Xbox or Exercise?
Are you in your mid-thirties, chubby and, well, depressed? Some recent research would say you must play video games. Lots of them.
Actually, countless gamers are fuming over a study of nearly 600 adults age 19 to 90 in the Seattle-Tacoma area that concluded the average gamer is 35, has a body mass index (BMI) pegging him or her as obese and tends to take more mental-health days than non-gamers.
Gamers predictably are questioning the cause-and-effect conclusions of the study, which was compiled by researchers from the federal Center for Disease Control, Emory University and Andrews University.
Dr. James Weaver III of the CDC says the findings “appear consistent with earlier research on adolescents that linked video game playing to a sedentary lifestyle and overweight status and mental health concerns.”
“Habitual use of video games as a coping response may provide a genesis for obsessive-compulsive video-game playing, if not video-game addiction,” he says.
Typical of the gamers’ response is a comment on Newsvine from one Heather Hull. “I know plenty of people in their 30s, overweight and depressed, and they don’t play video games,” she wrote. “I also know plenty of people who play and are thin, happy, and outgoing. Being a video gamer does not mean you are a slob, lazy, or stupid! Perpetuating a poor stereotype? For shame.”
The Seattle-Tacoma area was chosen for the study, researchers said, both because of its size as the 13th largest media market in the United States and because its Internet usage level is “the highest in the nation.”
