The Straits Times

OCBC and Lions Befrienders on June 27 launched a programme to provide 2,400 e-sports coaching sessions for seniors in gaming facilities in Bishan, Pasir Ris and Jurong West.

Anthropologist Zahirah Suhaimi, from Duke-NUS Medical School’s Centre for Ageing Research and Education, said that there may be growing interest in e-sports among the incoming cohort of older people who adapted to new technologies during their working lives.

“Some, like my father and uncles, were playing first-person shooter and multiplayer console games with their kids. They are understandably more comfortable and competent with it than the cohort before them,” said Zahirah.

She said that the social element of e-sports can combat loneliness, which is linked to poorer health outcomes later in life.

“What shifts loneliness isn’t simply turning up – it’s the quality of the connection and a growing sense of one’s own competence or personal mastery,” she said.

“E-sports, played as a coached team, is interesting precisely because improving at the game builds confidence, and doing it with the same people over time can build friendship.”

But a person may work alongside the same team for years and yet not feel close to anyone, said Zahirah.

“Identifying the subtle social mechanisms that genuinely shift the needle on loneliness is what makes a programme like this worthwhile… Whether e-sports function as a social scaffolding mechanism for older persons in this existing arrangement would be an interesting phenomenon worth looking at,” she said.

Read the full article here.