Video Games: Developing Resilience, Competence, and Mastery

Abstract

Until recently, research on video games has been concerned largely with negative effects of play. Increasingly, however, a range of positive psychological effects of playing video games are being reported. Being able to identify positive impacts is an important step toward leveraging the huge appeal of game playing to aid psychological well-being. This chapter discusses a range of benefits associated with playing two genres of popular off-the-shelf video games as opposed to video games that have been constructed to specifically target education or teach health-related lessons. With the video game phenomenon set to have an ever-increasing impact across society on a global scale, knowledge of games that have the potential to meet positive psychological needs will be critical to leveraging positive outcomes from video game play.