Top 10 (Proven) Health Benefits of Video Games

It’s certainly painful where you’re on a 24 kill streak and get sneakily taken out by some camping mofo, or when you lose online to some racist, sexist, homophobic moron on Xbox live. Games can also help relieve pain as well as inflict it though.

For those suffering from depression or another mental disorder, video games offer a way for them to relax and cope with the pain during the wee hours of the night when it's hard to turn off their brains. Video games are also reported to help those suffering from chronic pain because it distracts them and reportedly builds up their pain tolerance.

Of particular interest is the recent work done with Virtual Reality games. For those that don’t remember the early 90’s, virtual reality was a stupid pair of googles you put on your head that we all thought would make you enter a game world like in The Matrix, but actually made you feel sick and bump into things. Nonetheless Jeffrey I. Gold, Ph.D. said "Virtual reality produces a modulating effect that is endogenous, so the analgesic influence is not simply a result of distraction but may also impact how the brain responds to painful stimuli,".

That’s science-talk for "totally kicks pain's ass".

Games That Can Help:
Virtual Reality
Virtual Boy games *sn****r*

While formerly a purely sedentary pastime, videogames have recently become the equivalent of the angry drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. They bark instructions at us like: "Jump", "run on the spot", "sing, "dance", "do press ups", "play drums", "stretch" and "throw a controller into a flat screen tv". And how do we react to these instructions? We obey them of course! Like we do with any Space Commander asking us to wipe out a race of insectoid bio-aliens, or an Elven lord asking us to free the Kingdom of Nonsensia, we as gamers are programmed to do as we are told.

The benefit of this unthinking obedience is that it can make us engage in positive activities. We follow instructions so well that we will even leave the comfortable womb of our sofa ass-groove and physically sweat. We will do exercise, real exercise, if incentivised to do it by a game. Decades of TV documentaries have warned us about the dangers of heart disease, but its games like Dance Central, Warioware Smooth Moves and Wii Fit that have actually make us use our atrophied limbs for something other than shovelling food and lifting a remote. Sure, we don’t all play these games, but the people who do (and who take them seriously) see real world benefits. You know, little benefits like living ten years longer.

Games That Can Help:
Wii Fit
Dance Central
Rockband (drums)

It would be hard to imagine anyone who managed to improve their physical condition through gaming wouldn’t also see an increase in their self esteem. If you’re a 200 pound couch gorilla and Wii Fit helped you slim down enough to buy clothes from a non-specialist store then it’s a fair bet that you probably feel a whole lot better about yourself.

But gaming self esteem benefits can come from more than just physical improvement. In her book, Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal highlights several key studies showing that gaming actively makes us better people by raising our self esteem.

In her own case, McGonigal was able to get over crippling neurological and emotional problems by making a game out of her own recovery. She has gone on to proselytise on the benefits of social and team work in games in making us all better at communicating, working together and developing our own self confidence and self esteem. Sure, she then went on to popularise the truly awful term: "gameification", but at least she’s giving us all a good excuse when our mums/partners/wives/starving pets tell us we play too many games. We’re not just playing games, we’re re-establishing our self worth....by shooting dudes in the face.

Games That Can Help:
MMORPG's
Wii Fit
Dance Central
Modern Warfare

The only problem with the explosion of exercise games is the horrible terms that have been coined by researchers to describe them. I mean, exergaming, and exertainment? Seriously?

Despite the icky-ness of these terms, games like Wii Fit have made it semi-feasible to become fit and healthy without having to venture outside. This is a huge benefit to gamers who stereotypically fear the things that exist in the outside world like sunlight, human interaction and those confusing but intriguing individuals we know as "females".

Games That Can Help:
Wii Fit
My Fitness Coach
EA Sports Active

I know, I know. Bear with me.

Gamers are introverted loners who can’t communicate with the outside world, right? They’re locked up in dark bedrooms and talk in a series of muffled grunts and snorts like mindless animals connected to soulless machines. They’re like the humans in pods in the matrix, but with less weird pink liquid (most of the time).

Apparently... not.

In 2008 a Swedish researcher performed a social experiment where they used World of Warcraft in all of their lessons with a group of students for a whole year. These 15 year olds were "under-motivated" and were the poorest performing students in that year. By using WOW, they were taught about politics using proportial representation to vote on where and when they would perform in-game raids. They used mathematical formulae to determine the best DPS (damage per second) for their character builds and they studied economics through the in-game gold markets.

Most importantly however, the researchers noted how the students who were often loners or belonged to very small social groups got to know one another better. Their grades improved markedly, but they saw an even larger increase in their communication skills. These lonely and disenfranchised young men and women learned how to talk to each other as well as how to talk to strangers online. What years of school and formal classes had failed to achieve, they attained through gaming.

Just goes to show, there’s more to World of Warcraft than slaying orcs.

Games That Can Help:
World of Warcraft
Eve Online
Rift
Age of Conan