What people who play video games have wanted to believe all along now has some research behind it. Gaming is certainly widespread around the world and in some cases probably may become addictive, but in general, the literature to date hasn’t been clear on whether gaming causes positive or negative outcomes, or is just associated with them.
Now a new study by Hiroyuki Egami, Md. Shafiur Rahman, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, Chihiro Egami, and Takahisa Wakabayashi published in Nature Human Behavior uses game console lotteries as a natural experiment. During the pandemic, supply chain issues limited the supply of the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 consoles. It turns out Japanese retailers used lotteries to assign the gaming consoles to customers. Thus, because of this randomization, whatever effects that were uncovered related to well being were likely due to the impact of being a lucky person who won a lottery, and not other factors.
In a sample of 97,602 people in Japan in 2020-2022, they find that “game console ownership, along with increased game play, improved mental well-being. The console ownership reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction by 0.1-0.6 standard deviations.”
Of course, this lottery occurred during a unique time (the pandemic) and in Japan, so whether it generalizes to other contexts remains unclear. However, at least among people who already wanted to get one of these consoles, it seems that winning a video game console lottery reduced their psychological distress and improved their life satisfaction.
