A Japanese lottery for Nintendo and PlayStation devices resulted in a natural experiment on how video games affect people’s well-being.
Playing video games may be good for your mental health, according to a large new study conducted in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the pandemic upended global supply chains in 2020, demand for video games far outpaced the available supply, so Japanese retailers used a lottery system to decide who could buy two major consoles, the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 (PS5).
Researchers saw an opportunity for a natural experiment on how this random distribution of games played out.
They surveyed nearly 98,000 people – including about 8,200 people who participated in the lottery – and found that getting a console curbed people’s psychological distress and improved their life satisfaction.
Playing games also improved their overall mental well-being, according to the study, which was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
In real terms, the impact on gamers was likely “minor but perceptible,” Nick Ballou, a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute who studies the link between gaming and mental health and was not involved in the new study, told Euronews Health.
The dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic could have skewed the results, given people generally had poorer mental health and were less able to socialise and pursue other hobbies, particularly in the pandemic’s early months.
“We have lots of evidence that people turned to games as a lifeline in the early part of the pandemic,” Ballou said. His own work found that games helped some people cope with the mental toll of the COVID-19 era.