The team cautioned that their review did not indicate why certain video game interventions performed better than others. They also found that some of the video games included in the studies are not easily accessible, since they are not available online or are behind pay walls. An estimated 20% of children and teenagers between the ages of 3 and 17 in the U.S. have a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder. Suicidal behaviors among high school students also increased by more than 40% in the 10 years prior to 2019, according to a report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
With the global lockdowns, I became increasingly concerned about the lack of good co-op games. All You Need is Help was born out of the team’s inability to closely communicate with each other during the pandemic as everyone kind of got buried in their own bubble. For two weeks, we held a game jam at the office and made a variety of prototypes. All You Need is Help was the favorite and helped the staff come together at a difficult time, providing a sense of cooperation and camaraderie.
It’s a delicate mix of entertainment and strategy, yet on a much deeper level, playing games may contribute to our overall evolutionary survival. Playing games could even be enhancing our cognitive, social, and physical skills, giving us added advantages in life. Role-playing and other strategic games can help strengthen problem-solving skills. There’s little research that says violent video games are bad for your mental health. Almost any game that encourages decision-making and critical thinking is beneficial for your mental health.
New research suggests playing video games has lots of benefits
No one is confusing Fortnite with edtech, but online social games would seem to have some leg up. “Anything where you’re actively engaging, preferably with other people in a healthy way, is going to be the healthiest kind of screen time behavior,” Kaye added. That may be a consideration as parents struggle with whether to moderate screen time. There is “little evidence for substantial negative associations between digital-screen engagement … “Online games have been historically portrayed as what people in research call pseudo-communities,” said Dr. Rachel Kowert, the research director of the nonprofit Take This, who studies the psychological effects of video games.
One study [PDF] that tracked players and measured heart rate found that players enjoyed decreased stress. We all know someone who seems to have a faster CPU than the rest of us, game quiz able to retrieve information or react in a split second. Because new information is constantly being displayed during play, players are forced to adapt quickly. In one study, players who were immersed in fast-paced games were 25 percent faster in reacting to questions about an image they had just seen compared to non-players.
Multiplayer and online games are good for virtual social interaction. In fast-paced game settings, you’ll need to learn who to trust and who to leave behind within the game. It’s also a low-stakes environment for you to test out talking to and fostering relationships with new people.
Learning to think on your feet and strategize in a fast-paced fantasy environment is a skill that can translate to the real world. One long-term study published in 2013 showed that children who played strategy-based games showed an improvement in problem-solving skills—and thus, tended to get better grades—the next school year. The stereotype of a shy person who uses video games as a way to escape is not what the average gamer looks like. The study also found that playing video games can help young people relate to others better, with 65% saying that gaming helped them imagine being someone else. You may have heard about gaming addictions and dodgy in-game purchases, but some new research suggests playing video games might actually be good for you. When you play video games, almost every part of your brain is working to help you achieve higher-level thinking.
Players often share personal problems, challenges in their relationships, or difficult feelings such as loneliness. The outpouring of compassion and support they receive from the group in such instances fosters powerful feelings of connection and community. While some games are thought to induce stress—especially when you see your character struck down for the umpteenth time—the opposite can be true.
Limits of Video Games as a Mood Booster
Games have long been accused of making players violent, but evidence has been building over the years that they can have positive effects. Scientists say they are not only understanding why, but they also trying to put these observations to the test. Turning her grueling recovery process into a game motivated her to do all of the boring and painful tasks that helped heal her brain. After she recovered, she turned it into a complete game called SuperBetter and released it for free.
Despite video game research being a recent phenomenon, it’s proven that video games do provide out-and-out brain gains—good news for those of us partial to a video game (or two, or three, or 400). They can, however, have the potential to suck us in to a degree that isn’t healthy, which could potentially manifest as video game addiction. Though the stance is controversial, some researchers have asserted that action games may reduce a bully’s motivation to—well, bully. One study that had players assume the role of both the hero and villain showed that those controlling the bad guy’s behaviors displayed a greater sense of remorse over their actions. So-called “brain games” involving problem-solving, memory, and puzzle components have been shown to have a positive benefit on older players.
What Gaming Does to Your Brain—and How You Might Benefit
Nathan Lents, professor of biology at John Jay College, says that when kittens play, it might serve as a “warm-up for doing the real thing as adults.” Attacking a toy mouse for fun turns into hunting prey for food in later years. Similarly, it’s possible that the pleasure children get from wearing costumes and acting out roles they see around them is practice for later in life. “One of evolution’s greatest tricks was to link up behaviors and stimuli that are good for us to our reward centers, as a way to drive us to engage those experiences and thereby gain the benefits that they offer,” Lents says.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children under 2 should have no screen time and kids ages 2 to 5 should get an hour or less of screen time per weekday and three hours on the weekend days (and Dr. Manos agrees that this is a good rule of thumb). All You Need is Help also has cross-platform support so players will be able to play with all of their friends, regardless of the platform they downloaded it on. All You Need is Help is a four-player game, so grab three friends and play together, via couch co-op or online play. All You Need Is Help marks the 17th entry in the legendary PixelJunk series, which started 17 years ago. At its core, All You Need is Help is a puzzle game where you are unable to rotate your own character, so like the name suggests – you really need to help each other by rotating your characters and working together to find the solution.
With such good reasons to play, why not tailor schools to tap into this concept? Ana Lorena Fabrega, a former teacher, helped design a school that focuses on the impactful benefits of play. She’s now chief evangelist at Synthesis, a school that believes kids are hard-wired to learn through play and gamifies as many learning principles as possible. Lessons are problem-focused, not tool-focused, and encourage students to “take ownership over their choices and develop a sense of self-efficacy.” There is no losing, only winning or learning.