PlayStation is good for you: video games improved mental health during COVID

Playing video games for a couple of hours a day can improve mental health, according to a study on gamers in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic1.
The research — which was done from December 2020 to March 2022 — found that even just owning a game console increased life satisfaction and reduced psychological distress. The results were published today in Nature Human Behaviour.
The findings are a first step towards demonstrating a causal link between gaming and mental-health benefits, says Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist who studies how video games influence players’ mental health at the University of Oxford, UK. “The study provides a worked example that games researchers all around the world should follow closely,” he says. But he adds that conducting the experiment during the pandemic could have amplified the mental-health benefits of gaming because people’s mental health was generally poorer at that time and there were fewer opportunities to engage in other activities. The effect on well-being will need to be tested outside that situation, he says.

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Although studies have explored the effects of gaming on addiction, well-being, cognitive function and aggression, the results have been mixed2,3. Most of this research has relied on observational data, which cannot be used to tease apart cause and effect, says study co-author Hiroyuki Egami, a behavioural scientist at Nihon University in Tokyo. Many video-gaming studies are also done in controlled laboratory settings, making it difficult to assess the mental-health effects of gaming in daily life, adds Egami.
Some three billion people play video games globally and, during the pandemic, that number surged. In Japan, this spike in demand led to a shortage of Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 (PS5) consoles. To handle this, retailers set up a lottery system that randomly selected consumers who could purchase a console when it became available. Egami and his colleagues saw an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment on gaming and mental health.

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The study focused on 8,192 people, aged between 10 and 69, who had entered the lottery. The team collected information about their mental health, video-game ownership and sociodemographic characteristics. The researchers sent five rounds of surveys to the participants, which included two checklists that measured psychological distress and life satisfaction. Participants were also asked whether they had played video games over the past 30 days and, if so, for how long.
Participants who got the opportunity to buy a Switch or PS5 console experienced a decline in their psychological distress and had a greater life satisfaction than respondents who missed out in the lottery. The mental-health benefits of owning a PS5 were more pronounced among men, hardcore gamers and households without children.
On the other hand, owning a Switch seemed to offer a greater well-being boost to family households and less-experienced gamers. This could be because the Switch is a portable console that can be played with family and friends, whereas the PS5 can only be played by connecting it to a television and is typically used by single players, says Egami.
Playing video games on either console increased life satisfaction among the lottery participants, and doing so for an extra hour a day led to a further improvement in mental health. However, these positive effects tapered off among players who spent more than three hours a day gaming, suggesting that a long playtime doesn’t lead to further improvements in mental health.
“These results are not surprising,” says Daniel Johnson, a psychologist who specializes in video games at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. “They fit with what we know from talking to video-game players for decades.”
Przybylski adds that a limitation of the study is that it didn’t investigate other factors that could affect gamers’ mental health, such as how they approach playing and their games of choice.
Egami says the next step is to replicate the study to see whether the findings hold up outside a pandemic. “The result might be different,” he says.