A psychology professor says a new study directly countering the narrative that gaming is harmful isn’t surprising and is consistent with other studies over the past 30 years.
Professor Mark Wilson at Victoria University's School of Psychology tells Jim Mora continuing research on the subject reflects that fact many people still can’t believe gaming doesn’t affect people’s mental health. However, he says the latest study is impressive in its methodology.
A University of Oxford study published last week in the Royal Society Open Science journal concluded the amount of time spent playing video games was unlikely to have a significant impact on well-being. The study from the Oxford Internet Institute, tracked almost 40,000 individual gamers over six weeks.
Photo: 123RF
Working with Nintendo, EA, CCP Games, Microsoft, Sony, and Square Enix, the study recruited 38,935 Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Apex Legends, Eve Online, Forza Horizon 4, Gran Turismo Sport, Outriders, and The Crew 2 players.
Each participant was asked to fill out three surveys. In every survey, one set of questions was related to their mental well-being, and the other set about their experiences and motivations for gaming.
Participants answered these questions at the start of the study, at two weeks, and at four weeks.
The researchers used each participants’ game play data from the two weeks preceding each survey to investigate the effect—if any—of the amount of time each player spent gaming on their mental health.
It concluded we simply don’t know if gaming correlates to mental health after looking at the results.
Part of the reason why people view gaming time as unhealthy relates to a perception of older games decades ago, Wilson says.
“The nature of games has changed. The earliest theories about the psychology of video game playing date back to the early 1970s. But if you think back to the kinds of games that people would probably have been worrying about, then we're talking about Pong 1980s, we're talking about Pac Man, Space Invaders, Asteroids, whereas these days we're talking potentially about games that are ultra-immersive.
"They're highly realistic, and they potentially include the capability, if not the actuality of people be able to enter virtual reality worlds.
The Oxford research also found a way to avoid self-reported gameplay, making the evidence for its conclusions all the more solid, he says.
“This particular study is, I think, is an excellent attempt to try and do something relatively unusual in this research - to not look at people's self-reported gameplay, but rather have a look at people's actual gameplay.
“And they did this by contacting the publishers of that reasonably diverse set of games and asking for access to the actual amount of time that people spent playing them, and then to get in contact with those people to get them to tell them a little bit more about their mental health.
“And it's that kind of invivo aspect to it that I think it really elevates the study above the average."
Wilson isn’t surprised by the conclusions that cast doubt on a general position that gameplay correlates to mental health.
"The fact that researchers don't find a particularly strong relationship actually is fairly consistent with a lot of studies conducted over the last 10, 20, 30 years,” he says.
“In fact, I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing even more studies being published saying relatively similar things - because actually, people probably can't quite believe that there is no relationship between gaming and mental health.”
Wilson also agrees with the suggestion is that it's better for the mental health of a player if they’re not competing and trying for high scores. Games where you attempt to kill other players’ avatars could also add to stress and negative impacts on mental health. Or they could not.
“At least a couple of the games that have been looked at in this research, I want to call Battle Royale-type games, where it's you against potentially up to 100 other people trying to be the one who's alive at the end." Wilson says.
"And having tried to play these as a gamer in my middle age, these can be quite tense affairs… That competition can both add spice to whatever it is that we're doing, or it can make things really counter-productive.”
However, he agrees with the World Health Organization that higher-than-recommended screen time in general is bad children and teenagers.
Allowing children to stay up to the 1am gaming is obviously not going to have a good health outcome, Wilson says.
“We also know that there are numerous guidelines put out by paediatric organisations that recommend that for infants there should be zero screen time, and for two-year-olds we should be limiting to an hour a day at the maximum.
“If we're going with these recommendations, typically these suggest that even for teenagers we're talking about a handful of hours of exposure in the course of the day, and we're not just talking about games, we're not just talking about tablets, or cell phones, we're talking about television as well. There does seem to be reason to be concerned, if it's a problem.”
