Gail Nichols, a 49 year old Kansas woman, has been suffering from depression for years. During the day, she says she can talk to somebody about her woes. During sleepless nights, however, she found solace from her illness in an unlikely place: the popular puzzle game Bejeweled.
What takes this story from a nice anecdote on the positive aspects of gaming to something greater is what happened next. Nichols emailed PopCap, the game’s developer and publisher, to tell them about how their game has helped her. PopCap then went on to fund an independent clinical study on the benefits, if any, that can be effected on one’s mental health by video games.
Carmen Russoniello of East Carolina University is heading up the research. Preliminary studies, published in the Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine, show that patients who played Bejeweled showed improved mood compared to those who did not play.
Further studies are in progress in which a control group will be instructed to read websites on mood disorders, while the experimental group will be instructed to play video games. This is presumably to rule out that it is simply screen time that is helpful for allaying symptoms of depression.
Russoniello hypothesizes that only certain games have this mental healing quality, and that it requires the player’s attention, but without introducing stress. In other words, a game too simple or easy would be boring, but a game too complex or difficult would be frustrating, and only a game that can exist in between can elicit the zen-like reaction that Nichols describes as helping her get through the night.
[via The Washington Post]
[...] second bit is initially a surprising finding given the report that came out just yesterday on games as a means to assuage mental health issues. However, it is [...]