Stanford and Microsoft: Games like Pokémon Go help you live longer

Your obsession with catching ’em all could keep you alive longer.

Highly engaged Pokémon Go players are getting an average of 26 percent more physical activity than they were before playing the mobile game, according to a study from Stanford University and Microsoft Research available on the Cornell University Library. The experiment found that people who are “particularly engaged” in the Google Maps-powered location game that has players walking around their real world in search of digital monsters are getting 1,473 more steps per day on average, and that has a real benefit on health and could increase life expectancy. The authors of the study estimate that the game is responsible for adding 144 billion steps to U.S. physical activity since it debuted in July. That’s on top of the its domination of the $36.6 billion mobile gaming market with hundreds of millions of downloads and dollars spent.