Video games have come in all forms and styles, be it action-adventure, first-person shooting, real-time strategy, online slot games or even role-playing. But seldom do we look at them for anything other than giving us a good boost of adrenaline or dopamine. What if we were to tell gamers and their overly cautious and critical parents that video games can serve a variety of practical benefits medically and mentally?
That’s right! Video games have been documented to instill a plethora of advantages that stick with us for life, including boosting our mood, memory, problem-solving skills, and socializing. So if anyone were to tell you that games suck the life out of you, then all you have to do is show them these reasons why games are so important to human beings:
1. Builds Memory
The best types of video games leave an indelible mark in your mind, allowing you to recall the best combos in your action-adventure or fighting games, or even utilize the most appropriate tools and equipment in battle royale games.
By juggling a handful of tasks and goals in your head while you navigate the worlds of your favorite games, you’re giving your hippocampus a good workout. That’s the area of our brains that converts short-term memory into long-term ones and manages spatial memory. By continually maintaining your hippocampus, you’ll have better recall and navigate physical spaces a lot better. Now, you’ll have no trouble getting your way around large shopping malls.
2. Helps You Become a Better Person
Video games are often overlooked as to how well they develop you as a person in overcoming a variety of problems. For example, challenging games like Elden Ring help you overcome your frustration of failing, get a better hang of a particular skill in God of War, and also get over a specific challenge and nab that rare achievement that’s been alluding to you for so long.
With each failure you experience, you develop a better understanding of the game’s mechanics, skills, techniques and controls. In time, you’ll see that what began as a rage-inducing headache, soon became a comfortable experience since you now know how you need to progress.
As such, not only do they go further into the game, but they also learn how to better approach some of the challenges in life once they take the time to assess the surrounding situation. In other words, they become better problem-solvers.
3. Helps Improve Our Moods
One of the obvious benefits of playing video games is the fact that it makes us feel excited and enables us to have fun with what we’re playing. This phenomenon of excitement is due to the release of hormones known as endorphins within our bodies. They act as a sort of painkiller to our bodies whenever we’re feeling stressed or experiencing anxiety with whatever woes we’re trying to process. When combined with other transmitters, this creates a great environment for focused learning.
Another crucial hormone that’s released is dopamine, otherwise known simply as the feel-good hormone. This hormone is released especially when gamers have beaten an insanely difficult boss or grinded for hours just to achieve a hidden or rare reward. These rewards and achievements are only because players made the right decisions to give them those rewards. Because of that, it is by learning good decisions and behaviors that they can then apply them in real life as well.
4. You Develop Social Skills
The topic of developing social skills, especially when it comes to video games, is often highly contested due to certain types of games that people play. This could very well be the case during excessive playing sessions. However, moderate playing has been said to be of great benefit to social skills as well as lead to the reduction of anxiety within gamers.
When players assume the role of the characters they play in the game of their choice, they have all the freedom to engage in whatever social interaction they feel strongly about. This becomes a proper outlet for those who usually experience anxiety in real life but are quite comfortable in fictional settings, especially since there are no real consequences of their decisions. Eventually, they will understand what good behavior is and will learn to apply that in actuality.
5. Help Develop Your Body
Yes! You indeed read that right and this is especially the case with active video games. A study published in the Games for Health Journal found that active video games can have physiological benefits similar to that of treadmill exercise and like that kind of exercise, people can experience a reduction in their blood glucose levels.
However, the difference between these two options is that researchers found that video games enable participants to have better joy and motivation than traditional exercise.
