The Surprising Benefits of Video Games: What Science Really Says

I very distinctly remember and a key points like when I found out about his diagnosis and not long after he died that I turned to videogames as a sort of solace the all listening to the science focused podcast from the BBC sites focus Magazine team with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world find out more at science focused calm or look out for us in your App Store hello and welcome to the science focused podcast I'm sorry Kathy the online assistant of BBC science focus magazine this week we dive into the world of video games over the past couple of decades video games have often got a bad rap blamed for everything from aggression and violence

to addiction and mental health problems but what does the research actually say dr. Pete edgehill's is a psychologist at Bath Spa University who researches the behavioural effects of video games in his first book lost in a good game he gets to the bottom of our relationship with games and reveals a more positive side to our game playing habits here is our staff writer James Lloyd speaking to Pete I'm so Pete I was wondering why did you decide to write a book about video games what set you out on that journey it's a really good question I so I didn't start off doing video game research back in the early days of the mid 2000 2008 2010 I was I was doing work on vision research vision psychology so trying to understand how

and why we make eye movements to things that are moving around us I've been a gamer most of my life and the thing that kind of sparked my interest in doing research in this sort of area was just kind of really reading news stories around quite worrying stories around have videogames affect us there's always one that really sticks in my mind I think it's from around about 2011 where somebody was quoted in the news as saying that video games or computer games caused early onset dementia and kids and it's not so much that I got annoyed at those sorts of stories it's just that I didn't quite understand why people were worrying about those aspects of games that there's no evidence for and

there was no need to worry about really it kind of came from a viewpoint that was really based in somebody who'd not really approached video games in their life before and I think that's what piqued my interest really is that a lot of people who are scared about video games and the effects that they have probably don't have much experience of them and that's understandable really if you see if you know if you've never played a video game before and you watch somebody playing a video game it looks like a really jarring experience right somebody's staring at a screen yeah it looks as though they're completely absorbed in it looks like they're doing it on their own absolutely and if

you don't understand what's going on it's it's no small wonder that people worry about that sort of experience so it's kind of stories in the news like that made me think well you know what do we know about how video games affect us and that kind of spurred me into doing research that's primarily really stuck to the whether the old question of whether playing volume video games causes aggression but I do other work as well in terms of a little bit of work on addiction and also work on screen time more generally so the screens generally have any sort of positive or negative effect okay so we'll come on to that in a minute and I was going to ask you said that you yourself are a gamer when did your love for video games begin I don't

think I can pinpoint a specific time I've already I've always had video games around really I think the first quote-on-quote gaming console wasn't really a console that I remember was I had an Atari ST when I was really young when I was about six or seven more of a computer obviously but I remember playing all sorts games on that I do remember having access to things like a spectrum Zed X when it was a little bit younger than that and an atari 520 but it's just something that i've always been around really so it's just it's never felt as though there was a momentous moment where I wasn't playing video games before and then I did playing them it's just been a part of my life for as long as I can remember

everything so you mentioned there the link between video games and violence and that seems to be what causes the most controversy in the media the games for the loss of graphic violence and gore and there have been lots of headlines over the years linking video games to aggression and violence what does the research actually say about this do you know it's a really hard question to answer from a scientific point of view I think one of the things that frustrates me the most about the perception around video games research is that you know I talk about what I do in the news quite a lot and you get quite sarcastic comments from people saying oh you've you've found a cure for

cancer yeah and I get where they're coming from it's the implication that you know games are sort of perceived to be a childish pastime and why would you as a scientist waste your time on them but two things to say about that one is that actually I think it's really important to understand what the effects of games are because we are so worried about whether they're bad for us or good for us because so many people play them the second thing is that actually as a science it's really hard to do this or stuff right so it's really hard to get somebody into a lab in a really controlled condition set of conditions and give them if some people have been a violent game to play so in other people

a non-violent game and for that to be really nicely controlled so that you can really just isolate the effects of violence and do that in such a way that you can be convinced that whatever effects on behavior you do see are a because of that violent content and be long term and it's very difficult to do that so what kinds of studies are normally done then to test this link there's this generally sort of - site types of study so there are experimental studies that try and test a causal link so you selectively manipulate things like the violent content of games and see whether that has an effect on some sort of measure of aggression and there are real problems with how we measure

that yeah so it's gonna ask how do you actually go about measuring aggression in a lab you know obviously with someone in a lab you're not going to get them to do you aggressive acts or violent acts ercel yeah well that's the thing when you read a lot of these papers they often start by saying something along the lines of there was a they might talk about a particular shooting in the US and there was a discussion and controversy around that shooting that suggested that the person who perpetrated that to violence played a lot of violent video games and therefore it's an important societal questions or answer because ideally we want if it's the case that playing violent video games causes people to do that

then we want to be able to try and stop that from happening that's the sort of aggression that a lot of people are talking about quite a lot but you can't measure that in a lab you can't get people to beat each other up it's just never going to get through ethical approval so what we end up having to do is use what we call proxy measures of aggression so things that look like aggressive behavior but aren't people actually directly hurting each other and that's where the problems start to come in so one of the most common measures that people use in research is called the competitive reaction time task so the basic setup here is that you get people to play a violent or a non

violent game whatever that means and then you say afterwards okay we're going to do a different game now we're going to take you into a room on your own and you're gonna play a reaction time game so basically something's going to pop up on the screen like a red blob or something as soon as it does that you gotta press the spacebar as quickly as possible you're gonna be playing it against somebody else in a different room somewhere else in the university that person actually in reality doesn't exist it's all controlled by the computer but there's a competitive element to it so you're told that if you win you get to punish your opponent by blasting them with a loud noise if you lose they get to punish you with the same thing and you get to decide how

loud the noise is and how long the blast lasts for so that's the measure of aggression so you'll be more aggressive if you punish your opponent as it were with a louder noise for longer the problem with that as a measure is that it is some form of aggression it's very different to beating people up or shooting people or being physically aggressive in the real world but also there's a lot of flexibility in how we analyze and test that measure so because you're testing two things you're changing the loudness and the duration what do you pick as you measure well in some studies they pick the average loudness across all of the trials of the experiment some studies they take the average duration some studies they take

the average loudness times the average duration in some studies you might just take the data from the very first trial in the experiment where because that's the only time where the participant will have one having never lost and you could argue that's unprovoked aggression some studies take only the data from trials where the participant won but they lost the previous trial so you might call that retaliatory aggression okay now the trouble with all of this is all well and good but if you look at the data across all of the different ways in which you can analyze it the study that came out a few years ago did precisely this they took a single data set and they analyzed it in about 30 or 40 different ways that you

find in the research literature and the problem there that found was that depending on the way that you analyze the same data you can show anything from showing that violent video games really definitely do cause aggression to that they definitely don't and everything in between so it's nothing to do with what's in the data itself it's entirely down to the decisions that you make as a researcher about which analysis method to use and then the follow-on problem with that to get a little bit more nerdy is that in theory is fine as long as there's a clear and logical consistent rationale for why you pick a certain analysis method and that doesn't exist in the literature so it's not clear why some researchers pick some

methods and others pick other methods so do we not really have any idea yet then on whether there is a link between aggression and video games so the best research that we have like with a lot of things in this sort of realm suggests that there are effects so there are small effects of playing video games I don't think anybody's suggesting that if you play a video game you won't have any effect on you at all because I think that would be unique literally everything that we do has an effect on us in some small way the question is whether that whether it's meaningful or not so the best research I think that we have so far suggests that there are some small effects there some small

correlations but they're not things to worry about so if you're worried about real-world physical aggression if you're worried about mental health issues my depression or anxiety video games might play a very small factor in that but they're not something that you really want to concentrate on too much there'll be other things that are much more important in terms of contributing factors the other thing I was going to ask you about in relation to their possible downsides of video games is you mentioned something else which you look at in your research which is the addictive side of them so last year the World Health Organization classified gaming disorders as a mental health

condition but how addictive are video games really I mean as a gamer myself I get the urge you know you just want to compete the next level you just want to spend a bit more time getting to the next bit of the game but obviously there's a difference between an urge and an actual proper addiction I guess isn't that yeah absolutely so I think there's a lot of complex issues going on here and I think actually what you just said there is really important one to tease apart that you know we worry about kind of compulsive behavior or that kind of urge to play the next level but that's not addiction when we're talking about addiction in a clinical sense it's a really serious very debilitating

disorder when it comes to video games this the picture is not a clear one at all certainly in my mind I know that there are other scientists out there that would disagree with me I think the problem is that if you talk about video games generally that is such a broad Church that it sort of becomes a meaningless question to ask asking whether video games generally are addictive is probably not the right way to approach the subjects because I think by and large the answer is no generally that's not to say that there aren't things to worry about video games so I think increasingly we are seeing gambling like mechanisms being introduced into games as a form of monetization so things like loot boxes particularly mobile games in freemium

games in-app purchases and microtransactions the way a lot of those were mimicked the way that things like fixed odds betting machines work and I think that's a real worry but then I think the argument is not so much that video games are addictive these gambling mechanisms which we already know are addictive which are being implemented in videogames that's causing the problem so I think most scientists are in agreement that there is ace there is a small number of people of individuals out there for whom if they play video games it can become a problematic thing it can become something that looks like an addiction and can cause harm in their lives where scientists disagree I think is in what the prevalence rates are so

what proportion of the gaming population might be susceptible to that and actually even more fundamentally than that what video game addiction looks like so historically if you look at how video game addiction research has played out over the past thirty years it started used things like gambling addiction questionnaires or substance use addiction questionnaires as a starting point so basically what you do is take a questionnaire that says you know has very sorts of questions about gambling you just replace the word gambling with gaming in there right that's a really good starting point it's completely reasonable to suggest that you know things to kind of behavioral things might share similarities but what

sort of happened since then is rather than there be a real drive to understand what the unique aspects of video game addiction might look like we've just kept reusing and reusing these questionnaires that are based on other sorts of disorders instead without really thinking about what that might be you know if you have a scale that's a really kind of facetious an example but if I have a one item questionnaire that says you know do you think you're addicted to video games between zero and ten people will put numbers on that right and then you can create an addiction scale right and say well if you score more than six on this one item scale you are addicted to video games and then a certain portion of the population will show addiction to video games but that's not

actually measuring addiction to video games right and it's the same sort of issue generally with literature like there are criteria that the w-h-o uses for instance and the DSM which is sort of the American version of the International classification of diseases that the whu-oh lists or the although that did meet the disease criterion the American version came out a few years ago enlisted internet gaming disorder is a potential disorder that warrants further research and in both of those situations one of the criteria was that you become preoccupied with video games and stop doing other hobbies instead that kind of makes sense when you're talking about heroine right so if

you start taking heroine which has no negative effects and you're doing that and you're not doing anything else that you used to do you can see how that would be a bad thing but video games are a hobby right they're designed to be a hobby that designed to be immersive and interactive and there's lots of different ways you can play them so if somebody starts playing one thing and stops doing other things there are hobbies is that a problem if I started playing golf and I did that and stopped doing everything else nobody'd say it'd be addicted to golf so we have this kind of fixation on video games being unique in that sense so you know and obviously a lot of people will say that they play video games and they

don't really do anything else so that sort of criterion has the potential to inflate the potential prevalence rate and I think that's the problem that a lot of scientists have with how the w-h-o is preceded with trying to include gaming disorders to the extent concept work where it does have an impact on your relationship with people and impact on your mental health I suppose if you do it too much absolutely there is there is a potential for that but the problem is that if you include these are the criteria which then might capture a lot of a lot of people who don't have a problem with video games but are suddenly classified as having a problem with video games two things happen one

is that you're over diagnosing so you're stigmatizing people because you're saying that they've got a disorder when they don't that can cause all sorts of extra pressures on treatment services of which there are non that are evidence-based at the minute really but it also means that the people that do have an actual problem video games kind of get lost in the noise because you're not really specifically targeting those people you're just targeting a much broader population so we've talked quite a lot about the suppose it downsides of video games I was going to ask you what are some of the ways in which video games can benefit us that's quite a big part of your book you talk about some of the

kind of psychological benefits that videogames can have so it's an interesting question and there's sort of two sides to this really so one is I think there's such a backlash against videogames we see so much about the negative effects of them in the news that we end up sometimes seeing stuff that goes too far the other way so we often see like stories about well here that here the unequivocal positive effects of benef benefits of videogames you know they make their improve our reaction times or they improve our hand-eye coordination or they improve our memory and things like that there are studies out there that show that there are some benefits in terms of cognitive performance but just in the

way that I'm not convinced about the aggression effects I'm not massively convinced about the positive effects literature is well I think again because it's such a hard thing to study and to do properly there's not that much in the way of good research so I think we got to be really careful about cherry-picking right so I think it's important not to say look all the bad I'm gonna be really critical about all the negative stuff and I'm gonna be really uncritical about all the positive stuff cuz I don't think that helps anyone really I think in the book the sorts of benefits that I talk about a lot of them are kind of anecdotal in a way and I think they're trying to push back against some of

those misconceptions about what video games are so for me I always find it quite strange when people say that they think that video playing video games is a really isolating experience because for me video games have been one of the most connecting experiences that I can think of you know I play a lot of World of Warcraft I'm in a guild there which is a group of players I've known these people for seven or eight years now and a lot of time I play the game you know sometimes I might not even play the game right I'm just sat there chatting to them it's basically a glorified social network and it's a way of keeping in touch and forming communities around people that have

similar interests he and I think that's a really powerful and important thing finding ways to talk to people when actually you might otherwise be isolated is a really important thing that the games can offer us they in freezingly I think are being used in scientific research so scientists are starting to realize that the kind of the immersive power that video games can happen they ute they're leveraging that to answer some really important and complex questions around the human condition basically so over the past few years for example there's been a mobile game that's free to download free to play called sea HeroQuest really nicely designed game where you navigate a little boat around a map so the idea is you kind of give in a

top-down view of the map to begin with you gotta try and memorize that and then you've got to navigate to some waypoints afterwards actually what's what's powering that is scientific research into trying to understand Alzheimer's disease in a way so one of the things that goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease is spatial navigation how you kind of figure out where to go in your environment and annoyingly we don't really have much information or much understanding of how that starts to go wrong because it's so difficult to diagnose Alzheimer's disease early on you've got to kind of factor out other sorts of things that it might be it also means that we don't have much of a handle on how that spatial navigation

ability declines early on we know what it's like in people who've got full blown-out Simas disease we know what it's like in healthy populations it's that transition that we don't know much about so see he requests that the hope behind that was that we gather loads and loads of data from people right across the age demographic spectrum and we can use that as a sort of database to try and understand what happens to spatial navigation abilities over time they've had millions and millions of players on this already I think there were so vestments of millions of years worth of data out there that they need to crunch and we're starting to see some emerging results from it now some really

interesting stuff so spatial navigation abilities seem to decline start to decline much earlier in life and we initially thought there are interesting cultural differences so they've they've done country-by-country analysis on this and found that there depending on how oppressive certain cultures are towards women you see stronger differences between men and women in terms of the spatial navigation abilities so one thing that I always worry about with this is that this idea of gamification where basically scientists sometimes make a lab based experiment and they make it kind of look like a game by adding a point scoring element to something like that they tend to be really rubbish like for people who play

video games you look at these things in like they're really poor production values and they look really tacking anything while it's not really a game but they're starting to see a realization that actually if you make really good games with high production values you can communicate the science and do science in a really interesting and novel way so you touched on it earlier Pete the ways in which video games had benefited you in your own life I wondered if you could tell me a little bit more about the role that they played as you were growing up how they helped you with them with the things that you're going through at the time yeah it's I think this it's obviously it's going to be different for everybody who

has their own kind of personal experiences with games I for better or worse I used games as a coping mechanism when I was younger when it was when I was 14 my dad died he had motor neurone disease and I've been living with him and looking after him for about two years before that and I very distinctly remember and a keypoints like when I found out about his diagnosis and not long after he died that I turned to videogames as a sort of solace it's a very fine balance I think because I think there are some situations where some people have turned to videogames and they've got completely lost in them and that's not necessarily a good thing for me it's been a very positive thing for me it's been a way to allow my brain to sort of process

something that kind of defies understanding really so just take a bit of a pause and say like I need to figure this out but to try and do something in the background as it were to help with that at the time so they've been immensely helpful for me in that sort of way I think we've started to see more recently more of an acknowledgement of the role that sort of role that video games can play I think it's coupled with the fact that people are finding it easier to talk about mental health issues now but we're starting to see games that are built either based on the own that the own experiences of the develop themselves or to help them cope with either mental health issues or grief or loss so I think and we're starting to

see big developers get involved in that as well so I think ei have got a new game coming out soon called sea of solitude that tackles some of these ideas around loneliness in depression so I'd be interesting to see how those sorts of things play out so do you think it's the escapism side of video games that give them these benefits then I suppose movies books all these things we do in our leisure time they're all a form of escapism really aren't they yeah I think video games offer more of an escape in a way I think they can in the sense that you know you can get really involved in a movie and really empathize with the main characters but you're still a sort of passive unlocker

whereas in video games you're actively you are the main character and that's quite an empowering thing so yeah but I think people play games for different reasons and I think even an individual person will play different games at different times for different reasons I think I got us recently you know whether the social element of games is really important for me and the answer that is yes because I play Warcraft it's probably the game that I play the most and there's a hugely social element to that but you know there are also times where I just want to play a game on my own and not really talk to anybody in just the zone out for a bit so I don't want all video games to have a social

element because that would be horrible because I've never been able to get away from before you know sometimes I just like playing Zelda on my own and just experience in that escape and going to another world is kind of like going on holiday for a little bit so would you say that escapism is a positive thing generally I think we got to be careful about it because I for me personally it's been a positive thing I am completely sympathetic to the viewpoint that for some people that can quite wrong I think like anything in life it's one of those situations where you've got to be moderate in the way that you do things and I think you've got to be aware of what it is that you're doing and with anything that we

do if you can kind of just have a little bit of a background commentary going on and just checking you know is this is this getting too much it's good to be able to do that and to know when to stop yeah I don't think video games are unique in that sense but I don't think that we should be blase about demeanor so it seems like the world of science and psychology is grappling still with quite a lot of issues around video games we talked about the aggression the violence issue we talked about the addictive side how would you think we can resolve these things and where would you like to see the conversation around video games go next that's a really good question I think one thing to begin with

really is that I would like to see video games researchers chill out with each other a little bit more certainly in the violent video game aggression research literature there's quite a lot of viciousness yeah ironically it's at to the point that there was a paper that came out a few years ago saying that had the title of something on lines of does doing violent media research make research as violent it's also somewhat tongue-in-cheek but there's a lot of ad hominem I think sometimes and there's something I talked about in the book and that you know there's there's been published commentaries where people say you know some people some researchers believe that violent video games don't

cause aggression of course also some people deny that the Holocaust happened it's completely outrageous things to say that don't help the science as well so I would like to see much more collaboration between scientists on different sides I don't think it will happen because I think we're too far beyond that but hopefully with the new generation researchers who are a little bit more open to that we can move the conversation I'd like to see scientists use more open research methods so make their data and their materials and their analysis scripts available for other researchers to scrutinize because sometimes with the best intentions we make mistake scientists are only human right we all make mistakes I would also like to see more

conversations between scientists and developers as well so I think developers often hold quite a lot of data about how people are using their games and I get that there are issues around Industry confidentiality around that but I think opening the doors and being much more collaborative and collegial about that will help everybody I think it's unhelpful sometimes and I know that there are people out there that would say well that's a risk because if you start doing research with games developers there's gonna be a massive conflict of interest that there are ways in which you can mitigate the influence the sort of either financial or business influence that might impact on your results there are ways in which

we can get around that and I think we should do that being open is one of them so yeah there's lots of things that I'd like to see happen in those sorts of realms really I think I'd like to see more sensible conversations happen in the media as well I think we are starting to see a shift in that happily and I think we're you know five six seven years ago it got a bit boring the fact that all of the conversations were playing Call of Duty causes Alzheimer's disease or causes people to become much more aggressive or no that's not true video games are great because they do they're it's like they were very much although nothing black or white conversations we're starting to see more

of a nuanced conversation happen now in a more mature conversation anything that was very that was Pete actuals talking about video games his book lost in a good game is out now on icon books thank you for listening to the science focused podcast in the latest issue of BBC science focus magazine we ask what if the Big Bang wasn't the beginning speak to Sir David Attenborough about his new TV show and explore how robots are being used to reveal how ancient animals moved as always there is much more inside and please don't forget to rate and review the episode where ever you download your podcasts thank you for listening to the site's focus podcast from the BBC science focus magazine team with the

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