Japan study shows positive mental health effects from owning video games

That first year of the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on a lot of peoples' stability. It also led to an increase in video game play, as long as people were stuck at home anyway.

But a few researchers in Japan used that confluence of circumstances as an opportunity to conduct what they called a "natural experimental study" — the results of which were recently published in a new scientific paper from the journal Nature Human Behaviour. Rather than re-litigate the endless debate about whether video games are destroying society, they simply took advantage of some available data to make other determinations about the value of gaming: namely, whether just owning the right video game system can help peoples' mental well-being.

As the authors explain in the paper, supply chain issues in Japan related to the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shortage on availability for the Nintendo Switch and the PS5. In order to calm the fervor of anxious customers, Japanese retailers opted to use a lottery system to determine who would end up getting whatever video game systems arrived in stock.

Using this randomly distributed group of test subjects, the researchers tracked the mental health of those who won the video game lottery, and those who did not. Or, as they write in the paper, "we investigated the moderating role of sociodemographic factors in the causal link between video gaming and well-being."

This gave them a sample group of more than 8,000 participants. And here's what they found:

Game console ownership, along with increased game play, improved mental well-being. The console ownership reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction by 0.1–0.6 standard deviations.

Curiously, the results did show some variation depending on age, gender, and also, which console the participants owned:

[The level of video game benefits] were more substantial in absolute value for Switch in younger age groups…Conversely, the [benefits] were less pronounced for younger individuals with a PS5.

Further, the impact of owning a PS5 was more prominent among males, while the effect of Switch ownership was similar for both genders, possibly slightly favouring females. Moreover, the effect of PS5 was more pronounced among households without children (or full-time employees), which was not observed in the effect of Switch. Lastly, the effect of PS5 was more prominent among hardcore gamers, whereas the effect of Switch was stronger for non-gamers.

I'm not actually much of a gamer myself, but I found this study fascinating because of its focus not on actual games, or game-playing habits—but simply on ownership. The researchers were sort of forced into that perspective by nature of the data available to them. But I was still intrigued by the notion that ownership of a coveted thing—which, in this case, just happened to be a video game console—could correlate to a noticeable shift in mental well-being (with the recognition that correlation is not causation, of course).

Causal effect of video gaming on mental well-being in Japan 2020–2022 [Hiroyuki Egami, Md. Shafiur Rahman, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, Chihiro Egami & Takahisa Wakabayashi / Nature Human Behavior]