Playing video games has no effect on wellbeing, study finds

Time spent playing video games has no effect on people's wellbeing, a study from the University of Oxford has found, countering fears that gaming could be harmful to mental health. Unlike the vast majority of previous studies on the effect of video games on wellbeing, the Oxford team were able to track actual gameplay, rather than relying on self-reported estimates. With the cooperation of seven different game publishers, who agreed to share data without control over publication, they were able to track the gameplay habits of almost 40,000 individual gamers, all of whom consented to join the study. The scale of the study provided strong evidence for the lack of an effect on wellbeing, said Andy Przybylski, one of the researchers. "With 40,000 observations across six weeks, we really gave increases and decreases in video game play a fair chance to predict emotional states in life satisfaction, and we didn't find evidence for that – we found evidence that that's not true in a practically significant way."