Health and video games

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said. Who, without giving it much thought, was the first person to win a Nobel Prize for Literature and an Oscar (the latter for Best Adapted Screenplay for the version of his novel Pygmalion.) Playing is usually associated with children because what corresponds to grownups is getting serious, working… and exercising.

Whether going to the gym, running in the mornings, or playing in the Sunday league with the office team, this physical activity keeps our bodies healthy. By releasing endorphins, our mind stays healthy as well. Today’s article will address the relationship between health and video games. Are all negative things said about them false? Or, on the contrary, are they 100% something positive for health and society? Taking as an example the case of obesity, the situation is clear, and video games can lead us to very severe sedentary states.

This should be prevented by regulating playing times. Several European studies suggest that the ideal is to play around five hours a week, either distributed an hour a day or organized for the weekend. Although we must not forget that, although there is no way to go out to practice a sport or play in a park, games like Ring Fit Adventure or Just Dance are games that precisely require physical activity. The first is a title for Nintendo Switch that tries to advance levels by overcoming exercise routines using the joy-cons (console controls), and the second is a game that is released annually with an extensive playlist of songs that you will have to dance doing the movements that appear on the screen.

In the state of West Virginia in the United States, which is the state with the most severe childhood obesity problem in that country, a study of 50 overweight teenagers showed that playing half an hour a day to Dance Revolution (a popular game in the arcades similar to Just Dance) the boys lost an average of 2.7 kg, reducing risks of heart disease; meanwhile, those who used to have difficulties for the sport began to be more confident when practicing them. The problem with addiction to video games or violent behaviors for playing them, although it is a reality, it would be good to qualify it. And no medical studies confirm that the videogame could cause these problems, but it is possible that they can serve as a trigger.

If one takes care of the above, video games are ideal for exercising many parts of our brain, as it improves spatial skills, our reflexes, and what is known as eye-hand coordination. Shooters like Call of Duty force us to make quick decisions, coordinate with our team and act under pressure; simulators like FIFA help us make our peripheral vision wider by being aware of the entire court.

Games with narrative value like Red Dead Redemption 2 encourage our creativity, not to mention masterpieces like Disco Elysium, in which not only is the story a masterful crime novel, but we make decisions within it. In the end, Bernard Shaw was perhaps a little right that “we grow old because we stop playing” and, as C. S. Lewis said, it would be good to lose the fear of looking childish, that the little jogging in the morning may look well accompanied by a Mario Kart race at night, make a farm in Minecraft and learn from Victorian London helping Marx save children from being exploited in a factory. In Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, according to the University of Iowa, all this can be a great brain gym in adults playing two or three hours a week.