Can video games help with pain?
by Ben Kuchera
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Video games can help people.
That doesn’t feel like a controversial statement anymore.
Many of us who grew up playing games suspected they might offer multiple benefits, but now there’s been a flood of recent research showing that games can potentially help people. A 2020 study demonstrated just how helpful video games can be in the management of pain for a particular condition, and the striking thing about the experiment is that the benefits seemed tied to the very act of playing games itself, not which game was played.
Which means things are likely to get better when it comes to treating pain with interactive games.
When it hurts to heal
Katy Streeter
Researchers studied the use of video games by children suffering from the pain of mucositis, an inflammation of the mouth or the gut, after chemotherapy. Mucositis “is associated with intense pain, and it has a considerable impact on patient quality of life, patient mood, and the current and future evolution of the illness,” the paper explained.
The methodology was simple: 19 children suffering from mucositis to the extent that the pain indicated the use of a self-administered morphine pump were invited to play up to three hours of video games on a PlayStation Vita portable gaming system a day, choosing from a selection of games in a variety of genres. The patients themselves picked the game depending on their personal tastes and mood.
The specific games played weren’t listed in the paper. For now, the researchers only wanted to see if playing video games at all would improve the pain levels of the children.
The video games helped with pain control. “The use of video games for a mean of approximately 2 hours in children with intense mucositis relieved their pain by 30%… and at the same time, it reduced the daily dose of morphine by 20%,” the paper stated. This was the expected outcome, as the researchers knew of the previous research in using games for pain relief.
The results went a little deeper than that, as well. Your body has both a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, and the balance between them is one way of measuring the body’s current condition. The sympathetic nervous system is in charge of your body’s “fight or flight” response, while the parasympathetic nervous system controls your “rest and digest” functions. These systems tell your body how to react to stimulus based on what they think is going on; blood needs to be sent to different parts of the body in different amounts if you hear a sound that might be a predator and you don’t know if you’ll need to run to escape vs. getting ready to sleep for the night after a big meal.
“Interestingly, the effect was so intense that it influenced the sympathetic-parasympathetic balance of the patients,” the researchers wrote. Using an Analgesia Nociception Index (ANI) monitor to measure parasympathetic activity, they found that playing games may have a longer-term impact on pain management and healing than they had at first assumed. The higher the number shown by the monitor, the better the balance between the two systems.
“... a 14% increase in the ANI was noted during the visit on the day after playing video games, suggesting that the beneficial effects of video games did not have a short duration but extended for several hours,” the paper stated.
Why is this so interesting?
Katy Streeter
You can’t draw many specific conclusions from a study with a sample size of 19 showing what everyone expected would happen when video games were introduced to children suffering through a painful condition, but that doesn’t take away from the data.
Any cessation of suffering that’s achieved without increasing the use of dangerous or otherwise habit-forming drugs is worth celebrating, and more evidence that games can be helpful in a variety of ways is affirming. Nothing about these results should be surprising if you’ve read similar research in the past, other than how simple the experiment was and how positive the results became. There’s now one more way games seem to be able to help people.
“Video games have already been shown to be effective in pediatric oncology patients, encouraging physical rehabilitation during the patient’s recovery phase after disease remission [19] and allowing relief from pain and anxiety associated with the placement of percutaneous central catheters [20],” the researchers stated. “As of now and according to the findings of this study, it is possible to recommend video games during the acute phase of painful oncological mucositis.”
My head keeps returning to one single detail of the research, however: the children chose the game they’d play, and these are the results. If this is the power of video games in general on the children who participated, imagine the possibilities for further study with an eye toward which games work better in mitigating the symptoms of mucositis as well as other conditions.
The question of whether video games can help some people with some conditions has been increasingly answered, in the general sense. The next step may be refining our understanding of how games are providing these positive outcomes in so many areas of medicine and using that understanding and foundational knowledge to create a menu of games selected or created specifically for pain relief or the treatment of other conditions.
“Additional research to identify the best methods to provide this integrated help to young patients undergoing painful medical procedures is warranted,” the researchers wrote at the end of the paper. We agree completely.