You should play more video games, not less.

This is a topic that is close to my heart. I've been playing video games my whole life. And I've always enjoyed it.

But it is a commonly held opinion that video games are bad for you - and this opinion was shared by my parents too. I was always shouted at for sitting in front of the PC playing video games which was considered "useless". They would rather I spend my time reading a book or solving a math problem.

And it wasn't just my house. This was a widely held belief. Here are a couple of other myths that helped fuel the "video games are bad for you" narrative:

• Too much play time makes your eyesight worse.

• Playing games is a form of distraction and leads to attention problems.

And the internet doesn't help too. A few articles pushing the same narrative :

(Source: YouTube - Your brain on video games | Daphne Bavelier)

Reading through some of these articles, it became quite evident that most of them make baseless accusations or propagate the author's viewpoint without solid scientific backing.

So is there actual scientific data to indicate that playing video games is good?

In the search for an answer, I came across this TED talk by Daphne Bavelier - a brain scientist. She conducted lab studies along with her colleagues to understand the effects of video games on the human brain. The subjects of her study comprised both gamers (5-10 hours of game time/week) and non-gamers (<5 hours of screen time/week).

Here are a few instances from her work:

The Vision Tests

(Source: YouTube - Your brain on video games | Daphne Bavelier)

Action gamers clearly had better vision than non-gamers. And on further analysis they found that it was better in 2 ways:

1. They were able to resolve small details in the context of clutter. Practical uses would be reading the fine print on say, prescription boxes, very easily.
   

2. They were able to resolve different amounts of grey. Again, practically, imagine you were driving in a place filled with fog or at night. This trait helps in identifying objects through the fog.

This helped debunk one of the myths that we identified earlier in the post:

• Too much play time makes your eyesight worse
  

The Attention Test

"The Stroop effect refers to a delay in reaction times between congruent and incongruent stimuli (MacLeod, 1991). The congruency, or agreement, occurs when the meaning of a word and its font color is the same. For example, if the word “green” is printed in the color green. 'Incongruent stimuli' is just the opposite."- Charlotte Ruhl via Simply Psychology

Another test was 'Multiple Object Tracking' which tested the ability to keep track of multiple objects in the presence of various distractions.

Performing both these tests revealed that action gamers resolved this conflict faster and could track more objects than non-gamers.

All this helped debunk the next myth:

• Playing games is a form of distraction and leads to attention problems.

Brain Imaging

Brain imaging helped the team identify the impact of playing video games on the brain. And they observed that the main changes were to the brain networks that control attention.

These were the main areas affected by playing video games:

• The Parietal lobe - controls the orientation of attention

• Frontal lobe - controls sustaining attention

• Anterior cingulate - regulates attention

As seen from brain imaging, these networks of the brain were found to be more efficient in action gamers.

So is the conclusion that all video games are good?

Absolutely not.

Different video games have different effects on your brain. And it is paramount to see what elements of a particular video game would lead to an increase in cognition, vision, and attention.

To the same effect, Daphne Bavelier goes on to compare the effect of video games on the brain to the effect of wine on health

There are some very poor uses of wine. There are some very poor uses of video games. But when consumed in reasonable doses and at the right age, we can make them work magic for us.

There are specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy. In the same way, video games have several ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, and vision.

There is work being done on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can then leverage them to deliver better games either for education or for rehabilitation of patients with brain incapacities.

The challenge here is that these patients might not be interested in playing these games like a normal gamer would be. The focus now shifts to see whether there is a correlation between interest in the game and the positive effects produced in the brain

This is where training studies come in. The team conducted Mental Rotation tests to study this phenomenon. This is what one such task might look like:

This is hard - you really feel your brain cringing and it definitely doesn't feel like playing a mindless action video game.

And this is how the study was conducted:

• The subjects come to the lab and do similar tasks as the above.
  

• They are then forced to play 10 hours of action games.
  

• They don't play 10 hours of an action game in a row. They do distributed practice. So 40-minute sessions, in several days, over a two-week period.
  

• Once they're done with training, they come back a few days later, and they're tested again on a similar type of mental rotation task.

The observations:

• Initially, the subjects perform where they're expected to perform given their age.
  

• After two weeks of training on video games, they actually performed better.
  

• The most important thing is - the improvement is still there 5 months after having done the training.
  

• That's really cool.

If we are going to use video games for education/rehabilitation then it's really important that the effects have to be long-lasting.

All this is great. But the natural question then is: Why aren't we producing more games that focus on enhancing the attention, vision, and cognition of affected people?

Turns out it's not that simple.

While brain scientists like Daphne Bavelier are starting to understand the active ingredients in video games that correlate to the positive effects on the brain, the gaming industry is still very focused on providing the most action-packed best-selling games that they can. We need an intersection to happen between these two communities and only then would we hit the jackpot.

But until that time, if you feel stressed, it might be worth picking up your console and putting on a game of Call of Duty or FIFA and giving your brain something to think about :)