Can video games help us build healthy habits?

According to the NHS’s Live Well Advice Page, healthy living includes a balanced diet, good sleep, and exercise. But could video games help us actually achieve those goals? Note: for the sake of well-roundedness, I’ll also include good mental health as a part of healthy living. (Probably one of the most vital things to achieve the aims above.)

Youth crime rates have often been linked to violence shown in video games. However, whether this link is substantial enough to warrant video games being the cause of increased violence in young people is highly debated. News outlets have often focused on potential negative habits that video games produce, from a very specific genre of games.

Looking past the negatives associated with games, there can be possible benefits to how video games could be used to improve our everyday lives. I want to try to link games that you can play yourself to perhaps encourage these key habits and keep them going, even after you stop playing. 

Food is always the best part of a video game, with some dishes being fantastical, while others are more grounded in reality. 

For instance, Cooking Mama, the popular DS game, will be nostalgic for many. It’s pretty self-explanatory; you cook with Mama! It was one of the first places I was introduced to Japanese dishes, and it encouraged me to attempt to make the food I was virtually preparing. Furthermore, it made me more conscious of what my food looked like, did it look well-rounded and pretty with lots of colourful vegetables like in the game? This, in turn, helped me think about the variety of food I was eating. 

The Papa’s Pizzeria series also contributed, embarrassingly, to my discovery of more foods that I’d never seen on my mum’s daytime cooking shows. And being able to play through the process of making all the food myself was not only relaxing but helped me understand the different processes much more. We can already see the benefits of food in video games materialise in the form of cookbooks recreating foods from the games for people to enjoy. 

The game, rather than trying to draw you in, encourages you to get away from your phone and stay active

When I think of exercise and video games, it’s difficult not to think back to the motion controls and video sensors of the early 2000s consoles. Nintendo Wii Fit began the trend of video games designed for health with balance boards used to track weight and controls to measure movements and intensity of exercises.

Nintendo has continued to produce new iterations of these sports-focused games through new franchises like Ring Fit Adventure. Two Nintendo Switch joy-cons are used, with one strapped around your leg and the other placed in a large stretchy ring for you to hold while you run and exercise.

Ring Fit is considered an exergame by academics looking to study its effects, especially after COVID-19, when there was a rise in demand for at-home fitness. 80 students over the course of 4 weeks completed a 1600-metre run using the game. Participants experienced a significant decrease in time to complete the run, an improvement in heart performance, and sleep. And more studies are being done not just on its impact on general health, but its potential to improve specific conditions like chronic lower back pain.

If you don’t have your hands on a Nintendo Switch at the moment, your phone has many other apps that could be useful for you. Self-help apps like Duolingo, Study Bunny, and Mila provide interactive games and activities to keep you focused, to exercise both the mind and body, and to help you sleep. StudyBunny, and similar apps like Forest, are designed to help you “take care” of a pet, be it a plant or an animal, while you work. The more you work, the more things you can get to decorate and look after your virtual pet. Such games draw on the nostalgia of a Tamagotchi. The game, rather than trying to draw you in, encourages you to get away from your phone and stay active.

Some companies have taken this initiative quite literally. Habitica is a habit tracking app that aims to help you “Treat your life like a game to stay motivated and organized”. Tasks you set earn you gold and rewards like side questing in other games, like The Witcher or Assassin’s Creed. The progress bar moves along as you complete Quests (or chores like putting out the washing, etc). Anything where I get my own little character and the ability to hatch my own pet, I’m not complaining!

I’ve died in every way imaginable in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it took me three weeks to get past the last boss in Elden Ring (it will be another year probably before I even attempt the DLC), and I still haven’t finished Lies of P. Laxasia the Complete continues to make me suffer; I don’t think I will ever get past her, but it still doesn’t make me love the game any less. The process of picking yourself back up over and over again is part of the game, and finding the resilience to carry on is essential.

Life skills like this are practiced in games, and it doesn’t seem so foreign that they could be transferred to real life. Employers and universities love it when you play sport because it shows teamwork and resilience, so why doesn’t leading a party in a Baldur’s Gate Campaign transfer over? It does seem silly, but between the generations, these things lose their meaning, and people don’t appreciate the mad dedication someone needs to be successful in the esports or the speedrunning worlds.

It’s about applying these skills to real life. Repetitive side quests are not so far off from tasks in the real world. And the constant failure we face in games can teach us to keep on going, even if we continue to be beaten to a pulp for the 60th time.

Games reflect the human qualities of their creators and what is important to them in a game. There is that addictive feature of being able to slowly chip away at a boss to eventually get them. Believe me, the satisfaction after three weeks of painful deaths can make anything better. Revenge is sweet! These types of mechanics would never be included in the game if people didn’t love them. There is even a whole genre is based on this mechanic, like Hades or Balatro where you die over and over again to slowly improve. Rogue-like games set you up for failure purposely repeatedly in a drive to improve, and such games remind us that failure is an option and necessary to see progress.

Overall, I do think we take for granted what games can do for us. Rather than being scared and completely cutting them off, we must accept they will always be addictive and fun, so we might as well find ways to improve our lives alongside them to build constant healthy habits.