By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn
Video gaming leads to improved cognition, creativity, sociability
In previous posts, and in Free to Learn(link is external), I described the decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore freely that has occurred over the past several decades. I also presented reasons to believe that this decline is a cause of well-documented declines in mental health (here), empathy (here), and creativity (here) among young people over this same time period.
The one variety of play that has not declined over these decades, but has increased, is video gaming. For the most part, children can no longer go outdoors and find others to play with, freely, away from adults, as they once did; but many of them can and do go onto computers and play video games. Over time, these games have become increasingly varied, complex, creative, and social. This is especially true with the increasing popularity of multi-player online games. If you believe the scare articles in the media, you might believe that the rise of video gaming is a cause of declines in psychological health, but, as I have suggested elsewhere (e.g. here), the opposite may be true. Video gaming may in fact be an ameliorating factor, helping to counteract the harmful effects of the loss of other forms of play.
If video gaming worsens psychological wellbeing, then we should expect to find more mental health and social problems in video gamers than in otherwise similar people who are not gamers. If video gaming, like other forms of play, generally improves wellbeing, then we should find that gamers are mentally healthier, on average, than non-gamers. By now, many dozens of studies have examined psychological correlates of and consequences of video gaming, and, taken as a whole, the results overwhelmingly support the idea that video gaming produces many of the same kinds of benefits as other forms of play. Here is a review of that research.
Most of the video gaming research to date has focused on cognition. Correlational studies have consistently revealed that young people who play video games extensively have, on average, higher IQs and perform better on a wide variety of cognitive tests of perceptual and mental ability than do non-gamers. Moreover, a number of experiments have demonstrated improvement in previous non-gamers’ cognitive abilities when they take up gaming for the sake of the experiment. I summarized many of those findings in a previous post (here). Research more recently has confirmed and extended those findings.
In a recent article in Psychological Bulletin, Benoit Bediou and his colleagues (2018) reviewed all of the recent research (published since 2000) they could find concerning the cognitive effects of playing action video games. They found 89 correlational studies, which related the average number of hours per week of action video games to one or more measures of cognitive ability, and 22 intervention studies (true experiments), in which non-gamers were asked to play action video games for a specified number of hours per week, for a specified number of weeks, and were compared with other non-gamers on degree of improvement over that time on one or more cognitive tests. Their analysis of the correlational studies revealed, overall, strong positive relationships between amount of time gaming and high scores on tests of perception, top-down attention, spatial cognition, multitasking, and cognitive flexibility (ability to switch strategies quickly when old ones strategies don’t work). Their analysis of the intervention data indicated that even just 10 to 30 hours of video play, over the duration of an experiment, significantly improved performance on tests of perception, attention, spatial cognition, and cognitive flexibility.
Of course, different sorts of video games exercise different kinds of mental abilities. In contrast to fast-paced action games, strategy role-playing and puzzle games exercise problem-solving skills of a more reflective nature. Both correlational and longitudinal research have indicated that play at thes