BRAIN AND NERVE CARE

Playing Video Games Is Good for Your Brain

By Kristie Reilly and Sherry Baker @SherryNewsViews
 | 
June 28, 2022
Family Playing Video Games --- Image by © Artiga Photo/Corbis

Playing video games can be good for your brain. Certain games may improve memory and reaction time and even improve your ability to cooperate.

Since the 1980s, researchers have debated whether video games have negative effects on people who play them. Yet a spate of research over the past decade suggests playing video games can be good for you, too, potentially enhancing mental health.

In fact, a study of the potential beneficial impact of video games, published in American Psychologist, noted video games were linked to increased cognitive skills, such as spatial awareness, mental sharpness, reaction time, and creativity. Those skills, the researchers explained, may even transfer to settings outside the game and are perhaps one reason why the U.S. Army has used video games to train and recruit for decades.

A new crop of video games goes further: they’re designed to improve mental health. There are even versions for adults.

Because of the potential of some video games to boost memory, University of California, Irvine neurobiologists are studying how 3-D video games can not only improve eye-hand coordination and reaction time but also have the potential for novel virtual approaches to preserving or improving memory as people age.

 

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Smarter video games

“I think that maybe we’re finally getting to the point where we’re starting to get smarter about this,” says psychologist Douglas Gentile, PhD. “Designers have realized just how valuable their games can be and have started to dream bigger than they have before. I’m hoping that finally we’re starting to catch up to the promise that gaming has always had.”

Gentile, an associate professor of developmental psychology at Iowa State University, is an expert on the effects of video games. He has studied both the positive and negative effects of the games for over 30 years. He notes that violent video games have been connected to an increase in aggressive thoughts, such as playground bullying in children. Yet, he’s also found that more cooperative games have overtly positive benefits, too.

In a study of more than 2,300 children in Singapore, Gentile and a team of researchers found children who played prosocial games — those that included an element of helping others — showed more empathy, helpfulness, and cooperativeness over the two years of the study. Meanwhile, children who played violent video games demonstrated a decrease in such useful behaviors in the same period, and an increase in less helpful behavior.

Gaming can absolutely affect behaviors, Gentile says. “And, really, there should be no surprise. Because what we’re talking about here is learning. And anything you practice, you learn, right? There’s no way to stop your brain from learning.”

The catch, Gentile says, is that “games for good” have to be fun to play. “That’s the problem — gamifying something doesn’t immediately make it work. Why is it educational games don’t have a really good track record in school? It’s because they suck. It’s because they’re not fun to play. Just making it a game doesn’t actually make it work.”

For children, Gentile recommends The Sims game series, in which players create and manage and organize a virtual community. Another, Animal Crossing, involves helping neighbors around the user’s recently purchased home. (The appeal of both games is longstanding: Sims is one of the best-selling games in history, and Gentile’s daughters, he says, continued to play Animal Crossing even when they reached their teen years.) Video games can even be modified to suit cooperative, prosocial ends: one researcher customized the popular game Minecraft to create a world in which users are required to interact cooperatively to achieve certain goals.  

Try these games for mental health

For adults, try these cutting-edge mental health games, developed by gamers and psychology researchers:

  • SuperBetter aims to increase personal resilience. Created by veteran game designer Jane McGonigal to help herself recover from a severe concussion, SuperBetter claims to develop physical, mental, emotional, and social strength via games that help you tackle tough challenges while receiving support and developing resilience.
  • In Mindbloom’s Life Game — tagline: “Grow the life you want” — players are encouraged to pursue meaningful activities of their own choosing. They then receive rewards for performing those activities in everyday life. Other game-like apps from the company focus on improving quality of life, gaining momentum, tracking energy, and other positive goals.
  • The well-designed app Happify uses the principles of positive psychology to focus on increasing happiness, personal meaning, and social engagement in interactive games and assignments.

Used frequently, such games retrain the brain, Gentile says — in essence serving as a form of self-therapy. “I think apps like this can help slow down the pattern of habitual response. That’s what a good therapist does.”

 

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Updated:  

June 28, 2022

Reviewed By:  

Janet O’Dell, RN