If you are a gamer, chances are that your parents often scolded you for playing video games too often as a kid. They might have told you that all the screen time was rotting your brain, and encouraged you to play outside for a change. Indeed, those of us especially immersed in the Digital Age – particularly those who had a lot of Apple device time as children, or even as infants – are the subject of some researchers’ concern. That concern is not misplaced, as this unprecedented screen ubiquity hasn’t existed long enough for researchers to rule out harmful side effects.
Image Source: Janine Schmitz
However, one group of researchers proposes looking instead into screen time’s benefits – specifically, the potential of commercial video games to act as therapy for players. In 2017, these researchers, hailing from institutions such as Johns Hopkins and Harvard Medical School, released a mini-review article calling to jumpstart a new interdisciplinary research agenda for facilitating the exploration of commercial video games as therapy (VGTx). The article distinguishes commercial, off-the-shelf video games (COTS games) from custom-made, video game-based health applications (games for health), and suggests incorporating the former into interventions that promote health. Possible interventions include monitoring adults’ cognitive function by observing their play of FreeCell, and giving COTS games to children to soothe preoperative stress. The article also observes that millions of people already play and enjoy these existing games, and that the “massive corporate funding” for COTS games makes their development budgets “often orders of magnitude superior” to those of their health-specific counterparts, made by innovators in mobile health (mHealth) and electronic health (eHealth).
Image Source: Tom Stewart
Serious academic VGTx research faces many challenges, however. These challenges include lack of standardized terminology for VGTx research, biases such as the field not being a legitimate area of study, and the lag between health research and the faster-paced growth of video game technology. The article calls for strategic investment into a VGTx research agenda that addresses these challenges comprehensively, so as to produce standardized and comprehensible data for an exciting new field of study.
The indie video game Celeste was released around the same time as the article and was noted for its profound portrayal of a protagonist coping with mental health issues in a positive way, resonating with players also struggling with mental illness. Should this research agenda gain traction, perhaps we will discover in ten years that playing world-building games, like Minecraft, can also ease our own mental conditions in some way.
Feature Image Source: kerkezz – stock.adobe.com.
