Can playing games improve your health?

Simon Wells
Authored by Simon Wells
Posted: Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - 15:12

Video gaming has become one of the world’s most popular activities. There are currently over 2.8 billion gamers around the globe, enjoying a huge variety of gaming genres across mobile, consoles and PCs.

Within just a few decades, gaming has gone from being a casual hobby to a viable career path, and the industry itself sustains an ecosystem of businesses, developers, community organisations and individual players.  

The public’s perception of gaming has also changed radically since those days of the console wars of the 1980s and 90s. We’ve grown up with the impact of video games on popular culture, from the gamification of TV shows and movies to mainstream integration of “gaming tech” like virtual reality. These developments, combined with the emergence of the professional gaming sector of eSports in recent years, have shattered dated stereotypes about video gaming.  

More recently, researchers have discovered that gaming has value beyond that of simply being a form of entertainment. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at how gaming can improve our health and wellbeing and those games that offer the most benefits.  

Gaming and Mental Health  

In 2020, a study conducted by Oxford University revealed that playing video games can have a positive impact on our mental health. For the first time, researchers were able to access and work with actual gameplay data, which enabled them to pinpoint the exact games that had the most impact on mood and mental wellbeing.  

The key games used in the study were Nintendo’s uber-cute Animal Crossing and EA Games’ more comical Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighbourville. After regular play sessions of the two games, participants reported a greater sense of wellbeing and an improvement in their overall mood.  

More recently, in spring 2021, Microsoft conducted a study within the Xbox Research Accessibility Community Feedback Program to assess the impact of gaming and mental health over the past 12 months. The study found that 71% of respondents felt less isolated when playing games, while 84% reported a positive impact on their mental health.  

Casino Games and Mindsports 

It's not just video games that can help whip your brain into shape, casino games like blackjack can have positive effects on short term memory and decision-making skills. Luckily, in this digital era, you don't need to take a trip to a physical casino in order to get to grips with these classic games. Blackjack, roulette, and slot titles are just some of the casino games you can find populating online platforms like PokerStars Casino.  

Meanwhile, the benefits of mindsports like Chess have been widely known for some time; however, poker is a relatively new entrant to the market. Poker has been proven to be one of those games that can “re-wire” your brain for the better. Regularly playing a challenging card game like poker encourages a neurological process called myelination, which basically improves and creates pathways in the brain.  

How Games Improve Physical Wellbeing 

So, we’ve covered how certain video games can help reverse the effects of isolation on our mental health, and discussed how mind sports and casino games can make us smarter, but can video games improve our physical health too? 

Well, if you’re playing the right types of games they absolutely can. It may seem counter-intuitive to associate a sedentary based activity like video gaming with physical exercise, but there are numerous gaming options out there that actually encourage movement and exercise.  

The Nintendo Wii pioneered physical video gaming back in the early noughties, with the Wii Fit encouraging players to get active by playing sports like golf, boxing, bowling, tennis, and baseball.  

A decade later, the rise of mobile gaming and the release of the universally popular Pokémon Go meant that gamers the world over were taking to their streets to hunt down those elusive little creatures. Meanwhile, Zombies, Run! takes the physical component up a notch by unleashing hordes of ravenous zombies on players – in augmented reality, of course!  

 

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