by kevinfiol
5 subcomments
- Might have just been nostalgia, but I've played video games since I was a child, and largely took a extended break from Nintendo titles when I became an almost-exclusive PC gamer in the late 2000s.
I finally played Mario Odyssey for the first time last year, and I instantly felt like a kid in 1997 again, and my mood was elevated with excitement for playing this game -- it was clear a ton of love was poured into the level design and game mechanics. It was the best gaming experience I've had in my adult life.
- There's a certain culture that prefers "efficiency", punishes non-productivity, and every little slack, even enjoyment of life must be "earned". In that culture these video games that are pure playfulness (but it doesn't just have to be video games, it could be poetry, whatever, just something with no productivity!) are the antidote.
I'm happy I wasn't born into this culture. (I've seen and heard absurd, almost comical examples of this from my colleagues, like justifying not replacing a black and white TV in the 1990s... From my point of view they're ascetics, but from their point of view they're normal.)
- "Childlike wonder" is an interesting turn of phrase here, that reminds me of one specific game — Outer Wilds. The way I like to describe Outer Wilds is that you're exploring the star system in your grandma's back garden, escaping a blackhole just in time for dinner.
Everything about the game seems designed to elicit that response. The in-world technology is absolute jank, with wooden spaceships and patched-over spacesuits. Both groups of aliens in the game (the Hearthians and the Nomai) are intensely curious and driven by wanderlust. The story's stakes are simultaneously enormous and none at all, like a child playing make-believe.
Playing it genuinely gets me feeling like a child, and that's something truly special.
- I just bought a Switch 2 having not really played games much for decades. I'm finding that occasional breaks for "mindless" gaming noticeably relaxes my always on, work obsessed brain. The challenge is overcoming the feeling that it's an unproductive use of time and I should be reading, coding, exercising etc. But in balance I think it's just the break my mind needs right now.
- This is an area that could really use good research, but this study looks badly designed and completely dismissible. I hope it’s true that video game playing has some mental health benefits, and I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re not going to determine whether it does by asking a bunch of people how they feel about Mario and Yoshi.
- This seems like a pretty loosey goosey study. How do you realistically quantify someone's "overall happiness in life" and "burnout risk" into 1 number ?
I'm not sure how they did the control group, but I would be curious about the difference between 15 minutes playing Mario, and just getting a 15 minute break.
I think any significant time away from work/studying could reduce burnout risk
- I’ve been cooling off my brain after work on my way home on the bus by playing video games and it is very effective. Time flies and they move you in a completely different mental space. Initially I got Miyoo mini for my kid and installed a lot of Pico-8 games. Quickly I decided to get another one for myself and it’s been quite some therapy for the past year. By the way, I’m in my mid 40s and haven’t been playing games for a really long time, since the 80s or the 90s. I highly recommend Pico-8 games. I find the games very creative and novel and yet quite simple and to the point. I recently got into making a few myself, of course with the help of LLMs.
by headmelted
7 subcomments
- The fact this study even exists is a sign of something having gone very wrong IMHO.
The notion of tracking if time spent on anything helps “prevent burnout” speaks volumes to how we view ourselves as consumables.
The whole culture we have emphasises trading working the best years of your life just so you can (maybe) rest for a little while at the end of your life when your health is failing, which has always been really sad to me.
- I wouldn’t put much weight into this paper. This is a self-reported survey paper. They gave people surveys with a lot of questions and then tried to find correlations in the data (aka p-hacking).
Even the surveys had leading questions like “affordance of childlike wonder” from the game:
> Second, quantitative data were collected in a cross-sectional survey (N=336) of players of Super Mario Bros. and Yoshi to examine the games’ affordance of childlike wonder, overall happiness in life, and burnout risk.
There are even glaring numerical errors in the abstract that should have been caught by anyone doing any level of review or proofreading:
> First, qualitative data were collected through 41 exploratory, in-depth interviews (women: n=19, 46.3%; men: n=21, 51.2%; prefer not to disclose sex: n=11, 2.4%;
That n=11 is supposed to be n=1, if you didn’t catch it. It also doesn’t explain why the n=41 survey group separate from the 300+ survey group asked about burnout.
So I know this will generate a lot of discussion about burnout, but this is not the kind of paper to draw conclusions from. Everything about it, from the self-reported survey format to the idea itself, looks like someone started with a highly specific idea (Super Mario reduces burnout) and wanted to p-hack their way to putting it in a paper.
- I’ll share this with my partner.
But as I’ve told her before: “games aren’t meant to be relaxing to me, it’s to compete!”
I do wonder how these results would translate to more competitive games like CS.
FWIW, I used to game competitively (in tournaments) more than a decade ago. Now I _technically_ play just casually, such as “The Finals”. But I only play the ranked mode with friends who used to be in my competitive team.
Some days when we play it’s just chatting and good fun (we’ve known eachother for almost 2 decades), but other days we get “in the zone” and it’s not truly relaxing.
by christophilus
1 subcomments
- I’m skeptical of most studies, these days, but I’ll gladly reference this one as a justification for slacking off.
- This is not science. Like most of what far left universities produce these days, researchers set out with an outcome they wanted and made it happen.
by throwaway743
0 subcomment
- I'd assume Katamari has the same effect. Felt a sense of joy I haven't felt in a while, when playing the latest one after having not played a Katamari game since around 08.
- Tangential. I spent a long time thinking that entertaining myself was a waste of time and that I should just focus on "productivity". This was dumb. Reading fiction, playing games, leisure, etc. is necessary. Not only as a way to relax, but also to be imaginative and creative, which are necessary components to being productive.
For a long time, social media slop kind of filled the void of leisure, but didn't really feed into my imagination. It's wild how I can read through a few pages of a novel and spend the next hour just thinking about the scene coming into existence, the real-world references that play into the story, and the implications of the events that are unfolding. In that same time, had I been on social media, I would have seen like 100 short clips that barely feed the imagination.
I really enjoy "wasting time" thinking about and reading stories or playing games or whatever else, it really adds dimension to my life. I know that wise people have probably brought this up before (like I'm pretty sure a YouTube video has been recommended to me with the title of "I am BEGGING you to read fiction", which I did not watch, but took as a sort of "please come back from your coma, we miss you" message), but it just didn't click for me until I really felt creatively empty.
- It took me a surprisingly long time to find the actual games:
- Super Mario Bros Wonder
- Yoshi’s Crafted World
- Yoshi’s Woolly World
So relatively modern games. I initially assumed that they were using the original Super Mario Bros game and Yoshi's Island - my millennial bias, I suppose. But I wonder if this result would replicate with a game like Yoshi's Island or Yoshi 64. Older graphics, in different ways. But I suspect that the fanciful aesthetic would still win out.
- What about Call of Duty?
by zenethian
1 subcomments
- Is anyone else really bothered by the title of this? Super Mario Bros is a specific game, but what are “Yoshi” games? Feels like the none of the researchers had ever played video games before.
- From experience, my childhood hobby of playing video games, such as Final Fantasy VII, influenced my view of reading other, non-video-game material, such as novels, short stories, and non-fiction. I don't know how many fewer books I would have read in my life had I not played those games when I was younger!
- > Over the course of 3 weeks, exploratory, in-depth interviews were conducted with 41 participants (women: n=19, 46.3%; men: n=21, 51.2%; preferred not to disclose sex: n=1, 2.4%; mean age 22.51, SD 1.52 years). All interviewees were full-time students (confirmed by their student IDs) and had experience playing a Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi game (screening questions by the RAs included the name of the specific Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi games respondents had played and which console they used to play the game, eg, Wii U, Nintendo Switch, or Nintendo Switch 2). Interviews were conducted in a university cafeteria and lasted between 25 and 40 minutes. All interviewees were reassured of the anonymity of their responses and were informed that their participation would help inform academic research. At the end of the interview, each interviewee was given a chance to ask any questions they may have had.
Some tiktok videos have deeper research than this.
by throwfaraway135
2 subcomments
- If someone was wondering if this is statistically significant after reading the first line in the method and seeing 41 interviews, then the answer is probably yes, as the final results are based on a study with 336 full-time university students.
> The final sample consisted of 336 full-time university students (women: 19/41, 46.3%; men: 21/41, 51.2%; prefer not to disclose sex: 1/41, 2.4%; mean age 22.51, SD 1.52)."
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