Aug 02, 2022 16:00:00

Game play time turned out to be irrelevant to mental health, but it depends on whether ``I want to play the game''

The Kagawa Prefecture Internet Game Addiction Countermeasures Ordinance stipulates that 'games are limited to 60 minutes a day, and 90 minutes a day on holidays.' A six-week study of nearly 40,000 gamers who played a total of seven titles, such as , showed little relationship between time spent gaming and mental health.

Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being | Royal Society Open Science
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220411

OII | Major new study finds little evidence for causal connection between well-being and video game playing
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/major-new-study-finds-little-evidence-for-causal-connection-between-well-being-and-video-game- playing/

Gaming does not appear harmful to mental health, unless the gamer can't stop
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-07-gaming-mental-health-gamer.html

Rest assured: Playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being, study says | Euronews
https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/27/rest-assured-playing-video-games-is-unlikely-to-impact-well-being-study-says

'Governments and health authorities around the world are making extensive policy decisions to address the potential risks of gaming, despite the lack of sufficient supporting data,' says Oxford University Internet Research. This is a research team led by Professor Andrew Shubirski, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute. Professor Shubirski, who himself is a parent with children and grew up familiar with games, collaborated with seven game software makers to investigate the relationship between game play and happiness. .

The subjects of research are Nintendo's 'Atsume Animal Crossing', Electronic Arts' 'Apex Legends', CCP Games' ' Eve Online ', Microsoft's ' Forza Horizon 4 ', Sony Interactive Entertainment's ' Gran Turismo SPORT '. , Square Enix's ' Outriders ', Ubisoft's ' The Crew 2 ', a total of 7 games, from games centered on slow lives spent with animals to battle royale games, MMORPGs, racing games, and CERO rated 'Z' shooters. A wide selection of titles including games.

The study involved 38,935 gamers aged 18 and over. Average age is 34 years, median gamer age is 23 years, gender is 77% male and 21% female, 1.8% answered third gender or

non-binary , the rest refrained from answering gender. I'm a person. In addition, a total of three methods were used to investigate the mental health of gamers, such as satisfaction with life, various emotional levels, and motivation when playing games.

As a result of the research team analyzing the six weeks of game data provided by each game maker and the mental health data collected by the research team, there is almost a causal relationship between playing the game and the player's mental health. I didn't see it at all. According to the research team, the only change in mental health was the case of playing the game for 10 hours longer than usual.

On the other hand, when we focused on the motivation to play the game, we found that if there was intrinsic motivation , that is, if the gamer wanted to play the game voluntarily, the happiness was slightly positive. It was found that the influence of Conversely, when there was extrinsic motivation to play the game for extrinsic reasons, it negatively affected happiness.

Regarding the results, Professor Shubirski said, ``We found that the happiness of gamers has nothing to do with the amount of time they spend playing the game.In other words, quality is important, not quantity. Instead, there was no data that could be interpreted to suggest that if gamers love to play, it affects their mental health. It doesn't seem like there is,' he said.

In addition, Professor Shubirski noted that games are regulated in countries such as Japan, saying, 'This research is very basic and does not examine gamer behavior or conduct any experiments. No. But without even this basic research being done, Japan is enacting ordinances and China is

enacting laws to ban or restrict games, and these laws affect the mental health of young people. It should have been made to improve it, but there is no evidence that it is effective.'

In addition, this research not only found the relationship between games and happiness, but also revealed the problem that data on the impact of games on people and society is limited and it is not possible to conduct research freely. In conducting this research, the research team called out to more than 30 game makers, but only the seven companies mentioned above provided data. Also, there are about 1 billion gamers in the world, and it is possible to play more than 3000 games on Nintendo's platform alone, but this time we were able to study only 7 titles. Only weak gamers.

From this point of view, Professor Shubirski said, ``Players want to know what impact the game has, scientists, parents, governments, and I want to know, and the data is within reach. 'It's there, but it's not open. If the major gaming platforms care about the well-being of their players, they should give players and scientists a chance to see what impact their games have.' , expressed the view that data about games should be made more open.

Professor Shubirski's desire to provide more data to game companies is also reflected in the header image of his

Twitter account .