There must be a measuring which might help the society's comprehension regarding how video games are affecting social development. There are some aspects of the social development that can be unconsciously used and improved in the life of a human being. In mathematics, they use game theory to study decision-making. We could also use the team-spirit applied by the players, the risk study they do before the decision is taken, or even the game mode, where the player chose to have an easy or hard campaign. Overall, many points can be measured to help society to understand how video games are impacting social development.
Social development is a conceptual subject that combines different indicators to conclude whether a certain social group has a good quality of living. By the quality of living, we can assume another combination of different indicators concentrated in one concrete and well-known index used in the whole world called HDI (Human Development Index). Those indicators are small, atomic numbers resulted from researches made in diverse portions of the society, country by country, by different institutions and then recognized by the government. Once the community has these indicators, they can be used not only to compose the HDI as to compose another deeper subject, social development.
The logic used to solve puzzles and more rational games is studied by the mathematicians since ever, and by studying the people strategies to play games, like chess, help them to form a mathematic model that is called Game Theory. Since some people can get to a result faster than others, it's possible to assume that some people can get to an objective faster than others. And this objective can not always win the game. It can be to form a diverse group online, so this group can win the game, or something similar. There are more than rational thinking when you see the complex multi-player and multi-scenario video games that we have nowadays. The scientific society can benefit from the players' behavior analysis as much as the mathematicians went when they contextualized the Game Theory.
We cannot be blind to the video games aspects we don't want to see, of course. Some explicit violent video games can also help us check some bad numbers as well, like how many people are spending time in voluntary violent actions inside of them. Overall, the player needs this kind of action to achieve some goal, but in specific games, violence is only arbitrary. This can be measured as well. By measuring those indexes it's is possible to understand better some characteristics of the human being behind the screen.
In general, it's very clear that there must be a measuring which might help the society's comprehension on how video games are affecting the social development, or how they are being offered throughout the behavior that the industry might be already measuring it, for every new video game launched has a target public well defined from the beginning of its implementation project. Those measures should be shared with the well being scientific community and maybe we can change the future games by following what we want for our individuals and hopefully this helps us improve our social development.