‘Mind Games’ Documentary Shows That Gamers Can Increase Their Skills Through Exercise

A new documentary by Asics called Mind Games backs up the age-old claim that a healthy body leads to a healthy mind. Especially when it now comes to the world of video games.

Over the years I have covered a lot of video game related studies, with many of them showing that there are cognitive benefits from playing video games and that much of the supposed social downsides don’t really exist.

This new documentary takes a different angle, by showing that increasing the amount of exercise can also have a positive cognitive impact, from faster problem solving to improved memory.

The documentary covers four individuals before and after they start exercising, to show the effects of exercise on the brain. From a chess players to gamers, we get to see how their skills and abilities improve with more exercise.

Narrated by Stephen Fry, it is rather adorable hearing him cover events like EVO and having to talk about professional Street Fighter players.

That adorableness aside, it’s a solid documentary and backs up prior research on this subject. So not only do playing video games improve your cognition, you can improve you video game playing ability through getting more exercise.

This then begs the obvious question on whether playing Switch Sports will turn you into some kind of eSports genius in the long run.

One useful takeaway from the documentary though is that exercise only really helps if it’s done regularly and consistently. While that’s hardly a bad thing, it does mean you can’t get away with short spurts of irregular exercise if you want to reap the cognitive benefits.

Mind Games is now available to stream on Amazon Prime.

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