According to a new study, people who play video games for long periods of time are 'significantly happier' than people who don't. Working alongside two of the biggest publishers in the industry, researchers at Oxford's Internet Institute have come to the conclusion that video games really do make people happy. I know, I've spent enough time on the internet to be surprised by that too.
Researchers looked at two key games from Nintendo and EA, and found that extended playtimes correlate positively to a sense of well-being. To be fair, these are games that I think most of us would kind of expect to generate a sense of the warm and fuzzies: Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Plants vs. Zombies: Battle For Neighborville. I suspect there may be a bit of a difference if the data provided was for Bloodborne and Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare.
At any rate, both publishers provided the data for the research. Nintendo offered up the amount of time players were spending in their virtual Animal Crossing islands, while EA also gave researchers data on achievements and the emotes players used while in-game.
"If you play Animal Crossing for four hours a day, every single day, you're likely to say you feel significantly happier than someone who doesn't," the study's author, Prof. Andrew Przybylski, explained to the BBC. Przybylski added that this result actually goes against the last 40 years or so of research, which widely agreed that the longer people game, the unhappier they are.
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Przybylski muses that the crucial difference could be the social features in Animal Crossing and Plants vs. Zombies, which he describes as a "digital water-cooler" where players can talk to friends and even meet new people. Again, the same could be said of Bloodborne and Modern Warfare, but I'm not sure we'd ever describe the lobby of a Call Of Duty game as a water-cooler. A digital fight club, maybe.
You can check out the full study right here. It concludes that researchers can - and should - work with the games industry to create more accurate and higher-quality studies on games. While the positive results of this study do paint a positive picture for a collaborative future, you have to wonder how willing a publisher would be to willingly hand over data to researchers that could paint their games in a negative light.
For now, at least, let's just be content that spending all Saturday in your pajamas laying down a new path in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can now actually be properly described as self care. I class that as a big win.
Featured Image Credit: Nintendo