First the good news: prolonged gaming doesn’t make you unhappy. Or that could not be proved in a large and thorough investigation. But no: it won’t make you happier either.
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It doesn’t matter whether you spend many or few hours gaming, a new study says. Not for your mental health anyway. Whether or not you find that reassuring news will depend on your own gaming behavior – and that of your teens.
The researchers at the University of Oxford have done a thorough job, but their conclusions should not be generalized just like that. First, in collaboration with game developers, they assembled a test group of about 40,000 gamers. They then followed it for six weeks. Exactly how much the participants gamed was measured. They had to indicate how good they felt. They also had to say why they play and to what extent they feel free to stop.
All participants in the test were people who played one of these seven games: Animal crossing: New horizons (a social game with little action), Apex legends (a Fortnite-esque shooting game), Eve online (an online role-playing game), Outriders (a more violent role-playing game), Forza horizon 4, grand tourer sport in The crew 2 (the last three are racing games). There is a little bit of everything, but no mobile time wasters à la Candy crush.
Chinese restrictions
What turned out? There is no demonstrable link, let alone a causal link, between the number of hours played and the well-being of those 40,000 people. They don’t become more unhappy the longer they play, nor do they play more because they feel unhappy (or happy).
There seems to be a connection with people’s motivation to play and their well-being. People who say they play because they want to feel better than people who say they play because they can’t resist. But that connection, the researchers say, is limited and needs further investigation. Anyway, when politicians and doctors talk about the positive or negative consequences of games, they would do better not to focus blindly on the number of hours played, the scientists conclude.
The negative consequences of our digital habits have been a tricky subject for years. And not just in Europe. Last year, China imposed strict restrictions on its young people: they can only play online for three hours a week. Video games, especially violent games, have been identified in the past as responsible for violent behavior, usually without much concrete evidence. But games (of a completely different type) are also regularly used for therapeutic applications.
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