How does gaming affect the totality of our health?
Maybe health is an outdated term
LFG: Learning from Games is a series dedicated to making the complex world of video game research just a little easier to understand. I post about twice a month in between my Science Shorts, Coming Soon, and Impressions series. Welcome to LFG #03-2026, where we take a look (again) at gaming genres and a nuanced look at their effects on our health.
👋🏼Hello JOMT Reader!
When people talk about being healthy, they usually mean that they are disease-free and mentally healthy. While those are important aspects of being healthy, it isn’t the only way we can be healthy. How fulfilled we feel at work and in life as well as our relationships in the world can also affect our health.
Scientists use a word to describe all these different aspects of health: flourishing. But what exactly are these aspects of health that allow someone to flourish? There is some debate to the exact definitions of flourishing but the following five aspects are currently recognized:
happiness and life satisfaction: how good does life feel overall?
mental and physical health: how well do you function psychologically and biologically?
meaning and purpose: does life feel worthwhile and directed?
character and virtue: do you have capacity for moral self-regulation and acting well when facing challenges?
close social relationships: how good are your relationships?
Unfortunately, not all of these aspects of health/flourishing are considered in research. When researchers talk about health, they are often referring to only the mental/physical health aspect of flourishing. And that is no different for video game research.
That is, until researchers in China decided to dig a little deeper and look at how video games can affect the different aspects of flourishing. But there’s a little twist to how they did it.
Video game effects on the aspects of flourishing
Every day, I come across research studies that show the positive and negative effects of video games on health. But the “effect on health” points to only one of the aspects of flourishing listed above.
For example, in the last issue of LFG, we saw how video games can affect our brain function. Other research on gaming disorder has linked the disorder to lower happiness through factors like poor grades in school, low self-esteem, reduced health-related quality of life, and worse family finances.1
Gaming disorder has also been linked to mental and physical health. People with the disorder more often report psychological issues or have a mental health diagnosis.2 Physically, gaming disorder has been linked to unhealthy weight status and bodily pains.3
But what about the other aspects of flourishing? Does video gaming affect those aspects?
The twist: gaming genres
Nope, we are never escaping this topic.
For many of the studies done to date, video games were all considered to be the same. There was an assumption that no matter what type of video game you played, its effects on your body is the same. But we’re beginning to find out that it is a lot more nuanced than that. And the type of game you play (i.e., genre) can have a profound difference in the way it affects you.
What makes this research stand out among others is that the researchers tried to highlight the nuances of gaming genres and their effects on different aspects of flourishing. And they did so by looking at how addiction to different game genres affected each of the aspects of flourishing.
It’s worth restating that categorizing games into clean genres is tricky. The researchers don’t provide any details about how games were classified other than that they asked participants for the name of the games they were playing. And among the many genres that do exist, the researchers chose eight genres:
multiplayer online battle arena
shooting
casual
action and adventure
sandbox and simulation
sports
strategy
role-playing
We could debate whether these were the right choices for gaming genres. But they do broadly cover most video games and as you’ll see, is a good start to see the nuances of how different games affect different aspects of our health and flourishing.
Not surprisingly, different game genres affect different aspects of flourishing
Participants rated their addiction to the game they were playing between 0 (no addiction) and 4 (severe addiction). They also answered questions about the different aspects of flourishing. The researchers then looked at whether the degree of addiction was linked to their flourishing scores.
Not all game genres affected flourishing scores. Among the eight genres, addiction to casual, sports, strategy, and role-playing games were not linked to low flourishing scores.
Addiction to action and adventure games was linked to low scores across all five aspects of flourishing. Addiction to MOBA was linked to low scores in the meaning and purpose and character and virtue aspects of flourishing. Addiction to sandbox and simulation games was linked to low scores in the mental and physical health and close social relationships aspects of flourishing.
I think it’s important to keep in mind a couple of nuances from these findings.
1. Addiction to games does not cause low flourishing
The way this study was done doesn’t point to addiction causing any low flourishing scores and vice versa. What the results say is that low flourishing scores and addiction are frequently found together.
2. Addiction to any genre was fairly low
The average addiction score for any gaming genre was hovering around 1.5 or somewhere between mild and moderate. The highest addiction score (1.65) was for strategy games. The lowest score (0.96) was for sports games. It’s probably best to think about the results as “a tendency for addiction to certain gaming genres may be linked to low flourishing scores.”
What does it mean for us?
Looking at different aspects of health/flourishing based on gaming genres is the first step towards a better understanding of how gaming affects our health. But what is it about these game genres that makes some more addictive than others?
Part of the answer lies in the mechanics and design elements of the game. Elements like open-world exploration or story-driven adventures don’t have a clear stopping point (other than the end of the game) which might make them more addictive. The researchers also point out that the fast-paced nature of certain games may get our brains into cycles of feeling good that could lead to addiction.
But as games explore intersections of genres more and more, those singular genre labels start to matter less than the design elements within. Would a game, stacked with addictive mechanics, be linked to very low flourishing scores? On the other hand, if you included design elements from sports games alongside open-world exploration, would their effect on flourishing cancel each other out?
From a government and policy perspective, these nuances could help shape policies that currently treat all gaming equally. Instead of aiming to restrict all gaming (as China has done), policy makers could focus on the gaming genres with the highest risk of leading to low flourishing. It might even contribute to the creation of an addictability score for games that I’ve talked about in the past.
Final remarks
I’m excited to see the nuanced views about the effect of gaming on our health and flourishing. There’s still a lot more we don’t know but I’m hopeful that the days of “gaming is bad” is finally behind us. We do need that updated gaming genre classification though…I don’t think it is helping us to make sense of these types of research results.
If you want to read the article that inspired this post, you can read it here for free: https://www.jmir.org/2026/1/e89319
If you liked what you read, please consider giving this post a like and sharing it with your community!
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10608-025-10630-0
This is one of many articles that link gaming disorder to the happiness aspect of flourishing. I would run into the word count limit if I listed all of the studies conducted to date.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10608-025-10630-0
Again, one of many articles that show a link between gaming disorder and mental health.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpc.16726
Another article showing a link between gaming disorder and body weight.