It’s official: gaming is an excellent hobby for maintaining good mental health. For a long time, naysayers and scaremongers have enjoyed focusing on what they perceive to be the negative aspects of gaming, but it’s time to change the narrative.
Gaming is an art form, and can introduce us to stories we may never have considered otherwise. It’s also a great way to improve hand-eye coordination, keep your brain active, and socialise with your friends, among other things.
That’s where online gaming comes in. We believe online gaming can be an even bigger mood-booster than traditional offline gaming, and there are a number of reasons for that.
No matter what type of online gaming you’re engaging in – be it browser-based casino gaming, playing video games, or any other kind – you’re almost certainly improving a skill or keeping yourself feeling happy. Here’s how online gaming can boost your mood.
Social gaming helps make you feel connected
During the last year or so, many of us have felt isolated. It’s been difficult to socialise with our nearest and dearest when quarantine restrictions or lockdowns have meant we can’t simply go to each other’s houses as we once did.
In these times, social gaming has been a lifeline for many. Even during “normal” times, though, gaming with friends – and even strangers – can help us feel like we’re connected to those around us. Just by engaging in an activity we enjoy with those whose company we appreciate, we’re boosting our mood and building up our skills.
This isn’t just true for video games, of course. Even if you don’t have a console or a PC powerful enough to run the latest games, you can still head over to your browser and check out some games.
If you’re not really into traditional gaming, you could always take a look at a casino platform like novibet.co.uk. There, you’ll find plenty of ways to interact with others as you check out casino favourites like blackjack, poker, and roulette. Many of these casino games have social functions like chat rooms and leaderboards, so you’ll always have a way to make new friends.
Gaming can boost your skills
Gaming is an excellent way to work on several of the skills necessary to succeed in life, and that can be a great mood-booster in and of itself. By playing the right games, you can boost your decision-making skills, hand-eye coordination, and general cognitive strength, all of which have excellent real-life applications. Even if you’re not a strategy buff, you’re still building your strategic planning and observational skills, which could be lifesavers in a work situation.
Of course, hand-in-hand with improving your personal development, gaming can also build your ability to socialise with others. When you’re playing games with strangers, you’re effectively engaging in team problem-solving.
This means you’ll need to work together with your team to overcome the challenge, and in games that require extensive communication, this is a great way to strengthen your teamwork skills. Team-based shooters, strategy games, and MOBAs are all excellent ways to achieve this.
Online gaming is accessible to everyone
Gone are the days when gaming was a niche hobby, enjoyed only by the people who could afford the sometimes prohibitively expensive hardware needed to run many games.
Nowadays, pretty much anyone can get their hands on a gaming console, a smartphone, or a laptop and be gaming in minutes. This means the benefits we’ve outlined above are available to almost everyone, regardless of income or disposition. Gaming has become a truly inclusive hobby, and that’s a wonderful thing.
That also means that many gamers who perhaps can’t access brick-and-mortar gaming stores are now able to take advantage of digital storefronts in order to get their games.
As games move more towards digital distribution and away from traditional physical releases, online gaming will become more and more standard, to the point where many single-player AAA experiences may even come with free-to-play online components. Since gaming is so accessible, however, nobody needs to miss out on these experiences.
Accessibility is becoming more of a concern
There’s nothing more frustrating than having a unique accessibility need and seeing all the ways in which that need is not catered to. Happily, gaming is making much more of a collective push towards accessibility, which means that there are many, many more gamers being included in the hobby now who would perhaps not traditionally have found a way into gaming. Accessibility initiatives have been started by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, ensuring that no matter which console you pick up, you’ll be able to have a good time with it.
It’s not just the consoles themselves, either. Games are shipping with more and more default accessibility options. The Last of Us Part II and Gears 5 are just two recent examples; the former features settings geared towards low-vision or blind players and fine-motor control, and the latter has been widely praised for the variety and range of options it offers in terms of accessibility. Gaming is beginning to shed its elitist image, and the push towards accessibility is helping hugely in this regard.
We hope this outline of how online gaming can help boost your mood has been helpful. Of course, the industry still has very far to go when it comes to acting as a concrete mental health boon, but we think gaming has the potential to supplement other mental health-boosting activities and to effect a real improvement in your life.
