More than just a game: how video games can help our health

VIDEO games might improve our ability to fend off alien invaders or guide birds through pipes, but they’re often seen as an unhealthy childish activity.

Gamers

VIDEO games might improve our ability to fend off alien invaders or guide birds through pipes, but theyÂ’re often seen as an unhealthy childish activity.

IT'S a common, but flawed stereotype that gamers are all children, too. Research commissioned by the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association suggests seven out of 10 Australians play games regularly, and the average age of gamers is 32.

Gamers are getting older, and as we age our health concerns tend to expand.

Worldwide, it’s estimated we spend three billion hours a week playing video games. That’s a lot of alien blasting, and a rich field for research on the effects, positive and negative.

While some studies have concentrated on the addictive effects of games, there’s also a growing body of research that points to the potential positives of regular game play.

You’re not going to find a cure for cancer by blasting away in Call Of Duty, but you might just be improving more than your hand-eye co-ordination. A study published in American Psychologist suggests that playing first-person shooter titles may help children to develop spatial reasoning and problem solving skills.

Even venerable puzzle game titan Tetris may have beneficial side effects. The tricky Russian game has been used to treat lazy eye, due to its rapid speed, and research suggests its repetitive nature may have beneficial effect treating sufferers of post traumatic stress disorder.

Beyond the field of using everyday games as therapy, there’s also a growing trend in what are commonly called “serious” games. These are titles built not for fun or distraction, but for a targeted purpose such as therapy.

Alzheimer’s Australia Victoria has developed a Virtual Dementia Experience using projectors, speakers and Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect technology to assist carers of those with dementia symptoms to better understand the challenges of the disease.

Dr Tanya Petrovich, of Alzheimer’s Australia Vic, notes “You can list all the symptoms of dementia, but when you give people the experience, it changes the way they understand what they’re doing.”

The scale of the dementia problem is quite staggering. According to Alzheimer’s Australia’s Maria McCabe, there are 320,000 dementia sufferers across Australia. By 2050 that number will have grown to more than a million. By that time “there will not be an Australian who will not be impacted in some way by dementia in their lifetime,” McCabe says.

The team behind the simulator, Opaque Multimedia, is working with Alzheimer’s Australia on a Pozible-funded campaign to develop a virtual forest simulation for sufferers of dementia.

“Using game technology and sensory therapy we’re trying to give back to people with dementia their ability to engage more fully with life,” Dr Petrovich says.

The virtual forest is still in development, but the plan is to enable it to be used for both improving the lives of dementia sufferers and allowing further research to take place, thanks to the in-built biometric tracking features in the Kinect 2 sensor.

“When that news came out, a lot of people were up in arms; ‘Oh, you can see what we’re looking at and what we’re doing in our bedrooms.’ But what it presents us, when it comes to this kind of application, is a very valuable research tool,” Opaque Multimedia’s Norman Wang says. “What we want to be able to do with Alzheimer’s Australia, in the long term, is have tangible research outcomes, rather than just a video game.”