Gaming doesn't have effect on wellbeing, says Oxford University study

Gamers rejoice! Because a study has concluded that gaming does not have effect on people's well-being. The study has been carried out by Oxford University. Actual gameplay was tracked rather than just a survey of experience of gamers. Data shared by seven game publishers was used in the study. Gameplay habits of 40,000 gamers were tracked with their consent.

Andy Przybylski, one of the researchers, said that the large scale of the study provided a strong evidence that gaming did not have any effect on wellbeing of gamers.

“With 40,000 observations across six weeks, we really gave increases and decreases in video game play a fair chance to predict emotional states in life satisfaction, and we didn’t find evidence for that – we found evidence that that’s not true in a practically significant way,” said Przybylski who was quoted by The Guardian.

Players were asked whether they were playing for healthy reasons, such as socialising with friends and having fun or negative ones such as feeling of compulsion to satisfy goals in the game. It was found that even those who wanted to play due to negative reasons tended to report an overall satisfaction.

There was a note of caution in the study though. Though it was found that gaming didn't affect wellbeing, the observation did not hold true if a gamer increased his or her gaming time by 10 hours of the day.

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