The question of “Are video games good for people?” has been debated endlessly for a truly long time. Like seriously, people won’t shut up about it at times, and there were even certain people who made their names infamous because of their attempts to shut down video games for various reasons. However, now that games have been going on for decades and are a billion-dollar industry that tailors to all manner of gamers, some people are looking at titles like Animal Crossing New Horizons in a different light. Specifically, they’re looking at them in a way that showcases how they can help with mental health.
This claim comes from research found by Reuters, who noted that “cozy games” can truly help people unwind after a long day, and give them what they need to relax and be happier. The published papers were done by Hiroyuki Egami, who is an assistant professor at Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan. The study itself was done from 2020-2022, which were the peak years of the global pandemic.
That study claimed that just a single hour of gaming, presumably from casual games or “cozy games,” as some call them, lowered the stress levels of the players immensely. In turn, that lowered stress level helped with the overall mental health of the test subjects.
Things only get wilder when you look at a different study by another assistant professor, Michael Wong, of McMaster University in Canada. In the study he did on a similar subject, he found that test subjects who played video games and ones who did meditation had the same results:
“To our surprise, there really wasn’t a difference between the two forms of interventions. For blood pressure and heart rate, there was no statistically significant difference between playing a video game and engaging in meditation.”
Now, to be clear, these two studies aren’t fully definitive in their results due to sample sizes and such, but they do show that video games can help people. When Animal Crossing New Horizons came out, it was the “perfect game” for the global pandemic due to how the title was about building up an island to whatever you wanted it to be and even interacting with other people…even though you couldn’t do that in the real world.
“Cozy games” are meant to be played by anyone and enjoyed while you relax for however long you can. If science backs up that it helps mental health? That’s all the more reason to love video games.
