Abstract
•Playing the video games could be very beneficial for the most excellent students.•Excellent students spend more time on video games, but still they earn high grades.•The best students winning approach is ‘Play hard – Study hard’.•Video games can act for students as a self-reward scheme.•Games can have influence on social opportunities and problem-solving skills.
The use of video games among both youths and elders has been recognised as a remarkable trend and a global success for the video game companies. Although some of these games might be useful in certain academic areas, the majority of students have been using them from a leisure perspective and consequently became addicted users. Video games are also considered a main constraint that hinder high learning outcomes amongst university students. Due to the dearth of any research correlating the influence if such games to students’ learning outcomes in the Middle East in particular, we offer this study, which has two major objectives. First, it will explore whether gaming students achieve a different Grade Point Average (GPA) than their non-gaming peers or otherwise. Secondly, it will distinguish the GPA results of the intra-group students who are classified as heavy and non-heavy gamers. We adopted a quantitative approach and collected our data from a small public university situated in Saudi Arabia. Students with high academic achievement spend more time playing video games (p = .005), indeed almost as much as they spend on learning activities, and surprisingly they still earn high academic grades. The findings of this research, may improve the effectiveness of the strategies adopted by the online gaming industry to further improve these games with regard to education, as well as for behavioural and physiological studies to better reflect the interpretation of this phenomenon from a diverse perspective. A conclusion and the implications of this research are provided at the end of this study.