With an estimated 4 billion active gamers worldwide, it’s a market that doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon as consoles thrive with casual players, PC leads the way for the growing esports market, and mobile remains the home for the widest gaming audience ever particularly as options like these have become more available with the likes of online casinos and online betting growing for an older audience – all of these eyes on gaming have led to further research too, and the old sentiment of too much screen time being bad is changing as the health benefits of gaming are quickly being discovered.
For quite some time now it has been understood that gaming can be a fantastic tool to help those suffering with stress and anxiety issues and can be done in a vast majority of ways too – not only does gaming result in a dopamine releases which is the bodies own feel good drug, but the engaging nature of games on any difficulty can also help to reduce stress by providing an achievable goal with a fixed outcome for success. Anxiety can be treated in much the same way, with games becoming more social with live chat features and even voice chat for more competitive games too, it has been used as a method to generate meaningful connections and a great way to release anxiety for some.
Speaking of social features in gaming, they’ve been credited as a fantastic tool for younger children especially as a way to develop a wide variety of social skills as players will often interact with others from different countries and from different backgrounds, whilst not directly a health benefit, the creativity and problem solving that comes with this social activity is gaining a lot more attention particularly over the past two years.
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Recent studies have shown that gaming can also be fantastic for eyesight, particularly those that suffer from poor eyesight. The visual stimulation from playing games with a lot on the screen at once like action games can be enough to help focus poor eyesight and can lead to longer lasting visual power too – crediting even with helping crucial tasks like driving at night, for example. Whilst this is something to be handled in moderation, a gaming regimen has been shown to do a lot more for eyesight than what had previously been thought.
Research into the health benefits are still relatively new only really becoming a point of focus over the past decade or so, as such there may still be some undiscovered and very influential health benefits yet to be discovered, but it does appear that much of what was previously believed to be true is changing with new evidence.
