Despite a darker rationale as to the complications of video gaming in adolescents, new research by Oxford University challenges such assertions, concluding that video games could be beneficial for mental health.
As the study’s first author Niklas Johannes and colleagues state in their new paper, the goal of their new research was to probe the association between time spent playing video games and any implications toward well-being.
During the study, a set of participants were recruited to volunteer in a few commercially-released games, with researchers taking into account objective measures of video game behavior.
“Our goal was to investigate the relation between game time, as a measure of actual play behaviour, and subjective well-being,” Johannes and her colleagues wrote in their study.
“We found that relying on objective measures is necessary to assess game time: Although there was overlap between the amount of time participants estimated to have played and their actual play time as logged by the game companies, that relation was far from perfect,” they also stated.
“Overall, our findings suggest that regulating video games, on the basis oftime, might not bring the benefits many might expect, though the correlational nature of the data limits that conclusion.”
The study, released in mid-November 2020, has not been peer-reviewed yet.
