How much is too much?

[ZWarrior]

In an interview posted on Discover Magazine's website today (1-27-11)  there is an interesting notation regarding studies on how much gaming is too much.

There was a really significant study that tracked 1,100 soldiers for a year, and looked at how they were spending their free time with things they considered coping mechanisms—using Facebook, listening to music, reading, working out, or playing video games. They correlated this with incidences of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, suicide attempts, and domestic violence. The found that by a very wide margin, the most psychologically protected individuals—who had the lowest rates of any of these negative experiences—were people who were playing video games 3 to 4 hours a day. The benefit started at an hour a day, and it got better and better on this perfect U-curve up to 3 to 4 hours a day. And then if you started to play more than 4 hours a day, it got steeply less beneficial until it was actually harmful to play a lot of video games. That was fascinating—it was more beneficial than anything but working out 7 hours a day...

Very cool interview, and this segment alone is worth the read of the rest.  You will have to read the article to get the rest of that quote.

There’s really interesting research that came out this year looking at the rise in diabetes and the influence of diabetes on aggression and violence and crime. It turns out that there’s an extraordinary correlation between rising diabetes rates and all kinds of violent crime, and the tendency to wage war—even when you control for poverty and other social aspects.

So there’s new, interesting thinking that the best way to create world peace would be to reduce the diabetes trend, which is tied to the obesity trend, which is our number one health concern in the U.S. There is this huge space of games that are being created for physical activity, and games have also historically had quite a lot of content around war—World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Call of Duty. But this idea that we could use games to reduce obesity, stop diabetes, and that that would lead to world peace, I think is really fascinating.

Maybe gamers can change the world?