Video games: according to a study, playing them for a long time would not affect our mental health

Since their inception, video games have been believed to have various (necessarily negative) effects on the brains and behavior of individuals, gamer “lunch” at first (the first players were mainly teenagers), then children, before the attention turned to the whole population of players (the average age of regular players is 38 in France ). Numerous studies on the JV have thus been produced since the 1980s, most of them invalidating the most caricatural assertions about the sector.

According a new study conducted by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute (United Kingdom) and published on July 27 on the Royal Society Open Science platform, playing video games for a long time does not have a significant impact on the mental health of gamers… up to a point anyway. Thus, after questioning 39,000 gamers and recovering a number of figures from industry giants (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo), the researchers came to the conclusion that the vast majority of gamers can play for up to 10 hours a day. (!) without this affecting their well-being.

Beyond this duration (already more than substantial) we would find ourselves faced with situations of addiction, not to mention that those who play out of obligation or in a context of addiction could suffer negative effects from playing the game long before having reached ten hours cutting through the streum in Elden Ring… Playing JV for a very long time would therefore not make you happier or unhappier in general, even if we can assume that the time spent playing obviously remains a moment of pleasure in itself…