As someone who has evangelized for the video game industry and how games, long villainized by parents, politicians, and police, are actually either a neutral or positive force for the public and culture, I never shy away from sharing studies that demonstrate this. While a great deal of time has been spent on discussions of the impact of violent video games, it would be untrue to claim that the gaming industry in general hasn’t been targeted for all kinds of negative claims. It turns people into lazy game-junkies. It keeps people from experiences in real life. Hell, it’s a threat to the global population, with men (only men!) too busy playing video games to procreate and keep the human race going.
Meanwhile, all kinds of studies have come out about the positive impact of playing some video games. The University of Oxford had a study correlating gameplay with gamers self-reporting an increase in “well being.” An NIH study found gaming to be a good treatment for depression. And now we have another Oxford study, conducted with thousands of gamers playing a commercially available game played in their home setting, that correlates improvement in mood with gameplay.
The study analysed data from players in 39 countries, including the US, UK, Canada and Germany and found that PWS players’ moods rapidly increased during gameplay. Players consistently reported a higher mood after the first fifteen minutes of the play session compared to the start of each session.
Lead author Assistant Professor Matti Vuorre, Tilburg University and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute said:
‘At present short-term changes in video game players’ moods are poorly understood. Gameplay research frequently relies on artificial stimuli, with games created or modified by academic researchers, typically played in a lab environment rather than a natural context. Instead, we wanted to know how real play in natural contexts might predict player mood on short timescales.’
It’s important to note that this is studying short term mood effects, rather than mid- or long-term effects on mood. Still, the point is that there is an emotional well-being lift as a result of playing games in this study. The game played here is PowerWash Simulator, or a slightly modified version of it. Not a violent game, nor one that is rife with quick-twitch action. The only real modification to the game was the inclusion of a “researcher” character that would pop up in game to ask the player to self-report their mood level.
Now, there will be some out there that will look at this study with narrow eyes. I can already hear them comparing this to dopamine hits gained when using illicit drugs. Surely a heroin addict would report an uplift in mood after getting a fix, or some such nonsense like that. But the more proper analogy, according to this study, is not with drugs, but rather with other forms of entertainment.
The researchers found that the average player’s mood increased by approximately 0.034 units (on a 0-1 scale), from the beginning of the session to during play and the bulk of the improvement occurs for the average player after 15 minutes of gameplay. This change is comparable with changes seen in other leisure activities such as reading, shopping, or listening to music.
They also looked at differences in mood uplift between the population of similar PWS players. The Oxford team statistically modelled between-person differences in mood shifts in the population of PWS players. They found that nearly three-quarters of players (72.1%) were likely to experience an uplift in their mood during PWS play.
The study rightly cautions against trying to extrapolate these results into some kind of encompassing “video games are great!” conclusion. Rather, it’s a data point, and the the study’s authors suggest that more research should be done using more games and more people to gather more data on the short term effects on mood of playing video games.
But what the study certainly demonstrates is that the notion that video games are generally bad for people is simplistic nonsense.