While mainstream media has long accused video games of destroying society, new research finds that it’s good for boosting your mood.
When mainstream media isn’t trying to blame social media for pretty much everything with little to no evidence, sometimes, they take a break from that and proceed to blame video games for all of societal ills as well with little to no evidence. We’ve documented this activity off and on in recent times. This includes the time they compared video games to cocaine or the time they tried to blame the Donald Trump assassination attempt on video games, again, with no evidence.
Obviously, these recent examples are nothing new. Mainstream media, and politicians for that matter, have been trying to scapegoat video games for decades now. Both, along with their supporters, blame video games for mass shootings, delinquency, and a whole host of other societal problems. The problem, of course, is that there has never really been the evidence to back it up. In fact, the evidence has consistently shown that video games have a decidedly neutral or positive impact on people. Indeed, society isn’t going to collapse because of video games because if they were, we probably would’ve seen that happen by now since we’ve had video games for around 50 years already. Still, the myth pushed by the media, politicians, and others continues to persist to the point where laws to crack down on them continue to get proposed.
Today, it makes sense to offer up another chunk of evidence that video games aren’t going to lead to the collapse of society. TechDirt is noting that a study has found that video games actually positively boost people’s mood:
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.
While this may very well be one data point, it’s one of many data points that have long pointed to how video games aren’t turning people into psychotic maniacs or a digital equivalent to crackheads. Indeed, people are playing video games and being entertained. This shouldn’t really be a huge surprise, but there will no doubt be plenty of people out there who will be shocked and horrified by this simple reality. This as some out there who will try to ignore these findings and pretend that they don’t exist – which is precisely why we felt it to be important to report on it.
