8 ways video games are good for your health

In Asia, we hear a lot about the ways that gaming is bad for you. It hurts your grades! It’s a waste of time! It can be addictive!

But there is actually lots of scientific evidence that games can be good for you. Here are some of the good things video games may be doing for you and your brain. Kids, you may want to forward this list to your parents.

1. Doing bad things in games can make you a better person

Example study: “Being Bad in a Video Game Can Make Us Morally Sensitive” (Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking vol 17 iss. 8)

It sounds counter-intuitive at first, but researchers have suggested that doing bad things in video games may actually make you a better person. In the study, gamers who violated their own moral code in game by playing as a terrorist experienced real guilt, and caused real reflection on their behavior. More study is needed to show how this affects gamers’ behavior in real life, of course, but the study’s authors suggest that being bad in a video game may make gamers more likely to be nice in real life.

Actually, the more you think about this, the more it seems like common sense anyway. Haven’t you ever done something you regretted in real life, and then tried to do something good to make up for it? This is the same principle. The “bad” things are being done in a game, but since the guilt you feel is real, you may still try to make up for it by being a better person in the real world.

2. Playing online games can make you more social

Example study: “The Effects of Prosocial Video Games on Prosocial Behaviors” (Pers Soc Psychol Bull, June 2009)

Although people tend to think playing games makes you anti-social (because you’re sitting inside instead of going out), numerous studies have shown that playing social games actually makes people more social. The paper linked above, for example, looks at three different experiments, including tests on Singaporean middle-schoolers and Japanese children as well as American college kids. In all cases, researchers found that playing social games online led to more prosocial behavior in real life.

Granted, not every video game is going to make you more social; generally speaking the game itself also needs to reward prosocial behavior for that to work. But even the most violent video games don’t seem to make people anti-social; studies have shown that even gamers playing Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto IV didn’t experience any negative social effects.

3. Playing games can make your brain bigger