Top 10 (Proven) Health Benefits of Video Games

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

Did you think all that time you spent getting incredibly frustrated with Trauma Centre on the Wii or DS was wasted? Well it turns out that surgery games could be more beneficial than you think.

For surgeons, video game play allows them to opportunity to improve their dexterity which means less mistakes in the operating room. A study conducted with laparascopic surgeons found that those who played video games to improve dexterity were 27 percent faster and made 37 percent less errors than those who don't partake in a little video game action.

So while playing a few hours on the Wii certainly doesn’t qualify you to remove your cousins appendix, you should still appreciate how games may be the difference between a successful operation and a....well a dead dude. If you have a surgeon who makes 37 percent less errors that’s a lot less dead dudes, and if you’re one of the non-dead ones, then you could say a videogame saved your life.

So next time you’ve got a choice between two surgeons to open you up and mess with your innards, check which one has the highest gamerscore first!

Games That Can Help:
Trauma Center
Heavy Rain
Cooking Mama

Do you remember when your parents told you not to sit so close to the TV or you would ruin your eyes? Yeah, that was rubbish. The same is true with anyone who says videogames damage your eyesight....well except maybe for those eye-exploding Nintendo 3DS things.

If you suffer from a lazy eye or have trouble driving at night, video game play may actually help you improve your eyesight. An article published in Nature Neuroscience stated that video games have been known to improve contrast sensitivity.

Ok, so it’s not like playing games will make you have super vision or anything. You won’t develop x-ray vision if you play Halo for ten thousand hours. I guess if you play games that much you probably don’t have a job and ergo can’t afford an optician...but that’s really no one’s fault but your own.

Games That Can Help:
Anything, really. Maybe a Dead or Alive game. Those always do pretty well for my eyes.

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