Play on! Devoting hours to video games won't make you miserable - study
Spending time playing computer games does not have a negative impact on mood, according to the largest study of its kind.
University of Oxford researchers tracked nearly 39,000 adult gamers and found "little to no evidence" linking the number of hours spent playing video games with emotional wellbeing.
The results call into question policies designed to counteract the supposed ill effects of gaming, such as China limiting young people's playing time to an hour a day.
Professor Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist with the Oxford Internet Institute, who oversaw the study, said his team had found "pretty convincing evidence that increasing or decreasing the amount of time you spend playing games isn't good or bad for you". He said: "You would have to play a whole lot before you saw any positive or negative effects - more hours than there are in a day."
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People's motivations for playing were far more important, Przybylski said. For those who felt like they wanted to play and for whom the experience was fun, gaming was linked to positive changes in emotion.
Those who felt compelled to play showed negative changes.
The same research team published a study in May which found that playing two online shooter games had no noticeable effect on users' levels of aggression.
About half the UK population plays video games, according to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It has called
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