5 Reasons Why Games Are Good For you!
The debate as to whether video games are good or bad for us has been going since the days of Pong and Space Invaders.
Unfortunately, most people have always assumed they were the cause of many mental and physical problems. Even if there was a lack of scientific evidence to prove it.
Some say it is in our human nature to find something to blame when there’s an issue, and video games have always been an easy target.
But things have changed and now more professional studies are being conducted to find out the truth.
Are video games good for you?
Or, do video games really hinder our ability to learn, make us more violent, or affect our physical health?
While there still isn’t enough evidence to offer a solid answer, the good news is that most researchers are discovering that games can be good for us.
This article will show you 5 reasons why video games are good for you.
Before you read on, remember that anything in excess can be harmful.
No benefit that comes from a video game will justify playing them for 10 hours a day.
It’s your responsibility to figure out how long you should play before putting the controller down and doing something else, as difficult as it may be.
5 Ways Video Games Are Good for You
- Video Games May Slow Down Aging
Male, female, young adult, middle-aged person– all have one thing in common and that’s aging.
And while getting older and wiser has its perks, there are also a number of natural problems that come about as well.
There’s a reason why you see senior citizens driving at 25 MPH even though the speed limit is 45.
But just like maintaining a healthy exercise routine can help your body feel 50 when you’re 60, our brain can also be kept ‘in shape’.
In fact, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Iowa showed that playing games can do just that.
The study had 681 healthy people aged 50 and older play 10 hours of a certain video game for five to eight weeks, and this is what they found:
“We’ve shown that 10 hours is enough to slow the decline by several years. We saw a range across all our tests from a minimum of a year-and-a-half all the way up to about six-and-a-half years of recovery or improvement. From just 10 to 14 hours of training, that’s quite a lot of improvement”.
It seems performing any task that requires exercising your mind will help it stay sharper, and that includes video games.
- Better Decision Maker
His goal was to test if games, which demand us to view and keep track of moving peripheral images, improve our ability to receive sensory data and thus help us make more precise decisions.
The study had a group of young adults with no gaming experience play an action game for 50 hours.
A second group of the same age played a slow-paced strategy game instead.
After the study, Green had nothing but good things to say:
“Action video games are fast-paced, and there are peripheral images and events popping up, and disappearing. These video games are teaching people to become better at taking sensory data in, and translating it into correct decisions.”
A colleague of his even went on to say that shooters can change the brain by dramatically enhancing many of our low-level perceptual functions. Definitely good news for all the Halo and Call of Duty fans out there. (Source)
3. Games Can Enhance Your Ability To Learn
Contrary to popular belief that video games make you bad at school, researchers from the UK found that certain video games can actually enhance our brain flexibility.
The study was done at both the University College London and the Queen Mary University of London and had 72 volunteers play two different games for 40 hours over six to eight weeks.
The games were Starcraft, a fast real-time strategy game, and The Sims, a slower life-simulation game.
Here’s what they had to say:
“This result supports the notion that the within-StarCraft gaming manipulation led participants to manage more information sources during game play, thus leading to enhancements in cognitive flexibility.”
In other words, the people who played Starcraft boasted better cognitive flexibility since the game requires constant thinking and player input.
So while slower games may not offer the same benefit, it’s cool to know that our favorite fast-paced games are helping us become better learners while entertaining us. (Source & Source)
4. Improved Focus and Attention
One of the biggest worries among parents today is that their children sit in class thinking about Minecraft and Pokemon instead of listening to the teacher.
To see if games instead helped kids pay more attention by improving cognition and perception, a researcher named Vikranth Bejjanki performed a few experiments alongside several colleagues.
These tests first involved having two groups, experienced and inexperienced gamers, perform several perceptual tasks such as pattern discrimination.
The gamers ended up outperforming the other group who rarely, if ever, played games before the experiment.
The paper concludes with the following:
“The enhanced learning of the regularity and structure of environments may act as a core mechanism by which action video game play influences performance in perception, attention, and cognition.”
In other words, playing games improves several abilities, including paying attention.
5. Video Games Can Help Relationships
While there are plenty of ways for couples to have fun together and relax, psychologists from the University of Denver wanted to find out if playing video games was one of them.
This is an interesting study because research shows men care more about this part of a relationship than women do.
At the same time, most guys are known to either play games alone or with other male friends– not so much their girlfriend, wife, etc.
The study, which actually started in 1996, had 200 couples in their second year of marriage decide what aspect of their relationship was most important.
Their answers demonstrated a strong correlation between the importance of partaking in fun, exciting activities together and a good relationship.
Howard Markman, one of the psychologists involved in the study said this:
“The more you invest in fun and friendship and being there for your partner, the happier the relationship will get over time.”
So even though the experiment didn’t involve video games, it serves to prove that couples who game together tend to have happier, healthier relationships. Conclusion
Just like video games themselves, the field of studying how games help or hurt us is still very new.
There is still plenty of research to be done before we find out how the virtual characters, stories, and worlds we love really affect on a physical and mental level.
Even so, feel free to show your friends and family this list if they’re the kind of people who still assume games are to blame for obesity, school shootings, and antisocial behavior.
It will help them realize that instead of giving us problems, games may have actually been improving our lives in some ways.