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107 Video Game Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Video games have become a popular form of entertainment for people of all ages. From action-packed shooters to immersive role-playing games, there is a video game out there for everyone. With such a wide variety of games to choose from, it can be overwhelming to decide on a topic for an essay about video games. To help you get started, here are 107 video game essay topic ideas and examples to inspire your writing:

• The impact of violent video games on children's behavior
• The evolution of video game graphics over the years
• The rise of esports and its influence on the gaming industry
• The benefits of playing video games for cognitive development
• The representation of gender and race in video games
• The history of virtual reality gaming
• The psychology of loot boxes in video games
• The role of music in enhancing the gaming experience
• The ethics of video game journalism
• The impact of video game addiction on mental health
• The cultural significance of video game franchises like Mario and Pokemon
• The future of cloud gaming and streaming services
• The role of storytelling in video games
• The influence of video games on popular culture
• The relationship between video games and education
• The impact of video game censorship on creative expression
• The portrayal of mental health issues in video games
• The role of social media in video game marketing
• The history of video game consoles
• The impact of online multiplayer games on social interaction
• The evolution of game mechanics in the survival horror genre
• The representation of LGBTQ+ characters in video games
• The influence of Japanese culture on video game aesthetics
• The role of nostalgia in the popularity of retro gaming
• The impact of microtransactions on player experience
• The relationship between video games and violence in society
• The role of artificial intelligence in game development
• The impact of video game streaming platforms like Twitch
• The representation of disability in video games
• The influence of game design on player engagement
• The evolution of mobile gaming
• The role of virtual economies in online multiplayer games
• The impact of video game sound design on immersion
• The portrayal of mental illness in video games
• The influence of Eastern philosophy on game narratives
• The role of user-generated content in game communities
• The impact of fan culture on video game development
• The representation of indigenous cultures in video games
• The influence of literature on game storytelling
• The role of game difficulty in player satisfaction
• The impact of video game piracy on the industry
• The portrayal of war in military shooter games
• The relationship between video games and sports
• The influence of board games on video game design
• The role of player choice in game narratives
• The impact of virtual reality on therapy and rehabilitation
• The representation of historical events in video games
• The influence of film on game aesthetics
• The role of gender stereotypes in video game marketing
• The impact of game mods on player creativity
• The portrayal of mental health professionals in video games
• The influence of tabletop role-playing games on video game mechanics
• The role of game mechanics in promoting teamwork and cooperation
• The impact of game development crunch on industry workers
• The representation of animals in video games
• The influence of science fiction on game narratives
• The role of player agency in game storytelling
• The impact of game difficulty on player motivation
• The portrayal of addiction in video games
• The influence of mythology on game aesthetics
• The role of puzzles in game design
• The impact of game reviews on player purchasing decisions
• The representation of mental illness in horror games
• The influence of architecture on game environments
• The role of game soundtracks in enhancing the player experience
• The impact of game tutorials on player learning
• The portrayal of robots and AI in video games
• The influence of fashion on character design in games
• The role of humor in game narratives
• The impact of game localization on cultural representation
• The representation of environmental issues in video games
• The influence of psychology on game design
• The role of game narratives in exploring complex themes
• The impact of game communities on player engagement
• The portrayal of mental health struggles in indie games
• The influence of mythology on game storytelling
• The role of player feedback in game development
• The impact of game accessibility on player inclusivity
• The representation of gender identity in video games
• The influence of surrealism on game aesthetics
• The role of morality systems in game narratives
• The impact of game tutorials on player retention
• The portrayal of mental health professionals in horror games
• The influence of psychology on game narratives
• The role of player choice in shaping game outcomes
• The impact of game aesthetics on player immersion
• The representation of LGBTQ+ relationships in video games
• The role of environmental storytelling in game design
• The impact of game streaming on player engagement
• The portrayal of mental illness in puzzle games
• The role of player feedback in shaping game development
• The impact of game aesthetics on player perception
• The representation of LGBTQ+ characters in horror games
• The influence of film noir on game narratives
• The role of environmental storytelling in shaping game worlds
• The impact of game tutorials on player skill progression
• The portrayal of mental illness in narrative-driven games
• The influence of science fiction on game aesthetics
• The role of player choice in determining game endings
• The impact of game aesthetics on player emotional response
• The representation of LGBTQ+ relationships in indie games
• The influence of literature on game design
• The role of environmental storytelling in immersive game worlds
• The impact of game streaming on player community building
• The portrayal of mental health struggles in interactive fiction games

Whether you are writing a research paper, a critical analysis, or a personal reflection on video games, these topics provide a diverse range of ideas to explore. From examining the psychological effects of gaming to analyzing the cultural significance of game narratives, there is no shortage of fascinating topics to delve into. So, pick a topic that interests you and start exploring the world of video games through the lens of your essay. Happy writing!

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127 excellent video game research topics for 2023.

Are you looking for the best video game research topics for 2023? We are proud to say that you have arrived at the right place. Our experienced ENL writers and professional editors have just finished creating our brand new list of 127 awesome video game topics for high school and college students. You can use any of our ideas for free – no credits required.

Best Way To Write A Video Game Essay

Before we get to the list of topics, we want to make sure you know how to write a great essay. After all, finding a great topic is just part of the writing process of any custom term papers . Here are some pointers that should help you do a better job on your research paper:

• Structure your paper properly and always start with an outline. We recommend you use the 5 paragraph essay structure, as it’s extremely versatile.
• Make sure your grammar and vocabulary are spot-on. Edit your work and polish your writing to make sure you get a top grade.
• Be careful with quotes and citations. Remember to include all your sources in the References chapter.
• Always start your paper with a great thesis statement. Dedicate some time to crafting the best one possible.
• Keep in mind that each body paragraph should start with a clear statement and then support it. Don’t tackle more than one important idea in a paragraph.
• Make sure you research the topic thoroughly and get accurate data from reputable sources. This is, after all, a research paper.
• Last, but not least, write in a clean and concise manner. Express your ideas clearly and avoid unnecessary information that would just confuse or bore your readers.

Now that you know what to do and what to avoid when writing the video game research paper, it’s time to take a look at our list of original video game research topics:

Easy Video Game Topics

We will start our list with a selection of easy video game topics that are perfect for students who don’t want to spend too much time on their papers:

• Talk about your favorite video game
• What do you like about modern video games?
• The process behind the creation of a new game
• Why do you want to become a video game developer?
• What is a MMORPG video game?
• Differences between FPS and RPG games
• Analyze the gaming industry in a country of your choice
• An in-depth look at cyber sports and video game championships
• Can playing video games be considered a sport?
• What makes League of Legends so popular?
• Research gun violence in modern video games
• Are the games you play bad for you?
• Talk about the impact of video games on small children
• Do video games have any positive effects on you?

Video Games Topic For Every Student

Below, you will find a selection of topics for every student from high school to college. Check out our video games topic for every student list:

• The psychology behind modern video games
• Analyze the launch of a popular game
• How are video games priced?
• The history of online gaming
• Games as learning tools
• Controlling video game addiction
• Shooters or strategy games?
• Why you shouldn’t play video games
• Physical benefits of games

Interesting Video Game Topics To Write About

We know; you want a topic that is both interesting and easy to write about. Take a look at these interesting video game topics to write about:

• Do violent video games make teens violent?
• What is the effect of video games on children?
• What changed my view on video games?
• Skills that can be improved by playing games
• Do adults play video games?
• Research the increase in demand for video games
• Compare video games in the US and the UK
• Ethical responsibility in the gaming industry
• How addictive are role playing video games?

Fun Gaming Topics

Yes, writing a research paper can be fun – if you choose a great topic. Pick any of our fun gaming topics and start writing your paper right away:

• The entire history of video games
• Positive effects of video games
• Android games vs iOS games
• The Candy Crush popularity
• Gaming industry careers
• Genres of video games
• The technology behind the Xbox 4
• What causes addiction when it comes to video games?
• How do games improve learning skills?

Latest News On Video Games

If you want to write about something new, we recommend you take a look at the latest news in video games:

• Talk about the use of augmented reality in video games in 2023
• What are incremental console upgrades?
• An in-depth look at inclusivity in video games
• Which games are trending in 2023?
• Most anticipated video games of 2023
• Latest advances in 3D and SFX effects
• Talk about the remastered cinematics of Diablo 2 Resurrected
• Halo Infinite: everything we know so far
• The clan system in Call of Duty: Vanguard

Informative Gaming Topics To Talk About

Do you want to write an informative paper? No problem, we have a long list of informative gaming topics to talk about right here:

• Why do people love video games so much?
• Can video game addiction be treated like substance addiction?
• Case study: The Elder Scrolls of Oblivion
• Discuss government regulation of video games in the US
• Compare and contrast the Xbox and the PlayStation
• A closer look at the Japanese gaming industry
• What does it take to become a video game creator?
• The rise of Android video games
• Do we really need computer games nowadays?

Video Game Research Paper Topics For High School

Our list of video game research paper topics for high school is unique, so you can safely pick any one of our ideas and write your essay on it:

• What do modern video games promote?
• How much time should you spend playing video games?
• Are video games good or bad for our youth?
• Talk about how gaming will look 20 years from now
• Does playing video games make you think more strategic?
• How important are video games for our society?
• The importance of video games in treating depression
• Are games a good way to treat anxiety?
• Why do people spend so much money on video games?

Best Video Game Research Questions

A question is usually enough to spark your creativity. This is why we have an entire list of the best video game research questions right here:

• Are video games good for teens?
• How does video game violence affect children?
• How will games look 50 years from now?
• How do games improve our collaborative skills?
• Why do we love looking at other play video games?
• How damaging is piracy for the video game industry?
• Which are more popular, RPGs or FPSs?

Video Games Debate Topics

Are you preparing for a debate and need a great topic? Don’t worry about it; we’ve got your back. Check out these great video games debate topics:

• Discuss sexism in modern video games
• Talk about social problems related to video games
• Virtual reality in future games
• The important of augmented reality
• Can a game be educational?
• What makes games so fun and addictive?
• Gaming in the classroom in 2023
• Interesting online gaming experiences
• Important of games in special education settings

Good Video Game Writing Prompts

Are you looking for some good video game writing prompts that can help you write an intriguing research paper? Here are some of our best ideas:

• Compare and contrast the top 3 games in the United Kingdom in 2023
• What are some problems with modern video games?
• An in-depth look at advanced SFX effects
• 3D game rendering technologies
• Discuss online piracy related to video games
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Modern video games
• How realistic are modern games in 2023?
• Tackle the violence theme in video games
• Sony vs. Microsoft: gaming giants battle
• The link between gaming and violence in teenagers
• Discuss the addictiveness of video games

Video Games Research Paper Topics For College

Of course, we have a list of video games research paper topics for college students. These are a bit more difficult than the others in our list:

• Linking video game addiction to substance abuse
• The use of first person shooter games in military training programs
• Flight simulation games and their real world applications
• Games that improve critical thinking skills
• The minimum age for playing video games
• Games that improve reaction times
• Pros and cons of playing assassin video games
• Debunking the most popular myths about video games
• Should parents prevent their children from playing video games?
• The link between video games and cognitive skill improvements

Engaging Video Games Topics

Want to engage your audience right from the start? If you are looking to impress your professor, you might want to give these engaging video games topics a try:

• The role of a developer in the video game industry
• How is testing being carried out on video games?
• Talk about the latest and most advanced video game effects
• An analysis of the video game industry in 2023
• Compare the 3 most popular games in the United States in 2023
• Are online video games more addictive than single-player ones?
• Discuss about the psychological effects of video games
• Compare and contrast 3 first person shooter games
• Improving reaction time in FPS games
• The effect of video games on education

Video Games Of The Future

Last, but not least, we have a nice compilation of ideas related to video games of the future. Take a look at our innovative ideas and pick the one you like:

• A closer look at Battlefield 2042
• Talk about how rendering graphics works in games
• Advances in graphics planned for games to be released in 2023
• Innovative graphics in Halo Infinite
• Discuss 3D game rendering technologies of the future
• What makes Pragmata a game of the future?
• The use of artificial intelligence in games in 2023
• Research the use of virtual reality in future games
• Discuss real-time rendering in future 3D games
• An in-depth look at Hytale (to be released in 2023)

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110 Video Game Topic Ideas for Essays & Examples

🔝 top 10 video game topics for 2024, 🏆 best video game topic ideas & essay examples, 🎮 good video game research topics, 🕹️ interesting gaming topics to write about, ❓ video game research questions, ✅ simple & easy video game essay topics.

Looking for video game topics for your project? Look no further! Here, we’ve collected excellent essay topics for true gaming enthusiasts. Whether you’re looking for argumentative essay ideas on video games, research topics, or questions for debate, you will find them here.

• History of Video Game Consoles
• Myths of Video Game Violence
• The Global Phenomenon of Esports
• VR Gaming and Its Future Possibilities
• How Video Games Influence Cognitive Skills
• Therapeutic Mental Health Benefits of Video Games
• Diversity and Gender Representation in Video Games
• How Multiplayer Games Impact Social Interaction
• Healthy Gaming Habits Against Video Game Addiction
• Aesthetic and Narrative Qualities of Artistic Video Games
• Product Life Cycle & Marketing of Video Game Industry One of the most important advantages of the concept of life cycle can be seen in the sphere of marketing, where if used as a tool it allows adjusting the strategies, including marketing, based on […]
• Video Game Addiction and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs As to me, I was interested in video games when I was a child because this industry was at its beginning and almost every pupil was involved in it.
• Sony and Nintendo in the Video Game Industry The firm has manufactured several generations of the home console since the 1980s, beginning with the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System released in the early 1990s, and the Nintendo 64 that was […]
• Video Game Effects: Good or Bad? Given the fact that there is indeed a logically sound rationale to such a suggestion, throughout the course of conducting my study, I remained thoroughly observant of the article’s classification-related suggestions, in regards to the […]
• The “Medal of Honor” Video Game Analysis The game is set to depict the Afghanistan invention in 2002 and the battle between the U.S.military and the Taliban. Due to the close resemblance of the game to the Afghanistan war, the game has […]
• FIFA 10 Football Simulation Video Game A lack of consistency is evident in the various versions of this game as FIFA 10 played on a PC lacks the realism that is exhibited when the game is played on XBOX 360 and […]
• Video Game Industry Analysis In 1950, Yamauchi assumed the position of the president in the firm and got on a variety of strategies with the purpose of rationalizing and modernizing the way the firm was controlled.
• The Monopoly Tycoon Video Game Review The game is stylistically similar to the board game Monopoly, and it can be played both online and offline. It is important to note that the game has a multiplayer feature, which can be played […]
• The Video Game Industry Evolution The first mention of the creation of such games dates back to the 1940s, but it was in 1952 that Alexander Shafto “Sandy” Douglas officially presented his dissertation at the University of Cambridge. One of […]
• The NASCAR Video Game Project Management Plan The plan attempts to draw the features and gameplay mechanics by replicating the thought process of a potential player. At this stage, the game should be well-advertised and ready for release.
• The Motivation of the Video Game Player For instance, the project gave its players the dynamic and fast pace of the game, a vast and detailed map, various locations, several different weapons, and character skins, and this is not all the possibilities.
• Human Life: Video Game, Simulation, or Reality? Drawing parallels between the real and the virtual world, one can admit the unreality of the existence of the planet and people and compare everything that happens with the simulation in which we are.
• Does Video Game Violence Lead to Aggression in Children? Among the gaming community, children participate vigorously in absorbing the plethora of entertaining content, including age-restricted ones where the scenes of violence are abundant.
• A Role-Playing Video Game Ayiti: The Cost of Life This strategy worked but not to the topmost level simply because the burden of the living cost was gradually weighing down the overall income of my family.
• BioWare Video Game Project Management For example, Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third installment of the company’s flagship series, switched to the Frostbite engine used by most of the EA games and succeeded in delivering the product despite the technical difficulties […]
• Video Game History: Overview From the 1990s to Nowadays In addition to arcade car behavior, the game was also famous for its beautiful graphics at the time, with each game in the series being a launch title showing the capabilities of the console.
• Video Game Delivery Project: Strategic Marketing To initiate strategies in marketing of Video Game, the company will decide to develop a web based application by ABC CORP and this application is customized to meet the requirements of the project. The purpose […]
• A Video Game Store’s Business Plan The projected cash flow of the cash in the balance sheet will appear positive for the next five years and will show that the company’s profitability in will be good enough pay for operating expenses […]
• The U.S. Video Game Industry This was also based on the views of the company’s developers who assumed that the technological advantages of the the16-bit system were extremely less than that of the 8-bit system.
• Video Game Company Against Online Piracy The purpose of the said DRM software is to protect the intellectual rights of the company. The fourth major issue is the encompassing goal of the VGC to end all types of piracy.
• Twitch.tv and Video Game Streaming Career From this point, in spite of the fact that the Twitch.tv platform can be viewed as belonging to the live-streaming industry, the careers of streamers develop according to the traditional principles of the entertainment business.
• Nintendo in the Video Game Industry Previously, Atari was a major power to reckon with in the industry but was later toppled by Nintendo. Part of Yamauchi’s vision was to introduce new and cheaper video games in the market than the […]
• Game designers have the responsibility to design less video game Secondly, the outcome of the video game is unpredictable as compared to movie in which the audience can predict the point at which the story would end thus making the video games more interesting to […]
• Striving for the Ultimate Knowledge: Eli’s Mission. Video Game Owing to the peculiarities of the movie plot, the game can be shaped in a most intriguing way, with a lot of turns of the plot which lead to the most effective denouement.
• Analysis of the Counter-Strike Video Game Phenomenon in Computer Gaming
• Comparison of Three Companies in Video Game Industry; Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft
• Analysis of Free Will in The Stanley Parable Video Game
• Analysis of the Effects of Playing a Video Game Used in Computer Science
• Analysis of the Characteristics and Player Statistics of Bungie’s Video Game Destiny
• Are Video Games Truly a Game or a Reality?
• Analysis of the Topic of the Releases in the Video-Game Industry and the Issues of the Violence
• Analysis of the Rise of the Video Game Empire in Modern Society
• Two Aspects of Creating a Video Game
• Analysis of the Third-Person, Console-Based Video Game, The Last of Us
• Are Users The Next Entrepreneurs? A Case Study On The Video Game Industry
• Combating Video Game Addiction : A Global Problem
• Does Playing Video Game Consoles Bring About Plenty of Advantages?
• Analysis of the Field Work Project and the Topic of a Video Game Community
• Does Video Game Violence Affect Children?
• Do Video Games Contribute For Video Game Violence?
• Is The Video Game Industry an Oligopoly?
• Is Video Game Violence the Cause of Juvenile Delinquency?
• Psychological Effects of Video Game Violence on Children
• What Is the Defining Business and Economic Characteristics of the Video Game Console Industry?
• Why Play Station 4 and the Xbox One Are the Kings of the Next Generation Video Game Console?
• What Makes A Video Game Addictive?
• Competition Among 3 Main Video Game Companies: Nintendo, Sega, And Sony
• Brief Note On Video Gaming And The Video Game Industry
• Effects of Television and Video Game Violence on Children and Teenagers
• Analysis of the Different Genres of Video Game Systems for Children
• Overview of the Process and Career in Video Game Design
• Development of the Elder Scrolls Video Game Series
• Breaking Gender Stereotypes in Traditionally Masculine Sports: The Inclusion of Women in FIFA 16 Video Game
• Cancer: Video Game and Playing Violent Video
• Fighting the Online Video Game Wars in China
• Government Regulation Of Video Game Violence Is Unconstitutional And Unnecessary
• Japanese video game industry
• History of the Video Game Industry
• Microsoft Xbox Entering the World of Video Game
• The Merchant of Video Games: Adapting the Merchant of Venice into an Adventure Game
• What Are Some Revolutionary Breakthroughs in the Video Game Industry?
• What Does It Take To Make It in the Video Games Industry?
• Why Has the Video Game Industry Exploded Recently?
• What Is Wrong With the Video Game Industry in This Generation?
• Is the Video Game Industry Going Downhill?
• Who Is the Best Voice Actor in the Video Game Industry?
• What Will Be the Next Breakthrough or “Big Thing” in the Video Game Industry?
• Is the Video Game Industry in Trouble Right Now?
• Who Makes More Money: Hollywood or the Video Game Industry?
• How Has the Coronavirus Impacted the Video Game Industry?
• What Is the Biggest Missed Opportunity Yet in the Video Game Industry?
• Does Video Game Violence Induce Negative Affects on Our Youth?
• What Are the Changes the Video Game Industry Needs?
• How Large Is the Video Game Industry?
• Why Is the Video Game Industry in China Dominated by MMOs?
• Is There a Bubble Forming in the Video Game Industry?
• What Do Video Game Players Understand That Most People Don’t?
• How Easy Is It to Make a Video Game?
• What’s the Best Advice You’ve Received From a Video Game?
• What Was the First Video Game?
• What Is the Most Inappropriate Video Game You Know?
• What Are the Elements of a Good Video Game?
• How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Video Game?
• What Can Video Game Consoles Offer You?
• Why Video Game Addiction Is One of the Urgent Problems Today?
• How Does Science Create Video Game?
• How the 1970s Sparked the Video Game Industry?
• Why Do Video Game Movies Always Fail?
• What’s the Most Popular Video Game Genre?
• The Science Behind Brain-Boosting Games
• How Gaming Reflects and Influences Society
• How Video Games Participate in Social Justice
• Pros and Cons of Gamified Fitness and Wellness Apps
• Gamification, Its Benefits, and Learning Outcomes
• Virtual Goods in Video Games and Their Real-World Value
• What Factors Influence Immersion and Player Engagement?
• Cloud Gaming and the Potential of Streaming Technology
• Market Trends and Revenue Models of the Video Game Industry
• Violence, Microtransactions, and Other Ethical Issues in Video Game Development
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IvyPanda. (2023, December 27). 110 Video Game Topic Ideas for Essays & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/video-game-essay-topics/

"110 Video Game Topic Ideas for Essays & Examples." IvyPanda , 27 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/video-game-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2023) '110 Video Game Topic Ideas for Essays & Examples'. 27 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "110 Video Game Topic Ideas for Essays & Examples." December 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/video-game-essay-topics/.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "110 Video Game Topic Ideas for Essays & Examples." December 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/video-game-essay-topics/.

Articles on Video games

Displaying 1 - 20 of 367 articles.

From silent dialogues to vivid memories – here’s how the science of inner experience could transform gaming

Charles Fernyhough , Durham University

Game changer: A labour group in Québec is pushing for a province-wide video game workers’ union

Michael Iantorno , Concordia University

Fallout: an expertly crafted TV adaptation that manages to incorporate some of the best elements of gameplay

Peter Howell , University of Portsmouth

Video games at work? It sounds fun, but there are ethical risks

Nick Butler , Stockholm University and Sverre Spoelstra , Lund University

Could a video game developer win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Andrés Porras Chaves , IE University

Video games like Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley can inspire players to look after nature

Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda , University of East Anglia and Lucas Friche , Université de Lorraine

I created a ‘cosy game’ – and learned how they can change players’ lives

Adam Jerrett , University of Portsmouth

Playing Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley is a reminder of Tove Jansson’s environmental message

Esme Miskimmin , University of Liverpool

Anyone can play Tetris, but architects, engineers and animators alike use the math concepts underlying the game

Leah McCoy , Wake Forest University

The video game industry is booming. Why are there so many layoffs?

Kenzie Gordon , University of Alberta ; Jennifer R. Whitson , University of Waterloo ; Johanna Weststar , Western University , and Sean Gouglas , University of Alberta

60% of Australian English teachers think video games are a ‘legitimate’ text to study. But only 15% have used one

Amanda Gutierrez , Australian Catholic University ; Kathy Mills , Australian Catholic University ; Laura Scholes , Australian Catholic University , and Luke Rowe , Australian Catholic University

From besting Tetris AI to epic speedruns – inside gaming’s most thrilling feats

James Dawes , Macalester College

Why we should take competitive video games more seriously

Thomas Burelli , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa ; Haoran Liu , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa , and Marie Dykukha , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

Vacuuming, moving house, unpacking are boring in real life – so why is doing them in a video game so fun?

Lesley Speed , Federation University Australia

E3: why the world’s biggest video game event just closed for good – and what’s next for the industry

Theo Tzanidis , University of the West of Scotland

Buying indie video games over the holidays can help make the industry more ethical and fair

Sarah Stang , Brock University

Baldurs Gate 3 wins game of the year at 2023’s Game Awards – an expert review

Emma Joy Reay , University of Southampton

Microsoft’s ban on third-party controllers on the Xbox excludes some disabled gamers from using the device

Juan Escobar-Lamanna , Western University

All the video games shortlisted for the 2023 Game Awards – reviewed by experts

Theo Tzanidis , University of the West of Scotland ; Adam Jerrett , University of Portsmouth ; David Stevenson , Trinity College Dublin ; Emma Joy Reay , University of Southampton ; Henryk Haniewicz , University of Southampton , and Michael Samuel , University of Bristol

‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ became the surprise hit of 2023 by upending conventional wisdom about what gives video games broad appeal

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Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

Evolutionary Biologist, ARC Future Fellow, UNSW Sydney

Director of the International Gaming Research Unit and Professor of Behavioural Addiction, Nottingham Trent University

Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures, SOAR Fellow., University of Sydney

Associate Professor in Politics, University of Leeds

Researcher: Digital Literacy and Digital Wellbeing, Western Sydney University

Associate Professor, Swinburne University of Technology

Lecturer in Digital Cultures, University of Sydney

Professor of Psychology, Stetson University

PhD Candidate in Recreation and Leisure Studies, University of Waterloo

Lecturer, Faculty of Creative & Cultural Industries, University of Portsmouth

Professor in American Media and Culture, University of Kent

Knight Chair in Interactive Media; Associate Professor of Communication, University of Miami

Professor of Computational Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida

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How Video Games Are Making Research Fun

Gamification and citizen science meet when research projects create video games to make data collection and analysis fun.

The SciStarter Blog

By Nathaniel Scharping

While we might imagine a scientist as a chemist concocting substances in a lab, or a biologist diving with sea creatures, the reality is often far more mundane. Much of science involves collecting and analyzing data, and that process isn’t always very exciting. Think counting bacteria in a petri dish, or noting if two stars look alike in an image of the Milky Way.

But a number of research projects have found a way to buck that trend and turn the grinding work of data collection and analysis into something fun, even rewarding. By creating games that bake the process of data collection into their mechanics, players can contribute data and even uncover new insights just by playing along. Gamification, along with the growing movement known as citizen science, which invites volunteers to take part in real science research, is, in its own way, reshaping what it means to do science.

Gamifying Science

Games that pair citizen science with rewarding play are probing treatments for cancer, helping to cure Alzheimer’s, probing the foundations of language and more. Not only are the games made to be fun, but they address a prevailing issue among crowdsourcing projects: the dropoff rate. Citizen science games tackle the problem with game mechanics that allow players to uncover valuable data through the simple act of playing, keeping them engaged. The results can be striking: Volunteers with the citizen science game Stall Catchers were able to process 50 times as much data as scientists working alone. And research in The Lancet on citizen science volunteers playing the game Cell Slider found that the players were more than 90 percent accurate in classifying images of tumors, nearing the accuracy of trained pathologists.

“The concept is for the player, without actually knowing the background of the problem, without knowing the science of the problem, to be able to do something that helps solve the problem,” says Jay Halderman, the vice president of  BALANCED Media |Technology , a video game company that’s created multiple citizen science video games.

The studio’s most recent game is a pattern-matching challenge called Rocks & Runes . Players place cartoon bombs on a board filled with brightly-colored runes, with the goal of destroying rocks and matching runes together. The game might feel familiar to anyone who’s ever played Candy Crush, and it takes all of five minutes to get the hang of.

But beneath the bursts of color and flurries of point multipliers, players’ decisions are actually sorting through data from FDA-approved drug compounds to identify those that might be useful against multiple-drug-resistant chemotherapy. By eliminating rocks with bombs, players are virtually eliminating the ineffective properties of existing drugs and pointing machine learning algorithms toward more useful compounds, helping to sift out promising candidates from thousands of drugs.

Still, a player doesn’t even need to know the potential scientific benefits to enjoy the game. Adding enough reward to the gameplay to keep players interested in the game itself is a fundamental goal when designing citizen science games, says Nathan Bowden, a senior game designer at BALANCED Media|Technology.

“Everything we do, we’re trying to look at it through the lens of ‘is this fun?’” he says.

The designers often draw from existing video game archetypes — pattern matching, first-person shooters and more — when looking for inspiration. Sometimes the real challenge is simply finding the right paradigm for a particular dataset or scientific problem, Bowden says. When designing Wiley Wizard , a game that works with the same dataset as Rocks & Runes, the designers played around with half a dozen different game ideas before settling on one, a spooky cartoon world where a wizard fights ghosts.

“There’s just so many different ways you can encapsulate one piece of research into a single mechanic,” Bowden says.

Games With an Open Canvas

Another citizen science game, Glyph , takes a different approach. Instead of creating rigid rules or a defined path of gameplay, the project, which studies and compares alphabets from around the world, instead offers players a nearly blank slate.

The simple game asks players to come up with a set of rules to differentiate letters from alphabets around the world. The goal, says Olivier Morin , one of the game’s creators and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, is to develop a kind of grammar of letter shapes that the researchers can use to study how letters have evolved and how the shapes of letters affect our cognition. The researchers could have paid participants to do the work, like other lab experiments often do, Morin says. But by gamifying the process of data collection, he hopes they’ll be able to reach people who are much more creatively involved in the process, and more likely to come up with unique solutions.

“We need creative players who want to push the boundaries of the game and create unique kinds of data we could never gather in an experiment,” Morin says.

Players get points for coming up with rules for classifying the shapes of letters (think: these are all round, these all have a vertical line), with extra points if they’re the first-ever person to propose a particular rule. The response so far has been encouraging, Morin says, with a few thousand players from around the world. That’s ideal for a small game like theirs, he says, where the real goal is to reach people who might be highly interested in the challenge. Their top player right now has more than 60,000 points, which represents weeks of gameplay.

“That person really spent weeks trying to devise the most elegant, intelligible but innovative classification she could think of to make sense of letter shapes,” Morin says. “There’s no way a paid participant would do that in a few hours.”

At Balanced Media, the designers have been exploring other ways to entice players to participate, including creating games that can be played inside live Twitch streams, which allow gamers to broadcast matches and interact. They created a new game styled like the classic “Asteroids” arcade game that can be played between matches right on Twitch. Players must separate matter from antimatter by drawing a straight line across the screen, a simple task that helps sort the same drug compound data as Rocks & Runes and Wiley Wizard.

Other citizen science games offer even more ways to get involved. The popular Stall Catchers game asks players to find “stalls,” or blocked blood vessels, in images of mouse brains to advance Alzheimer’s research. And in the iPad game NeMO- Net , players classify corals to help train an algorithm that’s watching over the health of coral reefs around the world.

There may be even more ways for gamers to do citizen science soon. Or, to put it another way, we may soon have even more fun citizen science games. The technology and infrastructure supporting the video game industry continues to grow, unlocking new capabilities and audiences as it does so.

“It’s giving us more and more opportunities for ways to present these things to a player,” Bowden says. “That’s incredibly exciting, the potential there.”

Want to try some for yourself? Find dozens of citizen science games on SciStarter .

Do video games affect your mood? Read more about Video Gaming Disorder and Mental Health .

About the Author

Nate is a science writer and editor who has reported everywhere from particle colliders to archaeological digs. He’s also a cofounder of Lunaris Creative, an agency focused on scientific storytelling for brands and nonprofits. You can find clips of his work at nathanielscharping.com.

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Video Games for Impact: Design Projects That Can Change the Way We Think

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About this Research Topic

Video games are a popular form of entertainment across several age and cultural groups that is gaining increasing attention in recent years. However, their impact on players' attitudes and behaviors is often overlooked. This call aims to explore the concept of "video games for impact" and present design projects that can change the way we think. Games for impact, as it was introduced as an award category of the Games Awards and as an Academic Consortium launched at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the US, represents an exciting new frontier in game design, since it focuses on implemented games and their results. One key factor in the effectiveness of video games for impact is the use of persuasive design elements, such as storytelling, characters, and gameplay mechanics, that are carefully crafted to influence players' attitudes and behaviors. Another important factor is the potential for players to emotionally connect with the game's message and relate to its characters. This emotional connection can lead to increased empathy and understanding of the issues being addressed in the game and may motivate players to take action in their own lives. There are many ways through which a video game might have a big impact on the community of both players and designers, and this edited volume aspires to collect game design projects that have the potential to change the way we think about and experience games. Main issues include: - The theory behind video games of impact, including how they can be used to promote behaviors, and challenge negative stereotypes and biases. - Case studies of video games that have already achieved an impact and identify key design elements that contribute to their effectiveness. For example, the game "Never Alone" successfully managed to introduce the Inupiat culture to the public, using interesting mechanics and collaborative game design. - Design elements that can be used to achieve a desired impact e.g., social, or environmental issues and the potential impact of these design projects on the gaming industry and society as a whole. - Discussions on the methodological issues of games evaluation and impact assessment. What are the requirements and design principles for a comprehensive scientific methodology for the evaluation of games for impact? What kind of challenges are we facing and what kind of tools do we have at our disposal? Therefore, we are inviting the submissions of original papers focused on, but not exclusively, the following topics: - The impact of video game design elements, such as narrative, character development, and gameplay mechanics, on players' attitudes and behaviors - The effectiveness of video games in changing players' attitudes and behaviors - Inclusion and representation in video games - Games and game design projects aimed at introducing new forms of narrative, new narrative tropes and storytelling techniques. - The role of games and game design projects that tackle important societal issues, e.g., promoting diversity, inclusion, and challenging stereotypes and biases. - Games as culture mediators - Game projects that experiment with new equipment and technologies that could make a difference. - Games and game design projects with artistic value. - Serious games that affect attitudes and behaviors, challenges and opportunities of designing video games for educational purposes. - Interviews from aspiring game creators. - Reviews of games for impact. Possible submission types include empirical studies, theoretical contributions and game analysis. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Keywords : Video games for impact, Attitudes and behaviors, Game design elements, Serious Games, Narrative and storytelling

Important Note : All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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117 Original Video Game Research Topics That Are Very Cool

Stop wasting your time searching all over the Internet for unique video game research topics! You can find 117 original video game topic ideas right here on this page. And yes, you can use these topics for free without even having to give us any credit. In fact, we have just finished updating the list of topics for 2023. This means that you will be able to find dozens of unique topic ideas that will give you an advantage over your classmates. In addition to the interesting topics, we also have 7 helpful tips, tricks and advice on how to write a video game essay or research paper faster. Let’s get started!

Finishing Your Video Game Essay On Time

However, finding excellent video game topics quickly is not enough, especially when you are on a tight deadline. There are many other things you can do to finish your paper on time. To make sure you complete the assignment on time, you should follow our tips, tricks and advice.

Start early. Give yourself enough time to research and write your essay. Don’t wait until the last possible minute to start writing the paper. Make sure you understand the requirements and scope of your essay topic. Stay focused and avoid wasting your limited time. Break down the task. Divide the essay into smaller parts, such as researching, outlining, writing, and editing. This will help you manage your time better and avoid being overwhelmed. Create a timeline. Develop a timeline that includes all the various things you need to do to write the paper and set a deadline for each one. Prioritize. Determine which parts of the paper are most important and work on them first. Make effective use of your energy. Use credible (primary) sources. This way you won’t have to go back and correct various parts of the paper due to problems with your sources. Create an outline of your essay before you start. This will help you organize your thoughts and save time by avoiding the need to revise and rearrange your work later.

Now that you know how to be more efficient, it’s time to give you some topics that will help you write an exceptional paper in no time:

Easy Video Games Topics

Don’t want to spend too much time writing the essay? No problem, just choose one of our easy video games topics:

• The history and evolution of video games.
• The positive effects of video games on children.
• The impact of video game violence on society.
• The benefits of playing video games for cognitive development.
• The use of video games in education and training.
• The role of video games in promoting physical activity.
• The psychology of video game addiction and its effects.
• The influence of video games on culture and society.
• The future of virtual reality in video games.
• The use of video games as a treatment for mental health issues.
• The ethical considerations of video game development and production.

Interesting Video Game Topics To Write About

Our experts have put together a list of the most interesting video game topics to write about. Check out the list below:

• Gender representation and diversity in video games.
• The impact of esports on the gaming industry.
• The relationship between video games and storytelling.
• Cultural significance of popular video game franchises.
• The role of video games in socialization and relationships.
• The effects of streaming on the gaming culture.
• The potential negative effects of excessive video game playing.
• The use of video games in medical treatment.
• The evolution of game design and mechanics in video games.
• The impact of the video game industry on local economies.

Current Gaming Topics

If you want to talk about topics that are relevant today, you can simply select one of our current gaming topics. You can find them right here:

• The rise of esports and professional gaming leagues
• The ongoing debate around video game addiction
• The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gaming industry
• Loot boxes and micro transactions: controversies
• The increasing popularity of mobile gaming
• The emergence of cloud gaming platforms
• The debate around video game violence and its effects
• The role of gaming in learning
• The rise of indie game developers and their impact
• Talk about augmented reality in gaming in 2023
• The importance of inclusivity in gaming

Video Game Research Paper Topics

Writing a research paper on a topic related to video games doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are some simple video game research paper topics:

• The impact of video games on problem-solving skills
• Violent video games and aggressive behavior
• Using video games for teaching in the classroom in 2023
• The influence of video game design on player engagement
• The impact of online gaming communities on social interaction
• The role of video games in promoting physical activity
• The potential for video games to enhance mental health
• The effects of video games on attention span
• The use of video games in therapy
• Video game addiction and compulsive behavior

Video Game Research Questions

We have some of the most thought-provoking video game research questions on the Internet right here for you:

• How do different game design elements impact player attitude?
• What is the role of video games in shaping cultural identity?
• How do different types of video games affect spatial reasoning skills?
• What is the relationship between video games and creativity?
• How do video games impact risk-taking behavior?
• What is the impact of video games on academic performance?
• How do video games affect emotional intelligence?
• How can video games be used to promote sustainability?
• What is the impact of video game marketing on consumer behavior?
• How do video games impact racial stereotypes in society?
• What ethical considerations should be taken into account when designing video games?

Video Game Writing Prompts

Don’t know what to write the essay about? Don’t worry about it; we’ve got your back. Check out these video game writing prompts:

• Write a short story based on the world of “The Elder Scrolls. Skyrim.”
• Imagine a new planet for the “Mass Effect” series and describe it.
• Write a fanfiction piece that explores the backstory of “Overwatch” hero, Soldier. 76.
• Create a character in “Fallout 4” and write a journal entry from their perspective.
• Write a screenplay for a movie based on “The Last of Us.”
• Develop a new quest line for “World of Warcraft” and outline the story.
• Write a short story that takes place in the universe of “Halo.”
• Imagine an alternate ending to “BioShock Infinite” and write it out.
• Create a poem inspired by the themes and imagery of “Journey.”
• Write a story set in the post-apocalyptic world of “Horizon Zero Dawn.”
• Develop a backstory for the character of Clementine in “The Walking Dead” game series.

Video Games Debate Topics

Preparing for a heated debate? You need a good topic, of course. Check out these interesting video games debate topics:

• Are video games really a form of art?
• Is the portrayal of violence in video games harmful?
• Are loot boxes and micro transactions in video games ethical?
• Is it fair for video games to include difficulty levels in 2023?
• Are video games responsible for addiction and compulsive behavior?
• Should video games be used as a tool for educational purposes?
• Is it appropriate to censor or ban video games?
• Should video game companies be held accountable for their content?
• Is the portrayal of women in video games sexist?
• Are remastered video games worth the investment?
• Is streaming video games on platforms like Twitch a viable career?

Informative Gaming Topics To Talk About

If you’re looking for some informative gaming topics to talk about, you’re in luck. We have some for you:

• The evolution of gaming technology and graphics
• The rise of esports and competitive gaming
• The history and influence of classic video game franchises
• The future of virtual and augmented reality gaming
• The psychology of video game addiction and how to combat it
• The cultural significance and representation in video games
• The intersection of music and gaming, including video game soundtracks
• The rise of mobile gaming and its influence on the gaming market
• The history and impact of multiplayer gaming and online communities
• The design and development process of creating a video game

Engaging Topic Ideas Related To Video Games

These unique, engaging topic ideas related to video games will surely win you some bonus points from you professor:

• Write a script for a TV show set in the world of “Assassin’s Creed.”
• Create a new playable character for “Street Fighter” and describe their moves and backstory.
• Write a novella that explores the mystery of “Firewatch.”
• Develop a plot for a new “Red Dead Redemption” DLC.
• Write a short story inspired by the characters of “Life is Strange.”
• Imagine a 2023 sequel to “Breath of the Wild” and outline the plot.
• Write a screenplay for a movie based on “Half-Life.”
• Create a new creature for the world of “Monster Hunter” and describe its behavior and habitat.
• Write a story that takes place in the world of “Dark Souls.”
• Develop a new puzzle game concept and describe its gameplay and mechanics.
• Write a fanfiction piece that explores the relationship between Ellie and Dina in “The Last of Us Part II.”

Fun Video Game Topic Ideas

Writing a paper on a fun topic is a sure way to get noticed. Take a look at some of these fun video game topic ideas:

• Rank the best video game soundtracks in games from 2020 to 2023
• Discuss the funniest video game glitches and bugs
• Explore the history of video game consoles and their evolution
• Create the ultimate video game character (talk about their abilities)
• Choose the most iconic video game weapons and discuss their uses
• Debate the best video game crossover events
• Examine the most impressive speedruns in video game history
• Identify the most challenging video game bosses and discuss strategies to beat them
• Rank the most immersive video game worlds and environments
• Celebrate the most memorable moments in video game history.

Best Video Games Topic Ideas

Want to write your paper on an original topic idea? Below you can find what we consider to be some of the best video games topic ideas:

• The use of video games in advertising and marketing in 2023
• The history and impact of gaming consoles on the industry
• The role of video games in fostering creativity and imagination
• The history and impact of speedrunning on the gaming community and industry
• The ethics of video game content and censorship
• The history and impact of arcade games on gaming culture
• The impact of video games on spatial reasoning and navigation skills
• The psychology of character development and player identification in video games
• The role of video games in exploring and experiencing new cultures and worlds
• The impact of video games on decision-making abilities
• The history and impact of gaming conventions on the industry and community

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What are some gaming topics? Some more interesting gaming topics could be ideas like: psychological affect of games on young children (can also work for psychology term paper writing), developments in gaming software and design, the impact early video games have had on the gaming world today, or a look over important personalities in gaming. Can I get help writing my video games paper? Yes! It is always advisable to ask for help if you are struggling. Even a seemingly fun and interesting topic like video gaming can become overwhelming and a challenge to write about. So you can definitely get online paper writing help while you yourself enjoy playing games instead of writing about them! What is the biggest problem in the gaming industry? There are a few major problems in the gaming industry, however the most current and important one at the moment is labor conditions and economic compensation for gaming industry workers. Gaming is a difficult industry where professionals are constantly working over average hours.

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Video Game Genres and Advancing Quantitative Video Game Research with the Genre Diversity Score

• Published: 24 October 2020
• Volume 9 , pages 401–420, ( 2020 )

Cite this article

• Rebecca Sevin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4360-4464 1 &
• Whitney DeCamp   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4044-2220 1  

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Quantitative research on video games often reduces participants’ gaming experience to how much time they spend playing video games. Although appropriate in some instances, it often fails to capture aspects of the video game experience. Studies that only use time as a means of establishing expertise in gaming fail to capture how much a player is involved in different types of video storytelling, game rules and mechanics, social experiences online and/or offline, and many other aspects. Only using time as a measurement also introduces a bias against women, as they typically have less leisure time overall, reducing the time they might spend playing video games. The current study proposes and tests a novel measure for gauging participants’ experience with video games that includes their experience with various game genres in addition to time dedicated to playing games. The “genre diversity score” presented in this paper provides a better understanding of an individual’s experience with gaming as a whole while still providing a metric that can be used in quantitative research. To demonstrate the usefulness of this measure it is compared to measures of time spent playing, the use of a PC for gaming, and casual/non-casual gaming. The analyses indicate that the genre diversity score outperforms other gaming measures in various tests of predictive power making a case for it to be used in future quantitative or mixed methods studies on gaming.

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The coding used for this study is available upon request.

The difference in free-time is an important consideration here because of the cross-sectional nature of this study. The measures used refer to current video game use, but cumulative lifetime use would also be relevant in how video game exposure might affect various outcomes, and that might not be reflected in current use. Additionally, there may be other purposes for which an enthusiasm-focused measure is more appropriate (i.e., an investigation of the effects of interest or attitudes rather than actual exposure).

A separate set of analyses (not shown, but available upon request) used the same models as in Tables  2 – 4 , but with the ideal scores and ideal hours substituted in for the original measures. In them, ideal genre diversity is consistently the strongest predictor across the models, but the amount of explained variance is slightly lower than in the original models. This suggests that the ideal measure is no better than the actual measure and additionally, ideal hours per week is a significant predictor even after controlling for other measures in these models, but remains relatively weak in comparison to genre diversity and using a PC, suggesting again that it is not a suitable measure by itself.

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Questions used for genre diversity score construct.

(Q1) In the past 6 months, how often have you played the following types of games?

(1) Casual games such as Solitaire, Angry Birds, mobile games, Facebook games, etc.

(2) Arcade / Retro games such as Pac Man, early Super Mario or Sonic games, Galaga, etc.

(3) Group Entertainment such as Kinect Sports, Rock Band, Wii sports, etc.

(4) Role playing style games (RPGs) such as Final Fantasy, Skyrim, Fallout, Mass Effect, etc.

(5) Simulation style games such as Flight Simulator, The Sims, Sim City, etc.

(6) Action games, games which focus on game play, such as God of War, Grand Theft Auto, etc.

(7) Adventure games, games with a focus on story, such as Myst, Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted, Silent Hill etc.

(8) Strategy games such as Civilizations, Warhammer, StarCraft etc.

(9) Racing games such as Forza, Mario Kart, Burnout, Need for Speed, etc.

(10) Independent games such as Bastion, Super Meat Boy, Limbo, Braid, etc.

(11) Shooter style games such as Halo, Modern Warfare, Call of Duty, Left 4 Dead, etc.

(12) Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) style games such as World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, etc.

(13) Realistic Sports games, such as Madden, FIFA, etc.

(14) Fighting games such as Tekken, Soul Caliber, Super Smash Brothers, etc.

(15) Other genre not listed: __________________.

(16) Other genre not listed: __________________.

Responses for each genre: (a) Never / have not heard of this genre, (b) Rarely ever, (c) A few times a month, (d) Several times a month, (e) A few times a week, (f) Roughly every other day, (g) Daily or almost every day.

(Q2) On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “no interest” and 5 is “very strong interest,” how interested are you playing the following types of games if time and money were not an issue?

[Same list of 16 genres as above].

Responses for each genre: (a) No interest (1), (b) Very little interest (2), (c) Some interest (3), (d) Strong interest (4), (e) Very strong interest (5).

About this article

Sevin, R., DeCamp, W. Video Game Genres and Advancing Quantitative Video Game Research with the Genre Diversity Score. Comput Game J 9 , 401–420 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-020-00115-3

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Received : 28 July 2020

Accepted : 14 October 2020

Published : 24 October 2020

Issue Date : December 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-020-00115-3

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The Playing Brain. The Impact of Video Games on Cognition and Behavior in Pediatric Age at the Time of Lockdown: A Systematic Review

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A growing number of children and adolescents play video games (VGs) for long amounts of time. The current outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has significantly reduced outdoor activities and direct interpersonal relationships. Therefore, a higher use of VGs can become the response to stress and fear of illness. VGs and their practical, academic, vocational and educational implications have become an issue of increasing interest for scholars, parents, teachers, pediatricians and youth public policy makers. The current systematic review aims to identify, in recent literature, the most relevant problems of the complex issue of playing VGs in children and adolescents in order to provide suggestions for the correct management of VG practice. The method used searches through standardized search operators using keywords related to video games and the link with cognition, cognitive control and behaviors adopted during the pandemic. Ninety-nine studies were reviewed and included, whereas twelve studies were excluded because they were educationally irrelevant. Any debate on the effectiveness of VGs cannot refer to a dichotomous approach, according to which VGs are rigidly ‘good’ or ‘bad’. VGs should be approached in terms of complexity and differentiated by multiple dimensions interacting with each other.

1. Introduction

In the last decades, a very large body of literature has shown an increasing interest in video games (VGs) and their impact on the brain, cognition and behavior, especially in children and adolescents [ 1 ]. Indeed, a widely growing number of children and adolescents play VGs for a long time, often developing real addictive behaviors [ 2 , 3 ]. In addition, the current outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the following lockdown have significantly reduced outdoor activities and direct interpersonal relationships [ 4 , 5 ]. However, literature data are still inconsistent. For example, according to some meta-analytic reviews [ 6 , 7 , 8 ], exposure to violent VGs is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, cognition and affection in children and adolescents. Conversely, many cross-sectional and intervention studies have shown that the intensive use of some types of VGs leads to significant improvements in many cognitive domains and behaviours [ 1 , 9 , 10 , 11 ]. Video games are even considered as ‘virtual teachers’ and effective and ‘exemplary teachers’ [ 12 , 13 ].

The current systematic review focuses on some crucial outstanding issues within the debate on the effects of VGs on cognition and behavior in order to provide suggestions for parents, pediatricians, health providers and educators dealing with pediatric ages, especially in the complex pandemic period. Namely, it analyzes the most debated and educationally relevant problems on the relationship between video games, cognition and behavior: 1. video games’ effects on cognitive function; 2. video games’ effects on attention and addictive behaviors; 3. video games and prosocial or aggressive behavior. Therefore, the current analysis may be accounted as an original contribution to the practical dimension in the educational and rehabilitation field for parents and educators.

Early common predominant opinions mainly focused on VGs according to dichotomous thinking, as enjoyable entertainment or harmful tools [ 14 ]. The recent literature instead provided evidence on the impact of VGs on the brain and its functional modifications while playing [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ], showing that video games involve different cortical and subcortical structures, with cognitive and emotional competence, such as frontal and prefrontal regions, the posterior and superior parietal lobe, the anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, limbic areas, the amygdala, the entorhinal cortex and basal nuclei [ 1 , 20 , 21 , 22 ].

Mondéjar and colleagues [ 15 ], in a group of twelve healthy preadolescents between 8 and 12 years old, evaluated the frontal lobe activity and the different types of cognitive processing during five platform-based action videogame mechanics: 1. accurate action, related to processes such as concentration, attention, impulse control and information comprehension; 2. timely action, related to working memory, selective attention, decision-making, problem solving and perception; 3. mimic sequence, related to working memory, focalized attention and inhibition control; 4. pattern learning, as selective attention, planning, inhibition control and spatial orientation; 5. logical puzzles related to attention, working memory, the capacity for abstraction, information processing, problem solving, or resistance to interference. They found prominent bioelectrical prefrontal activity during the performance related to executive functions (timely action, pattern learning, logical puzzles) and more global brain activity and a higher presence of alpha waves, or a greater activation of the temporal lobe, in the accurate action and mimic sequence. Similarly, they correlated higher magnitudes on frequency bands with five game mechanics in ten healthy children, who played with a VG platform for an average of about 20 min [ 16 ]. Theta waves, related to memory and emotions, were more significant in the five mechanics, while beta waves, related to concentration, were more prominent in only two. Moreover, activation was more significant in the intermediate and occipital areas for all the mechanics, while recurrent magnitude patterns were identified in three mechanics.

Similarly, Lee et al. [ 17 ], found a thinner cortex and a smaller gray matter volume in critical areas for evaluating reward values, error processing and adjusting behavior, namely, the anterior cingulate cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex and the frontoparietal areas, in young male adults with internet gaming disorders, compared to age-matched healthy male controls. A neuroimaging study examined in individuals affected by gaming disorders the differences during the playing of a violence-related vs. a non-violence-related version of the same VG [ 18 ]. While functional connectivity of the reward-related network and the behavioral inhibition system was altered, the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cerebral area were overstimulated, similarly to smart drug addiction [ 17 , 23 ].

Recently, Kwak et al. [ 19 ] longitudinally compared 14 adolescents with internet gaming disorder to 12 professional internet gaming students who practiced for about ten hours a day, within a defined support system that included practice, physical exercise, lectures on team strategy, rest and mealtimes. After one year, both groups showed increased brain activity within the attention system of the parietal lobe. However, professional gamers improved problematic behaviors, impulsivity, aggression, depression and anxiety, while adolescents with internet gaming disorder showed no behavioral improvement and a dysfunctional brain activity within the impulse control network in the left orbitofrontal cortex.

The current systematic review was structured according to the guidelines and recommendations contained in the PRISMA statement [ 24 ].

Eligibility Criteria

Both experimental and correlational studies and meta-analyses between the years of 2000 and 2020 that investigated outcomes of VG exposure were included. They were considered children and adolescents. Studies employing different methodologies were included: studies in which naive participants were trained to use a VG versus a control group and studies comparing experienced versus non-gamers, or inexperienced players. Primary outcome measures were any type of structural and functional data obtained using neuroimaging techniques and behavioral testing.

Information Sources

One hundred and twenty-two studies were identified through electronic database searching in Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus (Elsevier) and Web of Sciences. The final database search was run on January 2021 using the following keywords: video games; video games and cognition; video games and epidemic; cognitive control; behavior control; brain and video games; spatial cognition; prosocial behavior; violence in video games; aggressive behavior; addictions in adolescents; children and video games.

Study Selection

Inclusion criteria: written in English; published since 2000; deals in depth with cognitive skills, attention, executive functions, or cognitive control; follows a high methodological rigor.

Exclusion criteria: does not refer to key topics directly; the full text could not be obtained; lack of transparency due to missing methodology information. Ninety-nine studies were reviewed and included, whereas twelve studies were excluded because they were irrelevant to the topic or because the full text was not obtained. General communication materials, such as pamphlets, posters and infographics, were excluded as they do not provide evidence about their effectiveness.

Figure 1 shows the selection of studies flowchart.

Selection of studies flowchart.

3.1. Effect of Video Games on Cognitive Functions

Any modern VG requires an extensive repertoire of attentional, perceptual and executive abilities, such as a deep perceptual analysis of complex unfamiliar environments, detecting relevant or irrelevant stimuli, interference control, speed of information processing, planning and decision making, cognitive flexibility and working memory.

Literature data in the last years have proven that VGs may improve a variety of cognitive domains [ 1 , 25 ] as, for example, even just 10 hours of VG could improve spatial attention and mental rotation [ 26 , 27 ]. A large variety of design studies reported in habitual players better performance in multiple cognitive domains, including selective attention [ 3 , 21 , 26 , 28 ], speed of processing [ 21 , 28 ], executive functions [ 29 , 30 ] and working memory [ 31 ]. Similarly, a large body of intervention studies have shown improvements in the same cognitive domains in non-players following training in action VGs [ 27 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 ]. Recently, Benoit et al. [ 38 ] examined in 14 professional VG players and 16 casual VG players various cognitive abilities, such as processing speed, attention, memory, executive functions, manual dexterity and tracking multiple objects in three dimensions [ 39 ]. Professional players showed a very large advantage in visual–spatial short-term memory and visual attention, and less in selective and sustained attention and auditory working memory. Moreover, they showed better speed thresholds in tracking multiple objects in three dimensions overall, though the rate of improvement did not differ in the two groups. In two previous meta-analyses, Bediou et al. [ 40 ] focused on the long-term effects of action VGs on various cognitive domains using both cross-sectional and intervention studies. Overall, the results documented a positive impact of action video gaming on cognition. In cross-sectional studies, a main effect of about half a standard deviation was found. The habitual action game players showed better performance than non-players. Likewise, intervention studies showed about a third of a standard deviation advantage in cognition domains in action VG trainees. Perception, spatial cognition and top-down attention were the three cognitive domains with the most robust impact [ 40 ].

Homer et al. [ 41 ] examined the effectiveness of a custom-designed VG (‘alien game’) in a group of 82 healthy adolescents (age range 14–18 years; average = 15.5 years) trained to play for 20 min per week for 6 consecutive weeks. Such a digital game was devised to target, in a fun way, the specific executive ability of shifting, as the ability to shift between tasks or mental sets, hypothesizing that after playing the ‘alien game’ over a period of several weeks, adolescents would show significant improvements in the targeted ability. Pre- and post-test measures of another executive ability, inhibition, as the ability to control a prepotent response, were also recorded in order to examine the extent to which training would transfer from one executive ability to another. Significant advantages both in shifting and in inhibition abilities were found, providing evidence that VGs can be effective tools for training executive abilities [ 42 , 43 ].

Similarly, Oei and Patterson [ 44 ] examined the effect of action and non-action VGs on executive functions. Fifty-two non-VG gamers played one of four different games for 20 h. Pre- and post-training tests of executive function were administered. The group that trained on the physics-based puzzle game, demanding high level planning, problem solving, reframing, strategizing and new strategies from level to level, improved in several aspects of executive function. In a previous study, the same authors [ 45 ] instructed 75 non-gamers, (average age 21.07 ± 2.12) to play for 20 h, one hour a day/five days a week over four weeks. They compared effects of action and non-action games to examine whether non-action games also improve cognition. Four tests pre- and post-training were administered. The results showed that cognitive improvements were not limited to training with action games and that different games improved different aspects of cognition. Action VGs have even been used to treat dyslexic children [ 46 , 47 ]. Only 12 h of action VGs, for nine sessions of 80 min per day, significantly improved reading and attentional skills [ 48 ].

Moreover, several meta-analytic studies provide evidence that action VG training may become an efficient way to improve the cognitive performance of healthy adults. Wang et al. [ 49 ], in a meta-analysis, found that healthy adults achieve moderate benefits from action VG training in overall cognitive ability and moderate to small benefits in specific cognitive domains. In contrast, young adults gain more benefits than older adults in both overall cognition and specific cognitive domains.

In summation, the studies on VG effects, by different methodologies, document both in adults and in children significant positive outcomes in different cognitive domains. Such performance improvements may be paralleled by functional brain remodelling [ 14 ].

3.2. Video Games Effect on Attention and Addictive Behaviors

Attentional problems are accounted as a crucial area of focus on outcomes of intensive game-play practices in children and adolescents. However, literature on the topic appears inconsistent. While some research has found mixed results [ 50 ] or a positive effect [ 51 , 52 , 53 ], or no relationship between VG practice and attention, other studies have linked VG playing with greater attention problems, such as impulsiveness, self-control, executive functioning, and cognitive control [ 53 , 54 , 55 ].

Gentile et al. [ 56 ], examining longitudinally, over 3 years, a large sample of child and adolescent VG players aged 8–17 (mean = 11.2 ± 2.1), suggested a bidirectional causality: children who spend more time playing VGs have more attention problems; in turn, subjects who have more attention problems spend more time playing VGs. Therefore, children and adolescents with attention problems are more attracted to VGs (excitement hypothesis), and, in turn, they find it less engaging to focus on activities requiring more control and sustained attention, such as educational activities, homework or household chores (displacement hypothesis). According to such hypotheses, and to the operant conditioning model [ 57 , 58 ], VGs, providing strong motivational cues, become more rewarding for impulsive children and teenagers [ 51 ] who, in such contexts, experience a sense of value and feelings of mastery that they do not experience in their daily relationships [ 59 ].

Actually, any modern VG is a highly engaging activity with a variety of attractive cues, such as, for example, violence, rapid movement, fast pacing and flashing lights [ 60 , 61 ]. According to the attractive hypothesis [ 56 ], it may provide a strong motivation and support for attention and even become addictive, especially in subjects with problems maintaining attention in usual, monotonous and poorly engaging tasks. Therefore, paradoxically, a greater VG exposure may improve visual attention skills involved in such engaging play [ 26 ], but it may impair the ability to selectively focus on a target for lasting time, without external exciting cues.

Probably, in line with the bidirectional causality framework [ 56 ], such rewarding conditions could become the psychological context for the structuring of addictive behaviors, such as a sense of euphoria while playing, feeling depressed away from the game, an uncontrollable and persistent craving to play, neglect of family and friends, problems with school or jobs, alteration of sleeping routines, irregular meals and poor hygiene [ 14 ]. The most psychologically fragile subjects may be most attracted to an engaging and rewarding activity, ensuring an effective compensation to their fragility [ 14 ]. However, the topic of video game addiction continues to present today many outstanding issues. There is a large consensus that ‘pathological use’ is more debilitating than ‘excessive use’ of VGs alone [ 62 , 63 , 64 ]. Addictive behavior appears associated with an actual lowering in academic, social, occupational, developmental and behavioral dimensions, while excessive use may simply be an excessive amount of time gaming. According to Griffiths’ suggestions, ‘healthy excessive enthusiasms add to life, whereas addiction takes away from it’ [ 65 ]. However, it is sometimes difficult to identify the clear line between unproblematic overuse of gaming and the pathological and compulsive overuse that compromises one’s lifestyle and psychosocial adjustment [ 66 , 67 , 68 ]. Therefore, there may be a risk of stigmatizing an enjoyable practice, which, for a minority of excessive users, may be associated with addiction-related behaviors [ 69 , 70 ]. Przybylski and colleagues, in four survey studies with large international cohorts (N = 18,932), found that the percentage of the general population who could qualify for internet gaming disorders was extremely small (less than one percent) [ 71 ].

In such a discussion of the pathological nature of VGs, another outstanding question is whether pathological play is a major problem, or if it is the phenomenological manifestation of another pathological condition. Several studies have suggested that video game play can become harmful enough to be categorized as a psychiatric disorder, or it could be a symptom of an underlying psychopathological condition, such as depression or anxiety. Moreover, the functional impairments observed in individuals with game addictions are also thought to be similar to the impairments observed in other addictions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that the brain reward pathways which are activated during video game playing are also activated during cue-induced cravings of drug, alcohol or other type of substances abuse [ 72 , 73 , 74 ].

Some longitudinal studies [ 14 , 75 , 76 ] proved that pathological addictive behaviors, such as depression, are likely to be outcomes of pathological gaming rather than predictors of it [ 77 , 78 ]. Lam and Peng [ 79 ], in a prospective study with a randomly generated cohort of 881 healthy adolescents aged between 13 and 16 years, found that the pathological use of the internet results in later depression. Similarly, Liau et al. [ 80 ], in a 2-year longitudinal study involving 3034 children and adolescents aged 8 to 14 years, found that pathological video gaming has potentially serious mental health consequences, in particular of depression.

In summary, attention problems and addictive behaviors in the context of VGs should be addressed in a circular and bidirectional way in which each variable can influence the others.

3.3. Video Games Effect and Prosocial and Aggressive Behaviors

The positive impact of video games also concerns the social and relational dimension, as occurs in the VG training of prosocial or educational skills. Several studies have reported that playing prosocial VGs, even for a short time, increases prosocial cognition [ 81 ], positive affect [ 82 ] and helping behaviors [ 13 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 ], whereas it decreases antisocial thoughts and the hostile expectation bias, such as the tendency to perceive any provocative actions of other people as hostile even when they are accidental [ 13 , 86 ]. Such findings have been found in correlational, longitudinal and experimental investigations [ 82 , 85 , 87 ].

In four different experiments [ 13 ], playing VGs with prosocial content was positively related to increased prosocial behavior, even though participants played the VGs for a relatively short time, suggesting that VGs with prosocial content could be used to improve social interactions, increase prosocial behavior, reduce aggression and encourage tolerance.

Following experimental, correlational, longitudinal and meta-analytic studies provided further evidence that playing a prosocial VG results in greater interpersonal empathy, cooperation and sharing and subsequently in prosocial behavior [ 87 , 88 , 89 , 90 ].

Such literature’s data are consistent with the General Learning Model [ 91 , 92 ], according to which the positive or negative content of the game impacts on the player’s cognition, emotions and physiological arousal, which, in turn, leads to positive or negative learning and behavioral responses [ 12 , 93 , 94 , 95 ]. Therefore, repeated prosocial behavioral scripts can be translated into long-term effects in cognitive, emotional and affective constructs related to prosocial actions, cognition, feelings, and physiological arousal, such as perceptual and expectation schemata, beliefs, scripts, attitudes and stereotypes, empathy and personality structure [ 83 , 91 ].

In the same conceptual framework, educational video games have been found to positively affect behaviors in a wide range of domains [ 12 ], school subjects [ 96 ] and health conditions [ 97 , 98 ]. In randomized clinical trials, for example, diabetic or asthmatic children and adolescents improved their self-care and reduced their emergency clinical utilization after playing health education and disease management VGs. After six months of playing, diabetic patients decreased their emergency visits by 77 percent [ 99 ]. Therefore, well-designed games can provide powerful interactive experiences that can foster young children’s learning, skill building, self-care and healthy development [ 100 ].

Violence in VGs is a matter of intense debate, both in public opinion and in the scientific context [ 101 , 102 ]. A vast majority of common opinions, parents and educators consider the violence of VGs as the most negatively impacting feature to emotional and relational development of youth and children. Actually, studies agree on the negative impact of violent video games on aggressive behavior. Several meta-analyses have examined violent VGs [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 103 ] and, although they vary greatly in terms of how many studies they include, they seem to agree with each other. The most comprehensive [ 8 ] showed that violent VGs, gradually and unconsciously, as a result of repeated exposure to justified and fun violence, would increase aggressive thoughts, affect and behavior, physiological persistent alertnes, and would desensitize players to violence and to the pain and suffering of others, supporting a perceptual and cognitive bias to attribute hostile intentions to others.

Similarly, experimental, correlational and longitudinal studies supported the causal relationship between violent VGs and aggression, in the short- and long-term, both in a laboratory and in a real-life context. A greater amount of violent VGs, or even a brief exposure, were significantly associated with more positive attitudes toward violence [ 104 ], higher trait hostility [ 105 ] and with increased aggressive behaviors [ 106 ], physical fights [ 107 ] and aggressive thoughts [ 108 ] and affect [ 109 ]. In a two-year longitudinal study, children and adolescents who played a lot of violent VGs showed over time more aggressive behaviors, including fights and delinquency [ 110 ]. Saleem, Anderson and Gentile [ 82 ] examined the effects of short-term exposure to prosocial, neutral and violent VGs in a sample of 191 children of 9–14 years old. Results indicated that while playing prosocial games increased helpful and decreased hurtful behaviour, the violent games had the opposite effect.

In summation, the overall literature data support the opinion that violent video games, over time, affect the brain and activate a greater availability to aggressive behavior patterns, although some researchers have pointed out that the negative effects of violent VGs are small and may be a publication bias [ 14 , 111 ].

4. Discussion

The focus of the current overview was to identify, from a functional point of view, the most significant issues in the debate on the impact of VGs on cognition and behavior in children and adolescents, in order to provide suggestions for a proper management of VG practice.

Overall, the reviewed literature agrees in considering the practice of VGs as much more than just entertainment or a leisure activity. Moreover, research agrees that any debate on the effectiveness of VGs cannot refer to a unitary construct [ 14 ], nor to a rigidly dichotomous approach, according to which VGs are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ [ 1 , 12 , 112 , 113 ].

The term ‘video game’ should be viewed as an ‘umbrella term’ that covers different meanings, far from a single unitary construct [ 14 , 114 ]. Furthermore, VGs and their effects should be approached in terms of complexity and differentiated by multiple dimensions interacting with each other and with a set of other variables, such as, for example, the player’s age and personality traits, the amount of time spent playing, the presence of an adult, the game alone or together with others and so on [ 115 ].

Gentile and colleagues [ 116 , 117 , 118 , 119 ] have identified five main features of VGs that can affect players: 1. amount of play; 2. content; 3. context; 4. structure; and 5. mechanics. Each of these aspects can produce or increase different thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

However, the content effects, individually focused, are frequently overemphasized. According to the General Learning Model, children would learn the contents of the specific games and apply them to their lives. Nevertheless, a violent game using a team-based game modality may have different impacts than a violent game using a ‘free for all’ game modality. Although both are equally violent games, the former could suggest teamwork and collaborative behaviors, while playing in an ‘everyone for oneself’ mode could foster less empathy and more aggressive thoughts and behaviors [ 8 , 88 ].

Likewise, the outside social context can have different effects and it may even mitigate or reinforce the effects of the content. Playing violent games together with others could increase aggression outcomes if players reinforce each other in aggressive behavior. Instead, it could have a prosocial effect if the motivations to play together are to help each other [ 120 ].

According to the dominant literature, the psychological appeal of video games may be related to an operant conditioning that reinforces multiple psychological instances, including the need for belonging and social interaction [ 57 , 58 ]. On such drives and reinforcements, the playing time can expand, and it may become endless in addicted subjects. However, the amount of play, regardless of the content, can become harmful when it displaces beneficial activities, affects academic performance or social dimensions [ 52 , 121 ], or supports health problems, such as, for instance, obesity [ 122 , 123 , 124 ], repetitive strain disorder and video game addiction [ 76 , 83 ]. However, a greater amount of time inevitably implies increased repetition of other game dimensions. Therefore, it is likely that some associations between time spent and negative outcomes result from other dimensions, and not from amount of time per se. Moreover, children who perform poorly at school are likely to spend more time playing games, according to the displacement hypothesis, but over time, the excessive amount of play may further damage academic performance in a vicious circle [ 116 ].

VGs can also have a different psychological appeal in relation to their structural organization and the way they are displayed. Many structural features can affect playing behavior, regardless of the individual’s psychological, physiological, or socioeconomic status [ 125 ], such as, for instance, the degree of realism of the graphics, sound and back-ground, the game duration, the advancement rate, the game dynamics such as exploring new areas, elements of surprise, fulfilling a request, the control options of the sound, graphics, the character development over time and character customization options, the winning and losing features as the potential to lose or accumulate points, finding bonuses, having to start a level again, the ability to save regularly, the multi-player option building alliances and beating other players [ 125 ].

The more or less realistic mechanics can also configure the game differently and affect fine or gross motor skills, hand-eye coordination or even balance skills, depending on the type of controller, such as a mouse and keyboard, a game control pad, a balance board, or a joystick.

Therefore, VGs may differ widely in multiple dimensions and, as a result, in their effects on cognitive skills and behavior [ 3 , 33 ]. Moreover, the different dimensions may interact with each other and with the psychological, emotional and personality characteristics of the individual player and context. Even the same game can have both positive and negative effects in different contexts and for different subjects.

The current analysis of the literature, therefore, supports the need for further experimental and longitudinal research on the role of multiple characteristics of video games and their interactions. A wide-ranging approach dynamically focused on the multiple dimensions will allow a deeper theoretical understanding of the different aspects of video games.

Nevertheless, according to common opinion, the violence would always have a negative impact on behavior, especially in pediatric subjects. However, a strictly causal relationship between violent VGs and aggressive behavior appears rather reductive [ 126 , 127 ]. Aggressive behavior is a complex one and arises from the interaction of a lot of factors. Therefore, violent VGs, with no other risk factors, should not be considered ‘per se’ the linear cause and single source of aggressive or violent behavior. Antisocial outcomes can be influenced by personality variables, such as trait aggression, or by a number of the ‘third variables’ such as gender, parental education, exposure to family violence and delinquency history [ 83 ]. According to social learning theories [ 128 ], aggressive behavior would arise from repeated exposure to violence patterns [ 129 ]. Therefore, children who have other risk factors for violent or aggressive behavior, such as violent family patterns, excessive amount of time spent playing, playing alone, and so on are more likely to have negative consequences from playing violent video games.

An alternative theoretical framework [ 126 , 127 ] assumes that violent behavior would result from the interaction of genetically predisposed personality traits and stressful situations. In such a model, violent VGs would act as ‘stylistic catalysts’ [ 127 ], providing an individual predisposed to violence with the various models of violent behavior. Therefore, an aggressive child temperament would derive from a biological pathway, while the violent VG, as a ‘stylistic catalyst’, may suggest the specific violent behavior to enact.

Conversely, playing prosocial VGs, even for a short time, increases prosocial cognition, affect and behaviors in children and adolescents [ 13 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 89 ]. Several intervention or training studies showed that a prosocial VG should activate experiences, knowledge, feelings and patterns of behavior relating to prosocial actions, cognition, feelings and physiological arousal. In turn, in line with the General Learning Model, [ 91 , 130 ], recurrent prosocial behavioral scripts produce new learning, new behavioral patterns and emotional and affective cognitive constructs [ 83 ].

Moreover, several studies emphasize the educational and academic potential of VGs that may become effective and ‘exemplary teachers’ [ 12 , 82 ] providing fun and motivating contexts for deep learning in a wide range of content [ 12 ], such as school learning [ 96 ], rehabilitation activities [ 46 , 47 ], new health care and protection behavior development and the enhancement of specific skills [ 97 , 99 , 100 ]. Similarly, the literature data document that the intensive use of VGs results in generalized improvements in cognitive functions or specific cognitive domains, and in behavioral changes [ 1 ]. Actually, VGs involve a wide range of cognitive functions, and attentional, perceptual, executive, planning and problem solving skills. They can, therefore, be expected to improve different perceptual and cognitive domains. However, on a methodological level, the impact on behavior and cognition cannot be simplistically viewed as the linear result of a causal relationship between VG and performance. For instance, subjects with better perceptual abilities are likely to choose to play and, as a result, their increase in performance may reflect their baseline level rather than the effects of the game.

Studies focused on the attentional functions in VG playing reported inconsistent data. Playing action games may improve attention skills implied in a specific game. However, according to the attractive hypothesis [ 56 ] and operant conditioning theory, children and adolescents with attentional problems may be attracted by the motivating and engaging VG activities. On the other hand, children and adolescents with a wider VG exposure show greater attention problems [ 53 ]. The relationship between VGs and attention, then, seem to be approached in terms of bidirectional causality [ 56 ].

Similarly, since VGs and their cues appear more pleasant and desirable, a large amount of attractive VG exposure can lead to addiction and impair ability to focus on effortful goal oriented behavior [ 131 ]. However, the literature does not yet appear to agree on the objective diagnostic criteria for classifying behavioral game addiction [ 132 ].

In the fifth edition appendix of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [ 133 ], the diagnostic criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder included both specific internet games and offline games. However, this has led to some confusion as to whether excessive video games must necessarily occur online [ 134 , 135 ]. According to some authors, since ‘Internet addiction’ includes heterogeneous behaviors and etiological mechanisms, the term ‘video game disorder’ or simply ‘gaming disorder’ would be more suitable [ 136 , 137 ], while the term ‘Internet addiction’ appears inappropriate. Individuals rarely become addicted to the medium of the internet itself [ 137 , 138 ]. Moreover, it has also been supported theoretically [ 135 ] and empirically proven [ 139 ] that problematic internet use and problematic online gaming are not the same.

The debate on the relationship between pure game addiction behaviors and game addiction in comorbidity with other psychiatric disorders appears still on. Some researchers have argued that game addiction, as a standalone clinical entity, does not exist [ 140 ], but it is simply a symptom of psychiatric illnesses such as major depressive disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Equally poorly defined is the question of genetic predisposition and vulnerability to game addiction.

Likewise, the relationship between clinical symptoms and changes in brain activity and the dynamics by which video games triggers such widespread brain plasticity needs to be more clearly defined.

5. Conclusions

The current analysis of the literature provides strong evidence on the power of video games as highly motivating and engaging tools in the broader context of cognitive, emotional and relational development of children and adolescents. However, the effectiveness of such tools does not arise exclusively from their content, but it results from a set of variables interacting each other.

Video games, beyond their content, can favor pathological aggression, withdrawal, escape from reality and reduction of interests. Virtual reality becomes more attractive than the real one and can become the ‘non-place’ to escape from the complexity of everyday life. Recently, to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, health authorities have forced populations to stay home and children and adolescents may experience an exacerbation of exposure to video games.

Parents, educators and teachers should ensure an educational presence, monitoring times and modalities of VG practice in a broader context in which children and adolescents live with a wider repertoire of interests, without losing social and relational engagement. Moreover, pediatric health care visits may be a great opportunity to support parents helping children to deal with media and video games.

On these assumptions, as practical suggestions to prevent or mitigate addictive behaviors, parents and educators should enforce the golden rule as the educational presence of the adult.

Moreover, in line with the literature, the core values to prevent a negative impact of video games should be focused on a few rules to be proposed with assertiveness and authority: 1. set a clear time limit to play, 2. prefer games that can also be played with family, 3. alternate video games with other games and activities, 4. avoid highly addictive games, 5. keep a social life in the real world.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, D.S., L.D.F. and G.L.; methodology, D.S., E.G.; formal analysis, D.S., E.G. and L.D.F.; data curation, E.G. and L.D.F.; writing—original draft preparation, D.S., E.G. and L.D.F.; writing—review and editing, D.S.; supervision, D.S. and G.L.; funding acquisition, D.S. and G.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Library Resources for Doing Scholarly Research on Video Games

So you are writing a research paper about video games but aren't sure where to begin? Since video games are a new medium of art that requires an interdisciplinary approach to conducting research, databases that draw on many different publications can equip students and scholars with the tools they need to succeed.

Before you begin exploring databases, here are a few useful tips:

• For quick, targeted results,  search by abstract instead of by keyword or by title. In an academic paper, the abstract is a brief summary of what the paper or study is about. Searching by abstract will give you a list of all the articles that discuss video games in the summary, so it will help you narrow down more quickly whether or not the article will be useful to you.
• Use full-text filters to only get results where the entire article is available for you to read.
• For the most scholarly results, use peer-reviewed filters to find only articles vetted by experts in the field.

Recommended Databases

Note that some of these databases are accessible from home with a library card while others can only be used onsite at an NYPL location.

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For those new to academia/scholarly research, EBSCO's Academic Search is a staple in libraries nearly everywhere to conduct general research. It is a good starting point to see the current literature out there for any paper, in this case, gaming scholarship. However, just typing in "video games" alone in the search will lead you to over 300,000 results; how do you narrow it down? As mentioned above, use limiters such as peer-reviewed/full text enabled for high-quality articles that you can read fully. Other available search limiters are "magazines" (think video game magazines) and "company" (e.g. if you want to research a specific video game company such as Capcom or Square Enix). Academic Search is good if you want to study video games in terms of education, how to utilize them in a teaching setting, in the workplace, and more. 

Business Source Complete

If you are interested in researching video games from a business point of view, then EBSCO's Business Source Complete is the database for you. Here you will find SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) analyses of gaming companies, research about NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), virtual and augmented reality, video games, and more. 

JSTOR (accessible from home with a library card)

Similar to Academic Search, JSTOR is a staple in many libraries and is a good area to conduct initial research while trying to figure out what you want your paper to be about. Typing "video games" alone in the search bar will net you more than 50,000+ scholarly articles about the popular entertainment medium. You can narrow your research to video games in Military Studies, Library Science, Political Science, and much more. 

"Can video games help alleviate seasonal depression?"

"Do violent video games cause behavioral problems in adolescents?" 

"Does Cognitive Dissonance explain the Console Wars?" 

"Does causing chaos in Grand Theft Auto correlate to causing chaos in real life?"

EBSCO's PsycINFO is useful if you are interested in studying video games in terms of the realm of psychology, and have ever pondered one of the above questions. You can find articles about video game addiction, aggression in players, mental health, personality development, and more.

Project Muse

This resource is a general favorite for anything art or media related, with tons of scholarly, peer-reviewed articles about video games including articles on diversity in video games, video games and the ecosystem, video games and civic development, and more. When starting research on video games, this database is highly recommended to be your number one starting point when trying to figure out what your paper is going to be about.  

Sage Knowledge

Sage is a good starting point if you want to read reference/textbook material about video games and gamification. In Sage you will find authoritative encyclopedias and handbooks that will help any gaming scholar in the beginning stages of their research. Some interesting encyclopedias that feature a chapter in video games are Death and the Human Experience, Out-of-School Learning, Communication Research Methods, and many more. 

Additional resources:

• Our  LibGuides page will point you to themed research guides of Library resources. For example, if you wanted to create a video game about a time-traveling librarian that takes place in New York City in the 1800s, looking at local history and newspapers may be something you want to do. If you know the research you want to do requires in-depth assistance, it's encouraged to make an appointment with a librarian . 
• This list of Fellowships around the city and at NYPL may be of interest to scholars. 
• Our Interlibrary Services and Documents is also a service for scholars to utilize if you need an article or not owned by the Library. You can also use interlibrary loan for video games as well. 
• Flipster  is a magazine database accessible with your library card that includes video game magazines.
• Finally, an external resource, the Internet Archive , has all kinds of old-school video games you can play, as well as gaming manuals and much more. Anyone who needs primary sources will find this very useful. 

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Video Game Studies

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• Studying Games at U-M
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• DEIA Topics in Games
• Race & Ethnicity in Games
• Women in Games
• LGBTQ+ Topics in Games
• Making Games Accessible

The MIT Game Lab has a long history of innovative research that spans game culture to design practice. Below are some highlights of our work. See specific pages in the pull down menu for more detailed information on some of them.

Games & Colonialism

2017-: mikael jakobsson (co-pi), mary flanagan (co-pi).

What does the history of colonialism-themed board games look like, and what can it tell us about the situation today? What does it mean to present these historical moments in such a lavish form and then let these artifacts serve as centerpieces to gather around for social interaction at board game cafes, meetups, and conventions? This greater project includes Playing Oppression , a forthcoming book to be published by MIT Press; Orderly Adventures, in which we play and analyze games with colonialist themes; and Creating Counter-Colonial Games, a series of workshops to prototype games through cultural engagement with people affected by the colonialist endeavor.

Diversity and Inclusion in Esports and Gaming

2015-: t.l. taylor.

Launched in 2015, AnyKey was co-founded by Dr. T.L. Taylor and Dr. Morgan Romine (with support from Intel and ESL) with the goal of building a more inclusive and accessible esports world for all. Since that inception, AnyKey has become the leading advocacy organization for inclusion and diversity in competitive gaming & live streaming. It now operates as a non-profit and Dr. Taylor has transitioned from being the Director of Research to Chair of the Advisory Board.

Playful Augmented Reality Audio Design Exploration

2018-2019: mikael jakobsson & philip tan.

The focus of this project was to explore the potential of audio augmented reality (AR) technology through design research methodology, particularly exploratory prototyping. Going into this, we understood that location-based audio AR allows the potential for telling stories using the players lived world, through innovative use of the affordances of mobile phone devices, particularly GPS. We also considered audio AR as a means of playing with sound and music. Utilizing the accelerometers of the Bose AR glasses and connected mobile device, body movement can be linked to the players’ own music collection or a music generation engine.

Our work culminated in the discovery of what we are calling locomotion-based gameplay, a modification to the assumptions that occur when considering location- based gameplay. From our explorative work, locomotion-based gameplay arises from the affordances and limitations of current audio AR technology. It considers a person’s movement through space as important, more so than their precise location. Locomotion also implies whole body movement through gestures including the nod of a head and the tap of a toe, not just the vector of movement on a map. These gestures are ephemeral and contain multiple meanings dependent on context and mood. We believe more work in discovering this style of gameplay would be fruitful, for purposes of art and entertainment, for education and tourism, and other currently unforeseen use cases.

Intimate Worlds: Reading for Intimate Affects in Contemporary Video Games

2016-2018: kaelan doyle-myerscough (s.m., comparative media studies, 2018).

When we think of pleasures to be found in video games, we often talk about power, control, agency, and fun. But to center these pleasures is to privilege certain stories, players, actions and possibility spaces. This thesis uses the framework of intimacy to closely examine three games for their capacity to create pleasure in vulnerability, the loss of control, dependence on others, and precarity.

Drawing from Deleuzian affect theory and feminist, queer and posthuman theorists, I read for intimate affects in the formal, aesthetic, proprioceptive and structural elements of Overwatch , The Last Guardian and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . Ultimately, I argue two points: that video games have a unique capacity to generate intimate affects, and that my games of choice push us to rethink our assumptions about what constitutes intimacy more broadly.

When All You Have is a Banhammer: The Social and Communicative Work of Volunteer Moderators

2016-2018: claudia lo (s.m., comparative media studies, 2018).

The popular understanding of moderation online is that moderation is inherently reactive, where moderators see and then react to content generated by users, typically by removing it; in order to understand the work already being performed by moderators, we need to expand our understanding of what that work entails. Drawing upon interviews, participant observation, and my own experiences as a volunteer community moderator on Reddit, I propose that a significant portion of work performed by volunteer moderators is social and communicative in nature. Even the chosen case studies of large-scale esports events on Twitch, where the most visible and intense tasks given to volunteer moderators consists of reacting and removing user-generated chat messages, exposes faults in the reactive model of moderation. A better appreciation of the full scope of moderation work will be vital in guiding future research, design, and development efforts in this field.

Recasting Player Two

2016-2017: mikael jakobsson, claudia lo, kaelan doyle myerscough, richard eberhardt & dozens of game designers from near and far.

The game development industry is currently on a mission to include “non-gamers” in local co-op games. Within the development community and among players, these games are said to have a “girlfriend mode.” Developers often cast player one as an expert player in their own image, while player two is a projection of antiquated gender stereotypes who has less agency and control over their play experience. This type of interaction would be better described as mansplaining in motion. This project consists of a series of workshops with participants from the game development community, where we not just discuss and spread awareness of what is problematic with current games and development practices, but work together in creating better alternatives.

OpenRelativity

2012-2016: gerd kortemeyer, philip tan, zach sherin, ryan cheu, & steven schirra.

OpenRelativity is an open-source toolkit to simulate effects of special relativity by varying the speed of light, developed to help people create, test, and share experiments to explore the effects of special relativity. Developed by the MIT Game Lab, it contains open-source code for public use with the free and paid versions of the Unity engine. The toolkit was developed during the creation of the game A Slower Speed of Light.

Gender and Systems of Warm Interaction in Digital Games

2014-2016: kyrie caldwell (s.m., comparative media studies, 2016).

This thesis considers the ways in which digital game mechanics (interactive inputs) contribute to games’ worldbuilding. In particular, this work is concerned with the replication and reinforcement of problematic gender roles through game mechanics that express positive (“warm”) interactions between characters, namely healing, protection, and building relationships. Characters who are women and girls are often associated with physical weakness, nature-based magic, and nurturing (or absent) personalities, whereas characters who are men and boys often protect women through physical combat, heal through medical means, and keep an emotional distance from others. Relationships built through game mechanics rely on one-sided agency and potential that renders lovers and friends as characters who exist to support the player character in achieving the primary goals of the game. Even warm interactions in games carry negative, even potentially violent and oppressive, representations and that there is thusly a need for design interventions on the mechanical level to mitigate violence in game worlds and the reinforcement of negative real world stereotypes.

E-sports Broadcasting

2014-2015: jesse sell (s.m., comparative media studies, 2015).

Situating e-sports broadcasting within the larger sports media industrial complex, discussing e-sportscasters, and investigating the economics behind the growing e-sports industry. E-sports, often referred to as competitive or professional gaming, stands as a prime example of the merger of work and play. A growing body of literature has started focusing on this pastime turned profession. As more professionals enter the scene and audiences continue to grow, e-sports broadcasters look towards older models of broadcasting to inform their own style. This reapplication of former conventions stands in contrast to the trends in the larger sports media trajectory. E-sports broadcasting is largely informed by traditional sports broadcasting, yet remains unable to fully capture the success of the global sports industry. On-air talent, once informed solely by traditional sportscasters are now looking to their fellow e-sportscasters to create something new. Revenue streams which form the foundation of the sports industry are making their way into e-sports but not in the way that one might expect.

MIT Overseer: Improving Observer Experience in Starcraft 2

2013-2015: philip tan & nick mohr.

The MIT Overseer project aims to provide casters with real-time graphics to help them tell the story of a game while it is in progress. We are trying out several different ways of displaying what happened in the past of a single game and anticipating what might happen in the near future.

Subversive Game Design and Meaningful Conflict

2012-2013: konstantin mitgutsch & steven schirra.

Movers & Shakers is used as a research tool to explore how a social component influences experiences in serious games. In addition subversive game design elements are implemented in the game to foster the players’ thinking process and to get them out of unquestioned routines. In the game the players are challenged to give up their prior egoistic goals to reach their common goal – to save the world. In a nutshell, the game shifts from a competitive to a collaborational gameplay – once the players start communicating.

Playstyle Motivation Explorations

2012-2013: todd harper.

Across game genres and communities, there are as many styles of play as there are players, from the highly competitive “powergamer” to the MMO fan who’s content to just take in the scenery and everything in between. Fugue is a game that asks: what are some of the motivations behind these styles? Do players reflect themselves — or a desired projection of the self — through playstyle? Or does the shape and context of the game itself direct such decisions? In order to explore these questions, we created a small, controlled gamespace that gives players an opportunity to express themselves via play.

Procedural Puzzles as a Design Tool for Games

2011-2013: alec thomson, clara fernández-vara.

Puzzledice is a set of tools and programming libraries for procedurally generating puzzles for a wide variety of games. These tools, developed by Alec Thomson at the MIT Game Lab from 2011-2013, are the result of multiple iterations of research and were used to develop Stranded in Singapore during the 2011 summer session of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Puzzledice is the result of research into how general purpose procedural puzzles can be used as a tool by game designers. These tools were designed to meet the following three goals: Solvability, Generality, and Usability.

Televisual Sports Videogames

2012-2013: abe stein (s.m., comparative media studies, 2013).

Over the three decade long history of sports videogame development, design conventions have lead to the emergence of a new sports game genre: the televisual sports videogames. These games, which usually simulate major professional or college sports, look and sound like television, and they use televised sports as a reference point for players. This thesis takes a critical look at how these televisual sports videogames are situated in the broader sports media industrial complex of North America, while also considering how the televisual design of these games is meaningful for fans of sports. Specifically, the text looks at how sports videogames reflect or reinforce dominant ideologies of hegemonic sports culture. Building on critical theories in sports studies, and through critical close readings of videogame texts, this thesis explores the relationship between sports television production, and sports videogames, with a focus on features that are found in both. Features such as introductory sequences, audio commentary, in-game advertising, news tickers, and instant replay are all commonly found in both sports television and sports videogames.

Purposeful Games for Social Change

2011-2012: konstantin mitgutsch & narda alvarado.

“ Purposeful Games for Social Change ” is a list of serious games designed to foster social change/justice or to raise awareness. This list was created in order to create the Purposeful Games Framework , a tool used to assess the cohesiveness in design of serious games.

Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab was a six-year research initiative that addressed important challenges faced by the global digital game research community and industry, with a core focus on identifying and solving research problems using a multi-disciplinary approach that can be applied by Singapore’s digital game industry. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab focused on building collaborations between Singapore institutions of higher learning and several MIT departments to accomplish both research and development.

Research topics explored included artificial intelligence, game design, computer graphics and animation, character design, procedurally generated content, interactive fiction, narrative design, and video game production. Game prototypes were made for these research topics during the GAMBIT summer internship program, many of which won international recognition at festivals like IndieCade and the Independent Games Festivals held at GDC and GDC China, as well as academic conferences such as Meaningful Play and Foundations of Digital Games.

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News releases.

News Release

Monday, October 24, 2022

Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

Additional research necessary to parse potential benefits and harms of video games on the developing brain.

On Monday, April 10, 2023, a Notice of Retraction and Replacement published for the article featured below . The key findings remain the same. The press release has been updated, in line with the retracted and replacement article, to clarify that attention problems, depression symptoms, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) scores were significantly higher among children who played three hours per day or more compared to children who had never played video games.

A study of nearly 2,000 children found that those who reported playing video games for three hours per day or more performed better on cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory compared to children who had never played video games. Published today in JAMA Network Open , this study analyzed data from the ongoing  Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study , which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and other entities of the National Institutes of Health.

“This study adds to our growing understanding of the associations between playing video games and brain development,” said NIDA Director Nora Volkow, M.D. “Numerous studies have linked video gaming to behavior and mental health problems. This study suggests that there may also be cognitive benefits associated with this popular pastime, which are worthy of further investigation.”

Although a number of studies have investigated the relationship between video gaming and cognitive behavior, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the associations are not well understood. Only a handful of neuroimaging studies have addressed this topic, and the sample sizes for those studies have been small, with fewer than 80 participants.

To address this research gap, scientists at the University of Vermont, Burlington, analyzed data obtained when children entered the ABCD Study at ages 9 and 10 years old. The research team examined survey, cognitive, and brain imaging data from nearly 2,000 participants from within the bigger study cohort. They separated these children into two groups, those who reported playing no video games at all and those who reported playing video games for three hours per day or more. This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines , which recommend that videogaming time be limited to one to two hours per day for older children. For each group, the investigators evaluated the children’s performance on two tasks that reflected their ability to control impulsive behavior and to memorize information, as well as the children’s brain activity while performing the tasks.

The researchers found that the children who reported playing video games for three or more hours per day were faster and more accurate on both cognitive tasks than those who never played. They also observed that the differences in cognitive function observed between the two groups was accompanied by differences in brain activity. Functional MRI brain imaging analyses found that children who played video games for three or more hours per day showed higher brain activity in regions of the brain associated with attention and memory than did those who never played. At the same time, those children who played at least three hours of videogames per day showed more brain activity in frontal brain regions that are associated with more cognitively demanding tasks and less brain activity in brain regions related to vision.  

The researchers think these patterns may stem from practicing tasks related to impulse control and memory while playing videogames, which can be cognitively demanding, and that these changes may lead to improved performance on related tasks. Furthermore, the comparatively low activity in visual areas among children who reported playing video games may reflect that this area of the brain may become more efficient at visual processing as a result of repeated practice through video games.

While prior studies have reported associations between video gaming and increases in violence and aggressive behavior, this study did not find that to be the case. Though children who reported playing video games for three or more hours per day scored higher on measures of attention problems, depression symptoms, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared to children who played no video games, the researchers found that these mental health and behavioral scores did not reach clinical significance in either group, meaning, they did not meet the thresholds for risk of problem behaviors or clinical symptoms. The authors note that these will be important measures to continue to track and understand as the children mature.

Further, the researchers stress that this cross-sectional study does not allow for cause-and-effect analyses, and that it could be that children who are good at these types of cognitive tasks may choose to play video games. The authors also emphasize that their findings do not mean that children should spend unlimited time on their computers, mobile phones, or TVs, and that the outcomes likely depend largely on the specific activities children engage in. For instance, they hypothesize that the specific genre of video games, such as action-adventure, puzzle solving, sports, or shooting games, may have different effects for neurocognitive development, and this level of specificity on the type of video game played was not assessed by the study.

“While we cannot say whether playing video games regularly caused superior neurocognitive performance, it is an encouraging finding, and one that we must continue to investigate in these children as they transition into adolescence and young adulthood,” said Bader Chaarani, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and the lead author on the study. “Many parents today are concerned about the effects of video games on their children’s health and development, and as these games continue to proliferate among young people, it is crucial that we better understand both the positive and negative impact that such games may have.”

Through the ABCD Study, researchers will be able to conduct similar analyses for the same children over time into early adulthood, to see if changes in video gaming behavior are linked to changes in cognitive skills, brain activity, behavior, and mental health. The longitudinal study design and comprehensive data set will also enable them to better account for various other factors in the children’s families and environment that may influence their cognitive and behavioral development, such as exercise, sleep quality, and other influences.

The ABCD Study, the largest of its kind in the United States, is tracking nearly 12,000 youth as they grow into young adults. Investigators regularly measure participants’ brain structure and activity using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and collect psychological, environmental, and cognitive information, as well as biological samples. The goal of the study is to understand the factors that influence brain, cognitive, and social-emotional development, to inform the development of interventions to enhance a young person’s life trajectory.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study and ABCD Study are registered service marks and trademarks, respectively, of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

About the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA): NIDA is a component of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIDA supports most of the world’s research on the health aspects of drug use and addiction. The Institute carries out a large variety of programs to inform policy, improve practice, and advance addiction science. For more information about NIDA and its programs, visit www.nida.nih.gov .

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How the Science Behind Video Games Helps Kids Walk

Did you know that some of the same technology used to make video games and movie special effects can help scientists better understand human movement? During motion capture, also called mocap, small reflective balls, or markers as they are called, are placed on specific points of a person’s body. Mocap systems work using multiple cameras around the room that track the motion of the markers as a person walks, runs, jumps, or plays. The information gathered during mocap can be used to help doctors decide the best possible care to improve a child’s walking. It can also be used to determine when someone is ready to go back to sports after an injury, to help prevent people from getting injuries in the first place, or to improve their sports performance.

Mocap: Measuring Motion of the Human Body

We all move every day. Some of us can walk or run. Other people use wheelchairs to move from place to place. Whether you are walking to school, throwing a softball, brushing your teeth, or eating a piece of pizza, you are moving at least one part of your body. Scientists who study how people move while walking, running, exercising, or just going about the day are called biomechanists . Biomechanics is the name for the study of human movement.

Have you ever noticed that the main characters in animated movies or video games look and move like real-life actors? There is a good chance that a technique called motion capture (mocap for short) was used to create these graphics. Characters like The Hulk, animated movies like Happy Feet and The Polar Express , and video games such as Guitar Hero and FIFA 22 have all used mocap on live actors to generate realistic movement of the animated characters.

Mocap is a method to digitally record movement. It can be done using one or more cameras, or with a series of sensors worn on a person’s body. Mocap tracks each part of the body that we want to measure and can take measurements between 100 and 250 times per second. This provides a detailed description of how a person’s body is moving in three dimensions (3D): forward and backward, side-to-side, and up and down. In movies and video games, mocap makes the characters appear very lifelike by mimicking real-life movements.

Types of Mocap

Movement can be measured in lots of ways. The best way to measure motion depends on what we want to look at. For example, at a track and field meet, we can measure how fast a person can run, or how far or high a person can jump. That type of motion analysis looks at the movement of the person’s entire body. But to understand how a person moves so fast or jumps so far, biomechanists want to look at specific joint movements. A joint is where two or more bones in the body meet. For example, your ankle joint has three bones: the lower leg bones, called the tibia and fibula, and the ankle bone, called the talus. In our track example, a biomechanist might ask questions like “How much is the runner’s knee bending when they land with each step? How much did their hips or ankles extend as they pushed off the ground?”.

The easiest way to measure this motion is with a simple video camera. However, if the camera is not perfectly lined up with the body, the motion data measured from the camera images might not be accurate. The camera measures best when the images are right in the middle of the screen. Since the camera is at an angle from something at the edge of its view, the position of the body may be under- or over-estimated.

3D mocap can measure motion more accurately, using 1 of three ways. The first method uses special cameras all around the room to track small, reflective balls, called markers. The markers are placed on specific parts of a person’s body to estimate the person’s movements ( Figure 1 ). When two or more cameras see a marker, the 3D location of the marker can be tracked by computer software. This is called optical motion capture [ 1 ]. The second method uses a series of cameras, but without markers. This method is called markerless motion capture . This technology uses advanced computer programs to track body shapes (legs and arms, for example). These methods also use color and depth and they combine multiple camera views to track the person’s motion. The last method, called inertial motion capture , measures motion by placing a sensor on each part of the body. This method does not require any cameras. Instead, each sensor detects changes in the speed and direction of the body, like how you feel a push or pull when riding in a car as it speeds up, slows down, or turns a corner.

• Figure 1 - (A) Special mocap markers (blue dots) are placed on specific parts of the person’s body.
• They stand, walk, run, or perform other tasks in the mocap room. Special cameras track the motion of the markers. (B) The mocap cameras and computer recreate each marker (gray dots) in 3D on the computer. (C) A skeleton model is created from the mocap markers, which moves exactly like the person does.

Each of these mocap systems can measure where one part of the body is compared to another. This is called relative motion. Optical and markerless mocap also give absolute motion, or how the part of the body is moving by itself. Some systems measure the motion in more detail, or at a higher rate of speed. Picking the right mocap system is an important step for biomechanists.

Mocap to Help Patients Move Easier

Some kids have health conditions that limit their ability to walk, run, or do other everyday movements. They may need an artificial leg, a leg brace, or walking aids like crutches. Sometimes a doctor or physical therapist can help improve a child’s ability to walk by changing how much a joint moves or by increasing the child’s muscle strength. 3D mocap can help the doctor or physical therapist identify which joints or muscles are having trouble when the child moves [ 2 ]. They can use these data to decide the best treatment to improve the patient’s movements. Many mocap tests are designed to help children walk better, often using optical mocap systems. During each testing session, the mocap staff applies the markers and asks the child to walk. Additional tests, like jumping, running, or sitting, are used to test movement during other daily activities the child may do.

These testing sessions usually involve more than just mocap—they may also measure the forces involved in creating and controlling motion. For example, every time you take a step, your foot applies a force on the ground. Per the laws of physics, the ground reacts by creating an equal and opposite force on your foot. This is called the ground reaction force . During mocap sessions, patients walk on special force-sensing plates in the floor that measure this ground reaction force. Biomechanists use the ground reaction force and the position and movement of each joint to determine how much force is generated at the hip, knee, and ankle. Inside the body, forces are also created when muscles contract. Small sensors placed on the surface of the skin over the muscle can measure the electrical activity produced when the muscle is contracting. These sensors do not cause the muscle to contract, they simply “listen” to determine when the muscle is “on”. As a muscle contracts, its forces help to bend or straighten joints.

Mocap to Help Athletes Recover and/or Prevent Injuries

There are some doctors, physical therapists, and biomechanists who treat sports injuries. They use mocap to determine when injured patients are ready to go back to playing sports. For example, a soccer player may hurt their knee and tear a ligament. A ligament is like a rubber band that connects two bones ( Figure 2 ). Its job is to help keep the bones together and prevent them from moving too much in a certain direction. Sometimes when a person lands from a jump, their leg or body is not in a good position. This can create a large force at the knee joint, which causes the ligament to tear. This ligament injury usually requires surgery and a lot of recovery exercises with a physical therapist.

• Figure 2 - A ligament acts like a rubber band, holding two bones together.
• A joint is the area where two (or more) bones meet.

Doctors must determine if an injured player’s knees and muscles are strong enough and have enough motion to return to playing sports [ 3 ]. This can be done by measuring the motion when the patient runs, changes directions, or jumps. Mocap answers these questions and helps the patient get back to playing their favorite sports. Doctors and physical therapists use these same tests to measure motion in athletes without injuries, to determine if they are at high risk of getting hurt. Athletes whose movements and forces are similar on the left and right sides and within a healthy range of motion are at a lower risk of getting hurt ( Figure 3 ).

• Figure 3 - (A) The patient performs a challenging movement, like a squat, while wearing mocap markers (not shown).
• (B) Using a computer-generated skeleton, scientists and doctors look to see if the ground reaction force (red arrows) is the same height and direction on both sides of the body. In this case, they are. (C) They also examine the position of the legs and the hip, knee, and ankle joints to see if they are the same on both sides of the body. Again, in this example, they are.

Mocap Take Home Message

Motion capture is often used to make our favorite video games and movie special effects. This same technology is used to understand how the human body moves. Mocap systems measure motion in 3D and can take more than 100 measurements per second. This high detail allows biomechanists to see exactly where limitations in motion impact someone’s ability to walk and move. The forces that cause human motion, both inside and outside of the body, are also important to describe why a person is having difficulty with specific movements. Doctors use this information to help people move easier, recover from an injury, or prevent injuries.

Biomechanist : ↑ A scientist who studies human movement, which is also called biomechanics.

Motion Capture (mocap) : ↑ A method used to record movement using one or motion cameras of multiple sensors placed on a person’s body.

Joint : ↑ A part of the body where two different bones meet and interact with each other.

Optical Motion Capture : ↑ A type of motion capture that uses several camera views to recreate 3D positions of markers placed on a person or object.

Markerless Motion Capture : ↑ A type of motion capture that uses multiple camera views to recreate the 3D position of a person or object, without the use of special markers on the body.

Inertial Motion Capture : ↑ A type of motion capture that uses special sensors placed on each part of the body to track movement without the use of cameras.

Ground Reaction Force : ↑ A force from the ground on the body. It is equal to the force applied by a person onto the ground.

Ligament : ↑ A part of the body that connects and holds two different bones together.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

[1] ↑ Kanko, R. M., Laende, E. K., Davis, E. M., Selbie, W. S., and Deluzio, K. J. 2021. Concurrent assessment of gait kinematics using marker-based and markerless motion capture. J. Biomech . 127:110665. doi: 10.1016/j.jbiomech.2021.110665

[2] ↑ States, R. A., Krzak, J. J., Salem, Y., Godwin, E. M., Bodkin, A. W., and McMulkin, M. L. 2021. Instrumented gait analysis for management of gait disorders in children with cerebral palsy: a scoping review. Gait Post . 90:1–8. doi: 10.1016/j.gaitpost.2021.07.009

[3] ↑ Heering, T., Rolley, T. L., Lander, N., Fox, A., Barnett, L. M., and Duncan, M. J. 2023. Identifying modifiable risk factors and screening strategies associated with anterior cruciate ligament injury risk in children aged 6 to 13 years: a systematic review. J. Sports Sci . 41:1337–62. doi: 10.1080/02640414.2023.2268900

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Finding the beat of collective animal motion

Virtual reality experiments have illuminated the rhythmic glue that could keep animals moving in synchrony.

Across nature, animals from swarming insects to herding mammals can organize into seemingly choreographed motion. Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered that these coordinated movements arise from each animal following simple rules about where their neighbors are located. Now, scientists studying zebrafish have shown that neighbors might also be moving to the same beat. The team revealed that fish swimming in pairs took turns to move; and, they synchronized the timing of these movements in a two-way process known as reciprocity. Then, in virtual reality experiments, the team could confirm that reciprocity was key to driving collective motion: by implementing this rhythmic rule, they could recreate natural schooling behavior in fish and virtual conspecifics. The study published in Nature Communications was led by scientists from the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany (MPI-AB).

The results provide further mechanistic detail to our understanding of how animals self-organize into moving collectives. "We show that it takes two fish to tango," says first author Guy Amichay, who conducted the work while a doctoral student at MPI-AB. "Fish are coordinating the timing of their movements with that of their neighbor, and vice versa. This two-way rhythmic coupling is an important, but overlooked, force that binds animals in motion."

The synchrony of the swarm

Animals moving in synchrony are the most conspicuous examples of collective behavior in nature; yet many natural collectives synchronize not in space, but in time -- fireflies synchronize their flashes, neurons synchronize their firing, and humans in concert halls synchronize the rhythm of clapping.

Amichay and the team were interested in the intersection of the two; they were curious to see what rhythmic synchrony might exist in animal movement. "There's more rhythm to animal movement than you might expect," says Amichay, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, USA. "In the real world most fish don't swim at fixed speeds, they oscillate."

Using pairs of zebrafish as a study system, Amichay analyzed their swimming to describe the precise pattern of motion. He found that fish, although moving together, did not swim at the same time. Rather they alternated such that one moved, then the other moved, "like two legs walking," he says.

The team then looked into how fish managed to alternate. They generated a computational model with a simple rule of thumb: double the delay of your neighbor.

The rule of reciprocity

The next step was to test this model computationally, or in silico . They set one agent to beat with fixed movement bouts, like a metronome. The other agent responded to the first by implementing the 'double the delay' rhythmic rule. But in this one-way interaction, the agents did not move in the alternating pattern seen in real fish. When both agents responded to each other, however, they reproduced the natural alternation pattern. "This was the first indication that reciprocity was crucial," says Amichay.

But reproducing natural behavior in a computer was not where the study ended. The team turned to virtual reality to confirm that the principle they uncovered would also work in real fish. "Virtual reality is a revolutionary tool in animal behavior studies because it allows us to circumvent the curse of causality," says Iain Couzin, a Speaker at the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz and a Director at MPI-AB.

In nature many traits are linked and so it is extremely difficult to pinpoint the cause of an animal's behavior. But using virtual reality, Couzin says it is possible to "precisely perturb the system" to test the effect of a particular trait on an animal's behavior.

A single fish was put into a virtual environment with a fish avatar. In some trials the avatar was set to swim like a metronome, ignoring the behavior of the real fish. In these trials the real fish did not swim in the natural alternating pattern with the avatar. But when the avatar was set to respond to the real fish, in a two-way reciprocal relationship, they recovered its natural alternating behavior.

Turn-taking partners

"It's fascinating to see that reciprocity is driving this turn-taking behavior in swimming fish," says co-author Máté Nagy, who leads the MTA-ELTE Collective Behavior Research Group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, "because it's not always the case in biological oscillators." Fireflies, for example, will synchronize even in one-way interactions.

"But for humans, reciprocity comes into play in almost anything we do in pairs, be it dance, or sport, or conversation," says Nagy.

The team also provided evidence that fish that were coupled in the timing of movements had stronger social bonds. "In other words, if you and I are coupled, we are more attuned to each other," says Nagy.

The authors say that this finding can drastically change how we understand who influences whom in animal groups. "We used to think that in a busy group, a fish could be influenced by any other member that it can see," says Couzin. "Now, we see that the most salient bonds could be between partners that choose to rhythmically synchronize."

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• Guy Amichay, Liang Li, Máté Nagy, Iain D. Couzin. Revealing the mechanism and function underlying pairwise temporal coupling in collective motion . Nature Communications , 2024; 15 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48458-z

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