European research proves you’re not wasting your life playing video games

If you’re of a certain generation and a fan of video games, you probably heard flack from parents or teachers or some other authority that playing games for too many hours a day is bad for you. It usually doesn’t come from a bad place, they’re just concerned that spending that large amount of time playing could interfere with your social life and mental health compared to other activities. Well, a new European study is saying that you could play games for hours and hours and it wouldn’t impact any of that. Sort of.

A Royal Society Open Science published study is showing that the amount of time a person plays video games doesn’t impact their mood, mental health, or life satisfaction. In fact, in some cases, video games improved their well-being.

Researchers of the Queen Mary University of London, UK surveyed 703 American gamers that played 150 different Nintendo Switch games for collectively over 140,000 hours. The results found that the amount of time spent playing games didn’t impact their mental or social well-being, but how gaming fit into their lifestyle.

Since playing video games was a hobby, the players naturally enjoyed their time playing them and didn’t feel left out or that they were losing any opportunities while playing. Regarding social health, several games allowed them to play with friends either at home or online. It’s just something they like to do and they do it when they’re able to. Simple as that.

Video games have become more and more social.Photo credit: Canva

In fact, some may argue that video games might be good for you. There are studies suggesting that video games can help people improve and exercise cognitive functions. Aside from puzzle games, real-time strategy games such as League of Legends and X-Com 2 encourage critical thinking and problem solving skills, too. Certain sports games exercise hand-eye coordination. Much like with movies, narrative-driven video games can increase a person’s empathy as they embody the characters within a role-playing game or AAA epic.

Socially, gaming has become less and less of a single-player experience. The rise of online gaming has allowed communities to form, allowing gamers to make more friends to play with and even hang out with outside of the game. Playing video games online has also been credited with helping the social lives along with curbing depression and anxiety for millions of people during the COVID-19 lockdown.

As video gamers themselves get older and see the benefits for themselves, many of them turn to video games as a way to bond with their children much like how their parents bonded with them through sports, art, and other hobbies when they were growing up. This has allowed generations to come together and socialize, with parents strengthening bonds with their kids as they practice teamwork to take on a boss in a game or solve a puzzle.

The bottom line is that video games themselves aren’t bad for you and they can fit into a healthy lifestyle. But if you’re using them as a means to skip work, skip social activity, and other life enrichment then there’s an underlying problem, but it’s not video games themselves. There are people who shut themselves out in the name of sports, painting, and other hobbies, too. In the end, it is usually not the hobby itself that interferes with a person’s quality of life, but the choices in when, how, and why they do the hobby.