The jury is in, and games aren’t exactly the devilish creations that melt your mind, as your parents may have told you.
Not only can gaming be a great deal of fun, but recent studies have shown that there are a variety of advantages to playing video games – from improving brain function to pain relief and more.
Here are six benefits to inform your buddies about the next time you meet up:
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3D video games can improve memory capacity.
“Due to the engaging experiences and enhancing the 3D virtual environment, the same video games that have been played for years by kids and adults alike can provide our minds with meaningful stimulation,” the researchers wrote.
People who played Mario ended up performing better on follow-up memory tasks, while others showed no improvement post-gaming. “Video players who prefer complex 3D video games played best,” the researchers concluded.
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Gaming could be good for pain relief.
This is the best excuse for playing games on your next sick day – a 2012 literature review found that out of 38 studies, video games improved the health outcomes of 195 patients on all fronts, including physical and emotional therapy.
Additionally, in 2010, scientists presented research at the American Pain Society’s conference, which found evidence that playing video games, especially virtual reality games, is effective in reducing pain or anxiety caused by chronic illness or medical procedures.
“The attention is drawn to the game, not the medical procedure, while the virtual reality experience engages visual and other sensations,” said Jeffrey Gold at the University of Southern California.
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There is evidence that video games can help dyslexic children improve their reading.
Video games can help children! A 2013 study published in Mobile explored the impact that playing games, such as ‘Rayman Raving Rabbids,’ can have on dyslexic children aged 7 to 13 years, making them read faster without a loss in accuracy.
The results were as good or better than those of reading treatments, which can be time-consuming and not as enjoyable. The researchers believe that the speed in these types of games helped increase their attention spans, but this theory has not yet been tested.
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Tetris can help limit trauma.
If this study is anything to go by, old Tetris could be useful for much more than just time-wasting. Last year, 37 patients who came to an emergency department in Oxford, UK, to be treated for a traffic accident were chosen to play 20 minutes of Tetris.
Another 34 patients did not play the game but were asked to log their normal activity, including things like crosswords, texting, and reading. The Tetris players had fewer flashbacks than those who didn’t, on average, of the traffic event.
The study, published last month in Molecular Psychiatry, concludes that the “short, science-driven intervention provides a low-intensity way that may significantly improve the mental health of people who have experienced emotional trauma.”
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Some research shows that video games may actually make you smarter.
Research published in PLoS ONE in 2013 goes so far as to say that your cognition may be improved when you start up your Xbox or PlayStation.
The researchers took five groups of non-gamers and made them play a mobile game for one hour per day. They found that both action games and puzzle games improved function in the participants, measured by tests like short-term memory tasks.
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Gaming is associated with an increase in brain matter.
The areas of the brain responsible for memory formation, cognitive orientation, strategic planning, and motor skills all see an increase in brain matter with gaming.
When the investigators looked at 24 participants who had played the sport for half an hour per day for 2 weeks under an MRI system, they discovered that they had increased gray matter in the ideal hippocampus, right prefrontal cortex, and cerebellum compared to a control group that had not played any sport.
“This demonstrates that certain brain areas can be trained through video games,” stated one of the investigators, Simone Küh, at the moment.
So there you go.