Research Shows Gaming Time and Levels of Wellbeing Has No Correlation

Research Shows No Relation Between Gaming Time and Levels of Wellbeing

In recent news, research from the Oxford Internet Institute revealed that time spent playing video games has no influence on people’s wellbeing, debunking claims that gaming might be detrimental to mental health.

Seven different game companies who agreed to exchange data without control over publishing were able to help trace the gameplay behaviours of over 39,000 individual players, all of whom volunteered to participate in the study.

According to Professor Andrew Przybylski, one of the researchers, the findings do not encompass the entirety of gaming. Despite pursuing over 30 companies, only seven consented to participate, and the games investigated over the course of six weeks were:

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• Apex Legends
• Eve Online
• Forza Horizon 4
• Gran Turismo Sport
• Outriders
• The Crew

The games do reflect a broad but not comprehensive cross-section of the genre.

The results were obtained with happiness measured by inquiring about life satisfaction and degrees of emotions such as happy, sorrow, rage, and frustration. Players would need to game for 10 hours longer than normal every day to observe any improvements in their well-being.

The study also discovered that healthier motivation was related to good well-being, whereas players who felt they were forced to play the game had lower happiness regardless of how long they played.

However, Przybylski did further explain that this study is pretty basic as they didn’t even go into what individuals are doing when they’re playing games.

Despite not doing an experiment and not having any solid data, nations are enacting ordinances in the case of Japan, or laws in the case of China that restrict or limit gaming.

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Pokdepinion: Finally we have a bigger sample size to prove that gaming for a long time does not affect our mental health. However, we do need to consume things in moderation and this also applies to gaming as people do tend to go to extremes.