Yeah, gaming can have positive effects on people's lives and it can have negative effects or have very little effect either way and simply just be a leisure activity that doesn't reach the point of having much effect at all. People treat it like it's black and white but it's not.

The idea of things having to be productive and things being pointless hobbies that you reference to me never made sense. Productivity is good but you're not supposed to be trying to be productive all the time. Leisure time should be spent doing what you want to do. All of us need leisure time and not to always be trying to be productive (we should be productive if we want to be, but not do it because we "should"). For some of us, we need it a lot and we need it in order to be productive. If I don't have time to engage with my special interests (some of which are productive and some of which are not) I become less productive and start to get depressed. I've seen that pattern multiple times. It also helps me cope if I'm struggling with other things.

For gaming specifically, there's nothing wrong with gaming as a hobby.
Certain criticisms of gaming are justified but most of it isn't and is based on not understanding it (nor understanding how we got here - ie the similarity between video gaming and other gaming or even sports). Individual games sometimes cop it because people don't understand it or see one thing from it and think that's the whole game too but that's a different issue again.

It's even more active than video gaming used to be. I've got a Wii I basically only use for Wii Fit Plus but we also got a second hand Oculus recently and I've been enjoying using it for exer-gaming. Gorn's a lot of fun.

As for transferrable skills, the transferrable skills from gaming are actually quite vast, including stuff like decision making skills as was mentioned in the article you linked.

It goes beyond people even though. AI's that were trained to play Dota2 have now trained a robotic hand to handle objects. This is fascinating as I thought teaching them to play games was for us to learn from the programs we wrote in order to apply that to other things or to actually be AI's in video games (depending on the situation) because most AI's I had seen tended to get great at one thing so I thought they really only are suited to do one thing, but these AI's transferred their knowledge from the game to a new task, which is pretty impressive really. I thought I'd share that because that's impressive and also just very interesting.

I feel this also supports the idea of leisure activities and hobbies developing transferable skills because ofc a person can develop transferable skills from a game if an AI can. AI's are different to us, and can be better than us in some areas when trained well, but we are typically better at transferring skills from one situation to another, so if an AI can, ofc we're doing it.