Why video games may be good for you

BBC:

A growing body of research is showing the flip side, though – video games can help people see better, learn more quickly, develop greater mental focus, become more spatially aware, estimate more accurately, and multitask more effectively. Some video games can even make young people more empathetic, helpful and sharing. As public debate on the subject is often highly emotive and polarised, and as more and more of us are becoming gamers, researchers say it is important to move beyond the generalisations that characterise much of the discussion.

“We know there are good sugars and bad sugars, and we don’t discuss whether food in general is good or bad for us,” says Daphne Bavelier, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, New York. “We need to be far more nuanced when we talk about the effects of video games.”

Douglas Gentile at Iowa State University, US, agrees. “Game research has tended to get sucked down into a black hole of people yelling at each other, saying either games are good or games are bad,” says Gentile, who studies the effects of video games on physiology and behaviour. “I think we are starting to move beyond this inappropriately simplistic idea to see games can be powerful teachers that we can harness.”

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