We truly believe Gaming is very positive overall, the best, most active way of entertainment and a great way for individuals to improve many skills. This belief is based on the fact that over the past two decades, researchers have been investigating a wide range of effects associated to video game play, finding positive effects but also negative ones when gaming is taken to an extreme behaviour.
Previous to the classification of Gaming Disorder, studies had indicated that lengthy and sometimes addictive gaming behaviour patterns may result in health issues such as aggressive behaviour and other controversial mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and stress.
On the other hand, we also know from studies that video games can result in a wide range of psychological, social, and cognitive advantages. For example, early research demonstrated that at the cognitive level, playing video games can result in significantly better hand-eye motor coordination on a rotary pursuit task (Griffith, Voloschin, Gibb, & Bailey, 1983). More recently, further research found that video game players exhibit better performance in perceptual and attentional tasks than non-gamers (Howard, Wilding, & Guest, 2016) and that video games may also help diminish cognitive decline in older adults, because older adults playing strategy games were shown to have obtained significant improvements in their working memory, abstract reasoning, distractor inhibition, and mental rotation and a significant reduction in task-switching costs after training compared with those receiving no intervention (Basak, Boot, Voss, & Kramer, 2008). Indeed, playing video games is for the most part a very healthy and highly enjoyable activity.
For all that is known further studies are needed and we support such effort.