Online games are the favorite scapegoat of the petty and the powerful alike, for no other reason than it is convenient, but time and again, it has been shown that playing games is actually good for you. This article aims to discuss just a few of the ways that games are beneficial for your mental, physical, and emotional health, so sit back and prepare for some interesting information.
Stress Reduction
A common misconception around video games is that they are bad for emotional health and promote violent tendencies in the people that play them. However, this is actually the opposite of the truth. Multiple studies have found that individuals who regularly play video games are able to use video games to reduce negative emotions and even process such emotions, overall reducing the stress of those individuals.
Video games, especially violent ones, provide a healthy outlet for pent-up emotions such as anger, which means that playing these games helps individuals struggling with these emotions to release and interact with them in a healthy and constructive manner. These individuals are obviously able to tell the difference between real life and video games and know that what is appropriate in a video game isn’t necessarily going to be appropriate in real life. However, having a healthy outlet for such emotions keep them from bubbling over and presenting in more sinister ways.
These benefits of online games are apparent across the spectrum of players. Whether you play competitively or simply hop onto an online casino every now and then, games will help to improve your mental health.
They Keep You Sharp
On top of this, it is becoming increasingly clear that video games have further health benefits beyond emotional health. Several studies have found that playing games regularly can actually improve the physical health of your brain. Playing video games, for example, can increase your grey matter and help to refine both learned and hardwired skills. What that means is that playing video games regularly helps with your memory, spatial awareness, coordination, and other fine motor skills.
Additionally, this increase in grey matter helps to stave off negative mental effects and deterioration of mental cognition that leads to things like dementia. In short, video games help to keep your brain healthy just like any other form of mental exercise because they require concentration and skill to engage with properly.
They Can Help Treat Medical Conditions
A lesser-known benefit of playing games is that they can actually help to improve your vision and lessen the effects of disorders such as amblyopia, which most know better by the colloquialism “lazy eye.” While therapy has been noted as useless for adult sufferers of this condition, a video game called Dig Rush is actually being developed to help both children and adults suffering from the condition. On top of this, some studies have been shown that games can help in the treatment of patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease and is demonstrably helpful to those diagnosed with autism.
