All of life involves doing things to pass the time. What makes video games (and all hobbies) different is that you do it voluntarily because you enjoy it.

I too have a job that I like very much (love is a strong word for a place of employment because if I didn’t have bills I wouldn’t be working let’s be real). I also have a home that I am happy in, a loving partner and a young son.

I achieved most of these things thanks to video games. They got me interested in computers which led to a lucrative career in technology. They helped me unwind after countless long days of work which kept me from losing my mind. They led to life long friendships due to the shared common interest. I was able to pick up my wife thanks to what I learned from Leisure Suit Larry, etc.

I guess what I’m saying is a healthy relationship with any hobby can be good, or bad when taken to an extreme.

Yes.

I think with something like this you have to do a literature search. Even then it’s kind of tough because I’m sure it’s very hard to do objective tests of these traits.

You might say that any activity has similar aspects. Learning a difficult passage in music, learning to speak languages, learning to throw a basketball through a hoop, etc.

I’m not sure there is a huge amount of evidence that video games teach resilience any more than any other similar activity. Moreover, it’s easily the kind of thing that our biases set us up to believe things that aren’t there. For every person who learned resilience from video games, there might be three other people who learned poor lessons, like “I should be lazy and play video games and not study for my exams.”

With academic or professional resilience, I can’t say I’ve seen any positive correlation with video games.

I could easily argue that excessive video game play makes you less resilient to doing non-video-game challenges.