I recently sat on a panel discussion at the Sync Digital Wellbeing Summit in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. This pioneering event explored the myriad ways technology impacts – for better and for worse – our physical, mental, and social well-being. This particular panel discussion focused on gaming, and I had the honour of sitting alongside Abdulaziz Alshehri, the first player from Saudi Arabia (the first player in the entire continent of Asia) to win eFootball’s highest accolade – the Fifa eWorld Cup.
Alshehri talked about the passion and dedication it takes to become an Esports world champ, but he also emphasised the need for balance, taking breaks, and prioritising education and health. I suspect his perspective landed well with any concerned parents in the audience. When the panel ended, I glimpsed Alshehri’s legend status as fans, beaming with adoration, flocked to the stage to get photos and perhaps a few tactical tips on how to raise their own games.
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Rather than overly focusing on the harms and dangers, our session celebrated gaming and Esports and the many psychological benefits they bring. After all, video games are only the latest incarnation of humanity’s innate playfulness. Anthropologists tell us that games are simply the formalised expression of play. Games involve rules, competition, chance, fiction, and personal enjoyment. Playing games is universal, found across all cultures, and arguably as old as humanity.
One obvious benefit of playing games is that it can help us make friends. In many parts of the world today, “online” is where young people form and maintain friendships. Surveys by the Pew Research Centre suggest that more than half of US teens have made new friends online, with a little more than a third reporting that they met their new friends through gaming. Additionally, most US teens spend more time with their friends online than in person.
For many people, gaming is a friend-making opportunity and the glue that helps maintain those connections. Decades of research underscore the benefits of friendships and strong ties. Friends are a vital source of actual and perceived social support, buffering us against stress and loneliness – a protective factor that positively influences our health and well-being.
At a more profound level, gaming can also feed into our social identity, providing us with a group to belong to, a category of humanity to call our own. We might have many social identities: nationality, tribe, profession. Calling oneself a “gamer” is asserting a valued social identity. Alexander Haslam, a professor of psychology renowned for his work on social identity, writes: “ … social identities – and the notions of ‘us-ness’ that they embody and help create – are central to health and well-being”.
Humans need other humans; we need to feel like we belong. There are scores of studies supporting this idea. The take-home message from much of this research is that the deeper the sense of belonging, the better the health outcomes. This has been well-demonstrated for depression, heart disease, stroke, and many other chronic health complaints. The evidence of this “belonging effect” is now so strong that we call it the “Social Cure”: the notion that strengthening social identity can prevent illness, accelerate recovery, and reduce relapse for numerous health problems.
More recently, psychologists have even been exploring gaming as an add-on to traditional forms of psychotherapy. The idea is that video games provide a sense of engagement and immersion that traditional psychotherapeutic methods may lack. Video games can also help patients/clients learn adaptive problem-solving skills and coping strategies in a controlled and safe environment. These game-based techniques have been trialled, with some success, in conditions such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is undoubtedly an important area for further research.
Our celebration of gaming is not to negate or deny that there can be a darker side. The idea that gaming might carry risks goes back to the mid-1990s when psychologists first started publishing research articles about problematic gaming and the notion of technology-related addictions. This debate continues, and in 2019, the World Health Organisation ratified the inclusion of gaming disorder on its official list of diagnosable health problems – the International Classification of Diseases.
There is a small minority of gamers – current best estimates suggest 2 per cent to 3 per cent – who develop problematic gaming patterns. Such individuals may be preoccupied with gaming and get irritable when prevented from playing. They may even experience a loss of control, playing more frequently or for longer than they would like. Such behaviours might also lead to deception, lying about the amount of gaming time, and other negative consequences, such as poorer workplace/academic performance and damaged relationships. According to the Academy of Animated Art, there are 3.2 billion gamers worldwide. Given these numbers, we would be ill-advised to ignore the problematic side of gaming, even if the percentage is relatively small.
Gaming and Esports only look set to grow in popularity. Our increasingly sophisticated uses of extended reality (virtual and augmented) and haptic devices (tech that creates the experience of touch) will further enhance engagement, perhaps blurring the boundaries between sports and Esports.
The 2024 Esports World Cup, held in Riyadh, will end next week. This 23-event sporting spectacle boasts a prize purse of $62.5 million. Several e-athletes will leave the arena financially better off. But beyond the substantial financial incentives for the gaming world’s elite, regular gamers can and do routinely reap rich psychological benefits.
Dr Justin Thomas is a chartered psychologist and senior researcher in the Digital Wellbeing Program (Sync) at the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (Ithra).