Are Your Video Games Causing Damage to Your Hearing?

Who doesn’t love to play video games? Perhaps some of us are not so crazy about it, but estimates suggest there are over three billion active video game players worldwide—40 percent of the global population (Howarth, 2024). But what are these games doing to our hearing? According to the results of a very recent survey, the answers are not what most gamers probably want to “hear.”

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and WHO Collaborating Center for Rehabilitation in Global Health Systems at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland (2024), distributed a poll across the world. The poll, which was conducted by international online research group YouGov, included about 1,700 gamers between the ages 18 to 35 from the United States, Japan, and Brazil. These three countries were chosen because they are world leaders in video gameplay.

Results revealed that greater than one in three of the poll participants reported hearing difficulties, mostly as having tinnitus and a hard time hearing in noisy areas (Rendall, 2024). Interestingly, while nearly 87 percent of those surveyed rated preventing hearing difficulties as important, greater than one-third of those individuals believed their listening habits put them at risk of hearing loss. However, after being informed of the WHO’s Make Listening Safe campaign, and being warned of the risk of hearing loss, more than two-thirds of participants indicated they will change their listening and gaming habits.

References

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, World Health Organization, Collaborating Center for Rehabilitation in Global Health Systems at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. (2024) Video Gamer Safe Listening Poll (accessed July 30, 2024).

Howarth J. (2024) How many gamers are there? (New 2024 Statistics). Exploding Topics(accessed July 30, 2024).

Rendall J. (2024) Video games and hearing loss: New survey shines light on gamer hearing health. CNET.(accessed July 30, 2024).