 2022 - showed that possession of a game console already reduced life satisfaction and reduced psychological stress. The results were published in Nature Human Behavior today.

The results are a first step in the demonstration of a causal connection between games and the advantages of mental health, says Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist who researches how video games affect the mental health of players at the University of Oxford, Great Britain. "The study provides an example to follow the game researcher all over the world," he says. However, it could be that the implementation of the experiment during the pandemic has increased the mental health advantages of playing, since the mental health of people at that time was generally worse and there were fewer opportunities to get involved in other activities. The impact on well -being must be tested outside of this situation, according to Przybylski.

Although studies have examined the effects of playing on addiction, well-being, cognitive function and aggression, the results were mixed 2 , 3 . This research was largely based on observation data that cannot be used to distinguish the cause and effect, says study mitachor Hiroyuki Egami, a behavioral scientist at Nihon University in Tokyo. Many video game studies are also carried out in controlled laboratory environments, which makes it difficult to evaluate the effects of playing on mental health in everyday life.

players unite

worldwide around three billion people play video games and this number rose during pandemic. In Japan, this increase in demand led to a lack of Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 (PS5) consoles. In order to deal with it, the dealers set up a lottery system that randomly selected consoles were able to buy when they were available. Egami and his colleagues saw this an opportunity to carry out a natural experiment about games and mental health.

The study focused on 8,192 people between the ages of 10 and 69 who had participated in the lottery. The team collected information about their mental health, the possession of video games and socio -demographic characteristics. The researchers sent the participants five rounds of surveys, which contained two checklists for measuring psychological stress and life satisfaction. The participants were also asked whether they had played video games in the past 30 days and if so, for how long.

participants who had the opportunity to buy a switch or PS5 console experienced a decline in their psychological stress and had greater life satisfaction than respondents who had left empty in the lottery. The mental health advantages of possession of a PS5 were more pronounced in men, hardcore gamers and households without children.

On the other hand, possession of a switch seemed to offer a larger thrust on the well -being of family households and less experienced players. This could be because the switch is a portable console that can be played with family and friends, while the PS5 is only connected to a television and typically used by individual players, says Egami.

life satisfaction

Playing video games on one of the consoles increased life satisfaction among lottery participants, and if they did this for an additional day, this led to a further improvement in mental health. The positive effects, however, decrease in players who played more than three hours a day, which indicates that a long time of play does not lead to further improvements in intellectual health.

"These results are not surprising," says Daniel Johnson, a psychologist who specializes in video games at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. "They go with what we have known about video players for decades."

Przybylski adds that the study has not examined which other factors could influence the mental health of players, such as their approach to playing and their choice of game.

egami says the next step is to replicate the study to see whether the results also exist outside a pandemic. "The result could be different," he says.