Yes, Your Mom Was Wrong
Every mom in the ’90s had the same three unshakable beliefs: the flu vaccine causes the flu, too much TV wrecks your eyesight, and video games turn your child into a friendless hermit who will never leave the house.
The definitive proof, of course, was you. Refusing to play soccer on a Friday afternoon because you were three attempts (okay, it was actually sixty-seven) away from beating the motorbike level in Battletoads - a game that, for anyone who didn’t experience that specific trauma, was designed by sadomasochists to be mathematically impossible to complete without a new controller every couple of weeks.
Decades went by. And then, out of nowhere, an international study emerges, published in a reputable scientific journal, evaluating almost a thousand people to seriously answer a question your mom answered with blind faith: do video games do more good than harm?
Science is Your Player 2
The study, titled “Characterizing the cognitive and mental health benefits of exercise and video game playing,” was published in PLOS ONE in October 2025 and was conducted by a team at Western University in Canada, led by neuroscientist Adrian Owen - a name that carries weight in the field, especially for having published, decades ago, a study debunking the nonsense of “brain training games” that promised to boost your IQ in 15 minutes a day.
(And here I am, having bought a lifetime license for one of those games, and I still didn’t get any smarter?)
This time he did the opposite: rigorously tested whether video games and physical exercise actually improve anything in the brain. He recruited participants via social media, radio, and newspaper ads from January to October 2024, applied questionnaires and a battery of cognitive tests, and filtered the data until a solid sample remained: 923 people, mostly from the UK, Canada, and the United States.
What They Measured, No Fluff
No more “do you consider yourself active?” with eyes closed. Participants filled in a validated questionnaire on how many minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity they had done in the previous week, and another about how many hours they had spent gaming in the last year, by genre.
Here’s a sidenote: the original idea was to separate players by genre: action, strategy, RPG, and so on - but practically everyone who played action also played other types, and the overlap messed up any attempts to isolate the specific effect of “first-person shooter” versus the rest. So the team simplified it to frequency: non-player, occasional player (less than 3 hours a week), and frequent player (3 hours or more).
On the cognitive side, participants went through 12 tasks on a validated platform that measured memory, reasoning, processing speed, and verbal skill. On the emotional side, they filled out two short, standardized questionnaires used clinically to screen for symptoms of depression and anxiety.
The Result No One Expected (Not You, Not Your Mom)
Regular physical exercise: Hitting the WHO target of 150 minutes per week did not relate to cognitive performance. Zero. Nothing. But it had a clear association with better mental health: those who exercised were much more likely to score lower on the two questionnaires for depression and anxiety.
Video games had the exact opposite effect: No relation to mental health, either for better or for worse (goodbye theory of “gaming is a disguise for addiction”). But a clear and consistent association with cognitive performance: frequent players outperformed occasional players, who in turn outperformed non-players, in short-term memory, reasoning, and processing speed.
In other words: your body needs exercise to keep your mind at peace. Your mind needs stimulation to stay sharp. They’re two different departments in the same building, and one doesn’t cover for the other’s shift.
An Important Detail About the Study
This is a cross-sectional study, meaning it’s a snapshot, not a movie. It shows correlation but doesn’t prove that playing games causes better memory. There’s that uncomfortable hypothesis again: maybe people with faster reasoning simply enjoy gaming more. The authors themselves honestly admit this limitation, which is more than most health headlines tend to do.
It’s also worth noting that the researchers had ties to the company that owns the cognitive testing platform used in the study, which is openly declared in the article itself, at no cost to anyone, but it’s the kind of detail that’s there for you to form your own opinion, not just swallow the ready-made conclusion.
Either way, the finding is solid enough to share in family groups: your mom was wrong about the anti-social nerd, wrong about the eyesight (that’s another myth, by the way—hello glasses), but not everything was unfounded grumpiness.
She just aimed at the wrong target. The problem was never the joystick. It was you not going outside to exercise.
By the way, Battletoads remains impossible. That’s one thing science hasn’t solved.
