Anti-social tendencies and a nasty case of agoraphobia are just a couple of the symptoms video game detractors throw at hardcore gamers, but they couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, playing video games might actually be good for you.

It’s understandable that video games just don’t seem healthy: the reflected zombie-blue pallor from the screen; the twitching movements of the hand more like a claw; the periodic howls of anger and abuse as you lose your life to yet another 14-year-old sniper taunting you via his headset microphone on Call of Duty. These are certainly not part of a healthy, well-adjusted lifestyle, and every so often a person will die from a non-stop gaming session. The course of action is clear: we should be running around outside, flying kites, climbing trees, grazing knees. Or so it would seem.

However, games are more than first-person shooters, and there’s a great deal of evidence that they’re actually good for you. Most video game players aren’t den-dwelling teenage boys playing with themselves: the average gamer is 30 years old, 45% of gamers are women and 70% play with other people, whether online or in the same room. This is down to the huge boom in social and mobile gaming – FarmVille, Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga have brought video games to a completely new demographic.

That virtual social experience makes people more social too, according to the Call of (Civic) Duty study published in 2011: people who play video games that encourage cooperation are more likely to help others. That extends into the real world. “Gamers are rapidly learning social skills and prosocial behaviour that might generalise to their peer and family relations outside the gaming environment,” states another review. Essentially there’s a lot more to all that online interaction than discovering new ways to insult someone’s mother.

Older gamers gain benefits beyond the heady rush of crushing candies too. Researchers at the University of Iowa have found that only 10 hours of gaming – 10 hours in total, not per week or per month – is enough to delay a decline in the mental capability of those over 50 years old, by seven years. Immersion in virtual reality video games can even dull chronic pain in adults, according to the American PainSociety, not just because games distract; they also influence how the brain reacts to painful stimuli.

A game like The Sims has been shown to improve cognitive flexibility – the ability of the brain to switch quickly and effectively from one task to another. Video games also generally enhance creativity. A study of 500 12-year-olds found that game playing was strongly associated with greater creativity, in a way that the use of other media, such as the internet or TV, was not.