Retirement has been most excellent. Although I did have the best job ever, the old saying is true: the worst day fishing is better than the best day working. Not that I fish. Just substitute any non-work past time for the word fishing.
I have a nice routine, each day spent in some combination of walking, reading, writing and cooking. I got out of the habit of watching TV when I worked, and never returned. Whenever I watched a show, I just got bored and/or pissed, mostly at the inane dialog and plot. Same with movies. Why spend 40 bucks to sit in a room to watch crap with folks who cannot/will not shut up or turn off their phones?
We do go to most of the plays in town; almost always the writing and plot are clever and/or interesting. So different than the slop that comes out of Hollywood. You do not need AI to create slop.
Most evenings I relax with a video game. Or not. There was nothing relaxing about the Last of Us. Best video game ever, HBO version crap. Why does Hollywood usually ignore what made the source material so compelling and substitute crap? What made Lord of the Rings or No Country for Old Men so good is the movies stayed true to the source material.
If you want good writing and good plot, can’t beat a video game. My wife? She thinks video gaming is a stupid waste of time. A grown-ass man playing a video game. I will be a gentleman and not mention what she considers a worthwhile way to spend a rainy Portland winter night. Renovation show. I’m sorry. Who said that?
Anyway, I wondered if playing video games has any benefits or harms. This is over and above the enjoyment derived from an excellent art form. I know everything causes cancer, so that’s a given. There are also a tremendous number of video game genres; I lean to horror survival, aka living during the Trump administration. So I would expect that different genres would have different beneficial or deleterious effects or cause a different cancer.
As a note, I often know where these blog posts are going to go before I start writing them. I this case, I really do not know what the literature is going to say. So let’s jump into the literature, shall we, and see. And, regardless of the conclusions, it will not change my behavior. Video games are fun, and I will continue playing them. The NYT always has articles like Is Frozen Yogurt Better for You Than Ice Cream? Who cares? Frozen yogurt is blech compared to ice cream. I’m going to eat ice cream. Along with potato chips, cake, and negronis. Cause they are delicious, at least in moderation. You ever OD on chips? Bad business.
I am going to focus on normal video game playing, not addicted playing. And I am also going to focus on effects on adults, not children and adolescents. People like me. But you know the saying, you are only young once, but you can be immature all your life.
Physiology
The physiological and biochemical effects of gaming: A review. Looking at 52 studies, they concluded there are no conclusions. Might as well stop here.
This field is heterogenic and does not lend itself to firm conclusions.
As I will sum up, that applies to all aspects of the literature on the topic.
Rationalizations
Why play? We need excuses, even for Bejeweled Blitz, which is not my cup of tea. Older adults liked playing against friends. It is always fun to beat a friend. And older adults thought they
were more likely to feel that their visuospatial skills and response time benefited. …they believe that they derive a number of benefits that, for older adults, appear to offset declines in age-sensitive cognitive functions.
Memory
If I remember the literature, playing video games improves memory. Not that I can tell. I call my wife of 40 years honey so I do not have to remember her name.
Enriching hippocampal memory function in older adults through video games
Compared adults who
played Angry Birds or Super Mario 3D World on a Nintendo Wii U. However, in place of a no-contact control, we employed an active control condition of playing computer-based Solitaire.
Two uninspiring games. Certainly, no A Plague Tale. But playing the platformers improved
hippocampal-based memory measured with the MST and may extend to the Rey-O. In conjunction with our previous work, we have shown that these video game interventions are practical, short (4 weeks) with a low daily commitment (~30 minutes/day), can be done remotely at home, and are effective. These studies highlight a real potential of using video games as a therapeutic intervention for age-related cognitive decline.
Other studies have demonstrated variable hippocampal effects depending on the game.
In another study
playing video games might enhance the usage of declarative knowledge as well as hippocampal involvement and enhances overall learning performance during probabilistic learning. In contrast to non-gamers, video gamers showed better categorization performance, independently of the uncertainty of the condition.
Here, we suggest that the exploration of vast and visually stimulating environments within modern-day video games can act as a human correlate of environmental enrichment. Training naive video gamers in a rich 3D, but not 2D, video game, resulted in a significant improvement in hippocampus-associated cognition using several behavioral measures. Our results suggest that modern day video games may provide meaningful stimulation to the human hippocampus.
and
Results suggest that playing an easily accessible video game in older age can enhance cognitive functioning.
Again a mess, as different studies will show different effects on cognition
nearly all of the relations between video-game experience and cognitive abilities were near zero. These results cast doubt on recent claims that playing video games leads to enhanced cognitive abilities.
One meta-analysis, Digital Games for Cognitive Enhancement in Healthy Older Adults: A Scoping Review, suggested
Cognitive outcomes were assessed across several domains, including executive function, memory, attention, processing speed, and language. Motor skills and executive function showed the greatest improvements; however, mixed outcomes were observed for other domains. Factors such as game complexity and participant demographics influenced variability, with complex games yielding greater benefits and device type having minimal impact. These findings suggest that digital games can be used as cognitive interventions for healthy older adults, particularly for executive function.
So maybe playing video games improves memory, maybe they don’t. But that is not a reason to play.
Sleep
Video gaming and sleep in adults: A systematic review suggests effects on sleep depend on the game:
Observational studies showed an association between excessive video gaming, poor sleep quality, and delayed sleep timing, whereas habitual and/or casual use was not associated with poor sleep and some studies even showed a beneficial effect on daytime functioning. Experimental evidence shows that playing an Bejeweled Blitz arousing VG before sleep delays sleep onset with possible alteration of sleep structure, whereas non-arousing cognitively challenging video gaming resulted in improved sleep continuity, stability, and organization.
Which makes sense. If you are trying to survive a bloater, that’s arousing and will wake you up. Like a cup of coffee, avoid gaming just before bedtime.
This result is supported in other studies, such as
Sleep quality is negatively related to video gaming volume in adults
gaming volume is negatively related to the overall sleep quality of adults, which might be due to underlying mechanisms of screen exposure and arousal.
Vision
playing stereoscopic three-dimensional, but not flat two-dimensional, first person shooter video games enhances stereo vision in adults with normal vision. This work suggests that exposure to disparity cues in a virtual gaming environment can induce plasticity of depth perception.
Not certain that I can use this as an excuse to get an Oculus, but I never Meta 3D game I wanted.
Global visual attention SPAN in different video game genres
The action video game group showed a significant correlation between visual attention span performance and weekly hours played.
Although my wife says trying to get my attention isn’t that easy while playing a game.
Mental Health
Psychiatrists’ Perceptions of Role-Playing Games
Twenty-three percent have played a role-playing game over their lifetimes. Twenty-two percent believed there was an association between psychopathology and role-playing games. A majority of psychiatrists who responded do not associate role-playing games with psychopathology. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.
I like that. Believe. Just what I want from my psychiatrist. If I had one. Which I don’t.
In the current study, a sample of more than 3000 youth from Singapore were examined by using preregistered analyses to determine whether early exposure to aggressive games was predictive of anxiety, depression, somatic symptoms, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder 2 years later. Analyses suggested that exposure to AVGs is not a risk factor for later mental health symptoms.
Good. Safe for the last decade or so of my life.
Perceived psychological benefits from video games were correlated with self-determination theory domains: autonomy, competence and relatedness; and with wellbeing theory. Despite players’ beliefs, MOBA-players had lower psychological wellbeing scores, disproportionately impacting male players. As the consequences of gaming toxicity and online harassment become more apparent, this connection may warrant further investigation. RPGs were perceived to be the most beneficial genre, particularly by female gamers. Interestingly, survival horror games, most often played by men, might be of benefit to all genders.
The benefits were for wellbeing (emotional, psychological and social), self-determination and flow. Flow being
…is a state of mind characterized by immersion, accomplishment, focus and loss of time awareness. It is inherently pleasurable and linked to positive affect, better performance, lower anxiety and increased self-esteem
You get in that zone and time vanishes. Suddenly realizing it is 3 a.m. and you have to get to work in three hours? Not so good. This is one of the few studies that looks at the results of playing real-world video games.
College Student Video Gaming: Risk or Resilience for Mental Health?.
Our findings demonstrate a minimal influence of video gaming on stress and anxiety levels among college students.
But perhaps you will feel beneficient towards your fellow man: Effects of playing video games on perceptions of one’s humanity found
that playing a prosocial video game (where the goal is to help and care for other game characters) led to increased perceptions of the player’s own humanity (in particular, for positive humanity traits). Results also revealed that playing a violent, relative to a neutral, video game decreased perceptions of humanity on positive humanity traits and increased perceptions of humanity on negative humanity traits.
Emotions
association between the time devoted to playing video games and emotional creativity. Surprisingly, in most of the cases, the association was negative, meaning that more time devoted to video games is associated with lower emotional creativity and some of its components (preparedness, novelty, effectiveness) for the whole sample.
It is mostly an issue for men, but they did not describe the types of games played. And emotional creativity? To be stereotypical, avoiding emotions and thinking about them by playing video games sounds good to me. One of the few big fights of my marriage was after birth class, where I was asked to share my feelings about becoming a father. I replied, “I think feelings are like bodily fluids. I don’t share them with strangers.” Ole what’s her name was not amused.
Become A Troll
According to Effects of sexualized video games on online sexual harassment
These findings indicate that sexualization of female characters in a video game can be a sufficient condition to provoke online sexual harassment toward women.
What was that all about? The game was Ultra Street Fighter IV. Participants either played as sexualized (in revealing swimsuits) or non-sexualized (covered up) fighters and found that those who played as sexualized fighters were more likely to send sexist jokes than non-sexist jokes. Of note
female participants sent significantly more sexist jokes than male participants.
I would also note that the examples of non-sexist jokes were not funny. The sexist ones were. I would be more likely to send a funny joke.
I would be skeptical the results can be applied to other video games.
As always, the medical literature’s version of Newton’s second law: for every study, there is an equal and opposite study. Sexist games=sexist gamers? A longitudinal study on the relationship between video game use and sexist attitudes.
Controlling for age and education, it was found that sexist attitudes–measured with a brief scale assessing beliefs about gender roles in society–were not related to the amount of daily video game use or preference for specific genres for both female and male players.
Exposure to sexualised content in video games was neither correlated with higher sexist attitude ratings nor with lower empathy scores. Sexualised content in games was associated with slightly lower sexist belief scores for those with higher scores on trait aggression.
Stress Reduction
A Plague(d) Tale: Are violent video games effective in reducing stress levels?
One group played two violent passages of A Plague Tale: Requiem , while the other played two non-violent passages for 25 minutes.
Aggressive behavior was measured as self-reports and seconds in the Cold Pressor Test allocated to the next participant. In line with previous studies, participants playing a violent passage of a game reported feeling more stressed and aggressive, while those playing a non-violent passage of the same game felt less stressed and more relaxed. In contrast, however, we found an increase in heart rate variability as well as a decrease in heart rate and cortisol regardless of playing group, which indicates relaxation. This dissociation between self-reported and physiological stress results indicates that the own state of arousal is incorrectly assessed. This may be due to a different cognitive assessment of the characteristics of the respective game groups, as the violent game sequence was judged to be more difficult and challenging. However, the observed physiological relaxation effect might also suggest the potential of video game engagement for stress interventions.
I have played A Plague Tale: Requiem. One of my all-time favorites and it is really intense. Not a surprise, players felt stressed while playing the violent passages and those playing the nonviolent parts did not. But both groups had the same physiologic response while playing. For an N of 1, while some games can be very stressful, when done, I often feel relaxed, have a smoke, roll over, and go to sleep.
Math
Effects of Action Video Game Play on Arithmetic Performance in Adults
After 40 minutes of video game training, the arithmetic problem-solving speed and accuracy of non-AVG group increased, while the AVG group’s arithmetic performance decreased, thus suggesting a possibility of state effects of a non-AVG training on arithmetic performance. The state effects did not persist over time;
suggesting they did a study that was unimpressive and demonstrated nothing of note but published it anyway.
Violence
This topic is a mess. Do violent video games promote aggression, reduce pro-social behavior, increase impulsivity and interfere with cognition as well as mood? You can get out of the literature what you want. In adults, gaming doesn’t have that effect. One example
Our participants played the violent video game Grand Theft Auto V, the non-violent video game The Sims 3 or no game at all for 2 months on a daily basis. No significant changes were observed, neither when comparing the group playing a violent video game to a group playing a non-violent game, nor to a passive control group.
and supported in some meta-analyses
Once corrected for publication bias, studies of video game violence provided no support for the hypothesis that violent video game playing is associated with higher aggression. However playing violent video games remained related to higher visuospatial cognition.
Not that these games are really going to help you when attacked in real life. In “Boom, Headshot!”: Violent first-person shooter (FPS) video games that reward headshots train individuals to aim for the head when shooting a realistic firearm, video games conditioned players to shoot real guns at the head, which is a small target. Gonna shoot someone, aim at the upper torso. Nice and big. Easier to hit.
As an anecdote, recognizing that the plural of anecdotes is anecdotes, not data, in most of the games I play, you are dropped into a situation where it is kill or be killed, fighting against grotesque monsters or evil to protect you and yours. There is a moral justification for the death you deal.
I am four-fifths of the way through Uncharted 4 (really fun) and there is an odd disconnect between the happy-go-lucky protagonist and the mass murder he commits. As of today, I have ‘defeated’ i.e., killed, 477 people. And these are not evil people, they are hired guards and soldiers. And I am slaughtering all these people in pursuit of a treasure to save one person. Mr. Spock would not approve. And it turns out the rationalization for saving the one was all a lie, so all the mass murder was unjustified. It feels wrong.
There is a term in gaming for this, Ludonarrative Dissonance, where
Ludonarrative Dissonance is the conflict in a game that occurs when a game’s storyline doesn’t gel well with the games gameplay. “Ludo” is Latin for “Game” by the way.
In Uncharted 4 there is an achievement called “Ludonarrative Dissonance” if you kill 1000 enemies.
I mention this only to point out that video game violence and the reaction to it can be complicated.
Death
Sudden gamer death: non-violent death cases linked to playing video games
24 cases were found: one from 1982, the others between 2002 and 2021. Twenty-three of the victims were male, age ranged from 11 to 40 years. More than half of the cases originated from Southeast Asia, and 12 deaths happened in internet cafes. Gamers played action-rich multiplayer games. In 18 cases the gaming session before death was extremely long (around a day or even several days) with minimal rest. The cause of death was pulmonary embolism in 5 cases, cerebral hemorrhage in 2 cases, most of the rest was presumably due to fatal cardiac arrhythmia.
It wasn’t the game per se that killed them. And not as risky as long flights. I’ll stick with video games.
Conclusion
There are over 5000 hits on PubMed if you use ‘video games’ as the search criteria and over 500 if you search for ‘video games adults.’ So I only looked at a small subset of the literature. Overall, I was less than impressed with what I read. These studies are mostly divorced from real-world video game playing. Mostly short play times, and rarely do they cover the variety and depth of these games. Outcomes are mostly based on surveys.
Take A Plague Tale. Requiem, mentioned above. Victims, er, I mean participants, played for 90 minutes. The game took me 40 hours to complete, about what it took me to read Bleak House or a Game of Thrones book. In the game, you play as a 16-year-old girl, Amecia, trying to protect and find a cure for her little brother, the source of the supernatural plague. Your weapon is a sling, not all that effective against armored knights. Most of the time you are sneaking past enemies or modifying the environment so rats do the dirty work. And man, those rats. Amecia is far more prey than predator.
After traveling across a plague- and war-ravaged medieval France, you reach the end of the story. There are many reactions to playing this game (spoiler, don’t click if you think you might play this), but aggression? I think not.
Sure, there are awful people who make awful games played by awful gamers. What’s new? That applies to all forms of human creation.
It is a literature I found mostly irrelevant, at least to my time as a gamer. The variety of video games is ginormous and any statement that starts “video games cause…” can be ignored. And it is a literature where you can confirm any bias you have. Color me unimpressed. If there were well-done, convincing, applicable research on the effects of gaming on adults, it avoided my search. Next time someone says there are benefits, or detriments (outside of fun), to video games, take it with a grain of salt substitute.
Now I need to get back to my game. I have 523 people to ‘defeat’ for my ludonarrative dissonance achievement.