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Video games are often singled out for their harmful effects on the mental health of players. However, a recent study carried out by researchers at the University of Oxford contradicts this preconceived idea. According to their results, playing video games intensively would not have as much impact on the mental health of adult players.
Video games, a danger for mental health? In any case, this is what numerous studies and alarmist speeches on the subject suggest. However, a recent study conducted by a team from the University of Oxford sheds new light on the issue.
According to their results, published in the journal Psychological Medicine, playing video games intensively would not have a significant impact on the mental health of adult players. To reach this conclusion, the researchers followed a panel of 414 American and English gamers for twelve weeks, through 2036 surveys, by measuring their playing time, mainly on Xbox, and their state of mental health using questionnaires.
The results show that, contrary to popular belief, playing time is not correlated with an increase in symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress: “These findings support growing evidence that playing time is not the primary factor in the relationship between gaming and mental health for the majority of gamers and that research should instead focus on context. and the quality of the game“, we can read in the study.
Previous work had already looked at the relationship between playing time and mental well-being, without providing truly clear-cut results. For some, excessive gaming could be linked to anxiety problems or even depression, while others failed to establish a significant link between gaming time and depression.
For some studies, video games can prove beneficial for gamers, providing them with a way to offset stress, almost like a cathartic tool: “Gaming is successfully used as a strategy to recover from or cope with daily stressors, to compensate for missed or wasted opportunities, to satisfy basic psychological needs in everyday life, or even to contribute to personal psychological development and to increased resilience“, indicates the study.
And if the content of the video game can have an impact on the development of children, according to certain studies, time has little importance, both positive and negative for the researchers of this study. “Our results contradict this narrative: for a general adult population of gamers, and on time scales ranging from one day to two weeks, even variations of 4 to 5 additional hours of daily video gaming are not likely to have a practically significant impact on well-being. This leads us to conclude that at the population level, the typical range of playing time and variation in playing time observed for adult gamers – without taking into account the content, context and player specifics that take us out of the player’s ‘ordinary’ experience – has no practically significant impact on well-being, either positive or negative“.