Gaming Time Has No Link With Levels of Wellbeing, Study Finds (bbc.com) 24
A study of 39,000 video gamers has found "little to no evidence" time spent playing affects their wellbeing. From a report: The average player would have to play for 10 hours more than usual per day to notice any difference, it found. And the reasons for playing were far more likely to have an impact. Well-being was measured by asking about life satisfaction and levels of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and frustration. The results contradict a 2020 study.
Conducted by the same department at the Oxford Internet Institute -- but with a much smaller group of players -- the 2020 study had suggested that those who played for longer were happier. "Common sense says if you have more free time to play video games, you're probably a happier person," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, who worked on both studies. "But contrary to what we might think about games being good or bad for us, we found [in this latest study] pretty conclusive evidence that how much you play doesn't really have any bearing whatsoever on changes in well-being. "If players were playing because they wanted to, rather than because they felt compelled to, they had to, they tended to feel better."
Conducted by the same department at the Oxford Internet Institute -- but with a much smaller group of players -- the 2020 study had suggested that those who played for longer were happier. "Common sense says if you have more free time to play video games, you're probably a happier person," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, who worked on both studies. "But contrary to what we might think about games being good or bad for us, we found [in this latest study] pretty conclusive evidence that how much you play doesn't really have any bearing whatsoever on changes in well-being. "If players were playing because they wanted to, rather than because they felt compelled to, they had to, they tended to feel better."
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Maybe the cops there should get on some Halo and CoD
Could hardly be worse than playing real life like a streamer trying to break a game by doing everything as wrongly as possible.
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I'm not quite sure if the world is ready for cops shooting someone then teabagging them...
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Bet he also watched movies and ate food
Link? (Score:2)
Would be better if we had a link to the current report instead of just to the 2020 study
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There you go [wikipedia.org].
Sweet! (Score:1)
huh (Score:2)
Really? The times in which I spent the most time gaming were absolutely not the happiest time of my life.
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It only means you were playing the wrong games.
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Were you gaming to cope with or escape from whatever-it-was that made you unhappy?
If the games themselves were making you unhappy, it sounds like you might not really qualify as a "gamer."
Or you need to find better games.
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"Were you gaming to cope with or escape from whatever-it-was that made you unhappy?"
Mostly for the endorphin rush that gaming gave me. Like frankly a lot of people did and do.
FPS != paintball and MSM is probably more to blame (Score:1)
Not sure this is common sense (Score:3)
Common sense says if you have more free time to play video games, you're probably a happier person," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, who worked on both studies
I was unemployeed and had a ton of free time. I was not a happier person. If my famly walked out on me, I'd have a ton of free time but would not be happier.
In Isolation, Yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
...but TFS doesn't give enough information to eschew other possible explanations.
I've had a game of Civ V that I started four months ago, and I haven't had the time to play since then, because I have two high-engagement projects at work *and* I'm moving. If I had enough time to play Civ, it would imply that things have quieted down at work and that my moving situation has been resolved, so yes, my increased game time implies other areas of my life aren't in a state of flux.
I'd happily play through the Mass Effect trilogy again; it's been about a year since I played it. It's a self-contained game, which I play by myself, and requiring nobody else's assistance either as a co-laborer or an adversary. There are no IAPs or microtransactions or lootboxes or gambling mechanics of any kind; in-game currency is earned in-game and spendable in-game with no external monetization of any kind. Such games are becoming relatively rare. There are plenty of examples of people paying five figures for in-game items in FIFA. There was the notable example of the Diabolo Immortal player who spent $10,000 and didn't get a single rare gem. Losing money at the video game casino is unlikely to produce a state of wellbeing in players, if not by way of unhappiness, by way of spending insane amounts of money.
Even beyond that, who wants to be the party member everyone takes due to pity? Who wants to wait around to get a co-op game going and your other friends are never available? Even Dark Souls with its known difficulty can cause dissatisfaction when a player hits a wall.
There are plenty of ways that video games, in their current iterations, can cause issues with well-being. Whether this study reflects a self-selected series of test subjects, or the definition of "wellbeing" is differently defined, or the test subjects were younger people who had fewer responsibilities, I'd submit that there are plenty of ways for these findings to be "technically correct" in that there isn't direct causality, but also that correlation between wellbeing and gameplay time, if present, is more valid in this case than in others.
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Your post sounds suspiciously like projection [psychologytoday.com].
They were asked (Score:2)
Well-being was measured by asking
Oh well, that makes it so conclusive then.
Did they also get asked about whether they're taking care of themselves, or are they relying on someone else to do all that for them? Cleaning, cooking, doing laundry...
It's pretty easy to "be well" if you get to play games and someone else does all your chores for you.