subject: Playing Video Games Could Actually Be Good For You [print this page] When people think about the health effects of playing computer games, it's generally with negative connotations: my kids are going to go blind, get fat, steal cars and want to kill everyone in sight. Well, fortunately for everyone, a new raft of scientific studies have begun to show that these popular ideas about playing video games are not only wrong, but that in many ways playing computer games can genuinely have health benefits.
There are some obvious examples of these, such as the Nintendo Wii and more recently Xbox Kinect systems, which rely on players physically moving the body, waving their arms around jumping about and generally having active fun to play games. Indeed, many of the games designed for these platforms are based around the idea of sports or dancing games to improve fitness. Although these have gone some way toward changing the style of gameplay, they still involve staring at a screen for long periods of time; isn't this going to damage our eyes?
According to recent studies from America, quite possibly not; indeed, it may actually help improve our eyesight! For children and adults with a 'lazy eye', it was found that playing computer games, especially action games, effectively trained it to work harder and, over time, see better. The workout the eyes get from concentrating when playing video games was also shown to improve their general ability to discern fine details, especially in darker light, a health-improving result important for adults and kids alike.
Computer games could also be of great value for tackling a completely different kind of health problem, one which is starting to affect more and more teenagers and young adults: depression. Research from New Zealand built various techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy into a 3D fantasy role-playing game to try and try and deal with the players' symptoms and also promote their social interaction skills. After an extensive trial, it was found that, in many cases, playing the game improved the patients' symptoms and moods by as much as a conventional therapy, like one-to-one counselling, would have done. Quite a healthy achievement for a computer game!
On a similar note, a study performed at Oxford University showed that playing even simple computer games like Tetris could reduce the amount of post traumatic stress disorder-related flashbacks and other unpleasant memories. Linked in with this, the general social and relaxing effects that computer games can have, especially online games and casual browser games where gameplay is designed to be a relaxing break from everyday stresses and also an opportunity to chat and keep up with friends online, has also been shown to help prevent the onset of mental illnesses, like depression, especially those related to a build up of stress or anxiety.
Overall then, it seems that all types of computer games, whether single- or multiplayer, physically active, requiring concentration or relaxing and sociable, largely do not contribute toward the numerous detrimental health concerns they are credited with doing, indeed they often help to alleviate, prevent or drastically improve any such deficiencies in physical and mental health to a remarkable extent.
