How does video games help people

He pretends to care. Then we go back to an uncertain reality. Sequestered people around the globe are playing more video games during the pandemic. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the latest version of the long-running Nintendo franchise, in which people can hang out online together on digital deserted islands, has sold more than 3 million copies in Japan since its March 20th release.

Sales of video game hardware, software, accessories and game cards in the U. Keep up to date with our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking here. Rather than rue this pandemic-driven video game and screen time boom, research suggests we should be cheering it.

But research shows that video games can provide important social, motivational, emotional, and cognitive benefits. Experts say we need to shed the stereotypical image of gamers as isolated loners playing for hours on end in a dank basement. Today, kids and adults can socialize with one another, in groups large and small, while playing games online. During the pandemic, connectivity stands out. You play in teams overcoming other teams and militias and whatever it is. And as much as kids need us, they need each other just as much.

That works out to about 90 minutes of video games a night. Gaming has benefits for people of all ages. One of his subjects in a later case study even ended up marrying someone he met playing World of Warcraft. Grffiths very much approved.

Video games saved this man from the streets. All that reading may also be helping players improve their writing. About 3 in 5 Many write blogs and fan fiction. The "shared cultural experience" of gaming also supports positive communication with friends and family, according to researchers. Read More. They can better distinguish between different shades of grey, called contrast sensitivity, which is important when driving at night and in other poor visibility situations, and is affected by ageing and undermined in those with amblyopia, or "lazy eye".

They also have better visual acuity, which is what opticians measure when they ask you to read lines of ever smaller letters from a chart at distance.

Bavelier found action video games could also improve the vision of non-gamers. She asked groups of non-gamers to play 50 hours of Unreal Tournament or Call of Duty 2, or to play the slower, non-action game, The Sims 2, over nine weeks. By the end of the study, the contrast sensitivity of those who trained on action games had improved more than those who played The Sims 2, and the benefits lasted for at least five months.

Other researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that adults with lazy eyes who spent 40 hours playing video games with their good eyes patched could improve their ability to distinguish smaller letters on such charts. The higher scores were not seen in those asked to do other visually demanding tasks such as reading and knitting with their good eyes patched. Researchers know from years of studies that when men and women are given the task of rotating two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects in their heads, men tend to perform better than women.

When Jing Feng, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, in Canada, and colleagues asked a small group of non-gamers to play either Medal of Honor or the 3D puzzle game Ballance for 10 hours over several sessions, they were surprised by the results. They found the action game training boosted the scores of the female participants more than it did the males, and the effect of the training was still apparent five months later.

So if playing video games can lead to beneficial brain changes, does this positively affect behaviour? Gentile set out to find out by testing the effects of playing "pro-social" games on young people in the US, Singapore and Japan. The children and teenagers in each study were more likely to help others in real life or in simulated tasks if they played the games where the characters co-operated, helped one another, or pitched in to clean a virtual neighbourhood.

What we now know is that across cultures and age groups computer games can either cause problems or be beneficial, depending on its content. He asked 46 German students to play Lemmings, in which players must protect groups of rodents from dangers, or Tetris.

They were then asked to complete three unfinished stories that included one about a driver and a cyclist who narrowly avoid a collision; another about two friends, one of whom is unapologetic despite being always late; and a third one about a customer speaking to a restaurant manager after waiting an hour to be served and having food spilt on him.

People who played Lemmings suggested less aggressive endings. Questions still remain about how long any effects could last. Gentile recently completed a study involving 3, schoolchildren, studied over three years. He expects to publish the results later this year. With violent games we see the exact opposite. Taken as a whole, the research poses a problem for those hoping that video games can provide a path to smarter, kinder young people.

Action games are high among the best-sellers, but they involve a lot more fighting and killing than caring and sharing.