Play Time Had A Small But Real Effect The researchers said they found the actual amount of time spent playing was a small but significant positive factor in people's well-being. The paper said the level of enjoyment that players get from a game could be a more important factor for their well-being than playing time. In other words, how happy a game makes you while you play it may have a bigger impact on mental health than how much time you spend playing it. "The fact that it's the electronic data collected from the device is very good, it's very objective," said Paul Croarkin, a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. A psychiatrist is a doctor who studies illnesses of the mind. Croarkin has studied video gaming and children. He said he had "lingering questions" about the study and said the self-reporting nature of the survey was a weakness, but added that the researchers presented their findings in a balanced way. Joseph Hilgard, an assistant professor of social psychology at Illinois State University, agreed that the paper had limitations. Hilgard studies how the feelings and behaviors of people are influenced by others. He said that this is correlational data, which means that the two kinds of data in the research -- emotional well-being and video game playtime -- are related in a specific way. However, the findings do not necessarily suggest a causal effect of video games on well-being. We cannot say for sure that increased wellness was caused by playing the two video games. The study just doesn't have enough information to show that. For example. Hilgard pointed out, respondents may have been playing other games at the same time, for which playtime wasn't tracked. Maybe those games had a positive or negative effect on well-being, too.