Gamers rejoice! Because a study found that video games had little impact on people’s wellbeing. Oxford University carried out the research. Instead of just collecting data on gamers’ experiences, this study tracked their actual gameplay. Oxford University used data shared by seven game publishers. With their permission, 40,000 players had their playing patterns monitored.
One of the researchers, Andy Przybylski, claimed that the size of the study was significant evidence that gaming had no impact on players’ wellbeing.
‘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,’ said Przybylski who was quoted by The Guardian.
Players were questioned about their motivations for playing—whether positive ones like making friends and having fun, or unhealthy ones like feeling pressure to achieve gaming goals. It was discovered that even people who desired to play for bad motives tended to feel satisfied all around.
The report did provide a warning, though. Even though it was shown that playing video games had no negative effects on wellbeing, this finding did not hold true if a player raised their gaming time by 10 hours per day.
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