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.
> The fact this study even exists is a sign of something having gone very wrong IMHO.
I agree, but for different reasons: The paper is an example of someone sending out surveys to collect self-reports and then writing a paper title as if they had performed a study. They did not. They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant.
It appears to have worked, though, as I’ve seen it shared across the internet by assuming it’s a robust proof of something.
This paper is very bad. The numbers in the abstract don’t even add up, which any reviewer should have caught. To be honest this feels like an undergraduate level assignment where students are asking to give a survey and do some statistical analyses. The students usually pick a topic close to their own life (like Super Mario Games) and then come up with some result by playing with their survey numbers until they find something.
> They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant.
Is this just cynicism or based on anything? From reading the methods section it doesn't appear this is what happened
> We used a mixed methods approach. 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%; mean age 22.51, SD 1.52 years) with university students who had experience playing Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi. Second, quantitative data were collected in a cross-sectional survey…
So interviews with a biased sample (students with experience playing the game) and then a survey.
Also, try adding up those n= numbers. They don’t sum to 41. The abstract can’t even get basic math or proofreading right.
If the body of the paper describes something different than the abstract, that’s another problem
Seems like n=11 should have been n=1. Use 19, 21, and 1 as a numerator of /41 and you end up with all the same percentages written in the abstract. A typo that should have been caught, but surely nothing more than that and certainly not substantive enough to qualify the claim below:
> This paper is very bad. The numbers in the abstract don’t even add up, which any reviewer should have caught.
I agree, but hard work is nothing new. Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it. I'm uncertain how to think about burnout in this context. Did they have burnout and were forced to work through it? Were they better at pacing themselves? Maybe the type of work (mental rather than physical labor) or circumstances (working for a corporation) today are more conducive to burnout?
I don’t have any citations, but I don’t think that “work” was at all similar to what we do now. Early hominid work would have involved many different tasks throughout the day, such as tracking, hunting, cleaning, gathering, building, repairing, traveling, etc, right? Compare that to “do this one task 8-16 hours in a row,” and it does seem like a mode of work we would be particularly ill suited for. Orrrr maybe I’m wrong, I’m using general knowledge and inductive reasoning, so I would not be suprised to learn I’m off base here.
> Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it.
Recent anthropological and archaeological research is challenging the traditional view that ancient lives were "nasty, brutish, and short." Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day and frequently took time off for festivals or to travel long distances to visit friends and family. And unlike today, work usually had a more flexible rhythm where short periods of hard work were separated by long periods of light work and rest.
> Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day
This statement is technically correct if you let the word “many” do the heavy lifting and ignore the people doing the work (slaves, etc)
Claiming that average life in the past was easier is just false, though. If it was easier to shelter, feed, and clothe yourself in the past then those methods wouldn’t have disappeared. You’d be able to do them now if you wanted to. Easier than before, in fact, because you can walk to the store and buy some wood instead of chopping down trees by hand and letting them dry for a few seasons before building, and so on.
A recent HN thread I cannot seem to find discussed the idea that currently in the US work is the default state, and leisure exists to refuel for work. At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. This context affects everything in life - IE a microwave frozen meal is excellent in the work viewpoint (time value ratio), but if you enjoy cooking it’s horrible in the leisure viewpoint.
At which time exactly was leisure "the default state"? The only way to have this is by having a slave-like class while the idle elite could enjoy "leisure", or live in very low density, caloric rich environment, which doesn't last long or ends up with wars (and being enslaved by the neighboring tribe, if you are from subsaharian Africa).
My girlfriend and I were talking about this the other day. We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended.
It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
> We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended.
Do you have extra long hours and/or an extreme long (1 hour) commute?
It’s common in my social circles for parents to work 8-5 or 9-6 and still cook weekday meals that are healthy. With some meal and grocery planning it’s not that hard, unless you of course have on of those 90+ minute commutes and a job that keeps you in office until 8PM.
Unless your definition of “real meal” is something more than I’m thinking of, like something that requires hours of prep.
> It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
There are a lot of healthy meal planning (ahead of time prep) or quick and easy recipes out there. It’s pretty easy to prepare a healthy meal with steamed vegetables and a warmed protein in 10 minutes. We can even make an entire healthy meal in 30 minutes start to finish after doing it for years.
More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch (or I’m just incredibly slow).
Cooking a full meal would at least take me an hour end-to-end. As any sibling comment mentioned, it’s more that when I finally get home (6:30 -7pm), I rarely have the energy to put in that kind of time.
So I end up making a quick pasta or other such dish that is ready in 30 minutes.
You can adjust what “real meal” means for you so that cooking at home is possible. The hardest part is finding time together if schedules don’t line up.
For two weeks write down what you do with your time, and then evaluate it afterwards and decide if it was the best use.
> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure
It wasn’t that long ago that a lot of hard work was necessary to even survive through the winter each year.
What times in history had leisure as the default state? When was life so much easier than it is right now? Where were all the food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment materials coming from during this time and why was it so much more efficient than today?
I think there is a growing online mix up of "leisure" time in the past. 99% of people were farmers, farming season is 3-4mo a year. That doesn't mean they had 9mo to do whatever they wanted. The time off was technically not their job but they were doing work on other survival tasks. If you consider re-roofing your shelter leisure time then yeah past people had more leisure time.
"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.
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.)
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.
I do this too, but it bothers me a little bit to think that my mind needs to be doing something all the time in order to feel relaxed. Video games are fun but the ones I play are not really that restful; ditto web browsing. I've been exploring breathing exercises, mindfulness, journaling, just listening to music by itself more but it's tough not to just get bored with it. Maybe that means I need to do it more.
FWIW I've had a meditation practice for over a decade and do use things like box breathing and journaling too. But sometimes my brain just needs stimulation and this has never gone away. I've learned that the thing I need to avoid is engaging with my monkey mind in spiraling thoughts, so video games are ideal as they require enough attention to prevent me getting distracted but I can also zone out and just play.
People can be snobby about reading to the point of being too judgmental. Don’t feel guilty about your free time. There isn’t a hierarchy of pastimes with one better than another.
I hear this more and more as I age. This isn't what original comment was doing, but when discussing recent readings or hobbies with my friends or community I often must prod for the actual object of their pass-time or sit through a winded preface devaluing their enjoyment. It saddens me that people can so easily betray their own experiences.
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
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.
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.
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.
As I age, it gets harder to enjoy competitive games. I just can’t keep up with people who play 6 hours a day and are in their peak twitch-reflex years.
I see this sentiment and rationalization a lot but I don't understand it.
Age aside, presently, are you saying you cannot meet a threshold you would label competitive? Competitive games are almost always played on a spectrum? I would argue your placement in the spectrum should curate the ground for competition if the player base is large enough (and ladder system coherent).
Now with my framing understood, how does age fit in? I can buy that as you age you have less time to put into a game and potentially weaker reflexes (I'm not going to pretend to know the science here), but this should simply inform your placement on the ladder?
I don't think it has anything to do with "people who play 6 hours a day and are in their peak twitch-reflex years" unless you mean your enjoyment is derived from overcoming this archetype.
Competitiveness implies desire to win. There’s no fun if you constantly lose, and you’ll always lose against a kid who spends half of their living day making sure they’re better than you in the game.
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)."
Some studies are better than others, and headlines / secondary sources don’t do enough to comment on this, but looking the source and having an opinion about their methodology, sample size, etc. can help a lot.
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.
Yoshi’s Island still holds up, and I think it remains a contender for one of the best platformers of all time. Recently replayed with the little ones and they were completely captivated.
I don't know, maybe it's because my experience with Wonder was unique, to a degree.
My autistic stepson has the game. Loves Mario. Will gladly get into any game, whether it is an RPG like the Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi series, platformers like the core Mario games, or the action/adventure Luigi's Mansion. However there are parts and levels he knows he cannot do.
He also loves schedules. Monday is the "free" day, but every other day of the week has a planned activity. He's gotten better at being flexible, but he still likes the regularity.
And that's where I come in. I'm the "hard level" guy. And the last level of Mario Wonder, The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon, was just miserable. Eventually, I had to just tell him that if he wants to play another game, we'll just have to give this one up. The last section where you have to play blind is just too much.
So we moved on to Super Mario 3D World. Eventually, I did beat Champion's Road, but once again, it was just a chore.
I think the burnout reduction mostly comes from the ability to play in general. In my case, these games have become obligations for me.
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.
For me at least, competitive shooters are addictive, put me in an overstimulated reward-driven mindset that seeps into every aspect of life, affecting attention span, enjoyment, mood, and sleep. If there's childlike wonder in there it's not worth it for me.
Quit planetside 2 in high school after about 1000 hours.
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.
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.
> The fact this study even exists is a sign of something having gone very wrong IMHO.
I agree, but for different reasons: The paper is an example of someone sending out surveys to collect self-reports and then writing a paper title as if they had performed a study. They did not. They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant.
It appears to have worked, though, as I’ve seen it shared across the internet by assuming it’s a robust proof of something.
This paper is very bad. The numbers in the abstract don’t even add up, which any reviewer should have caught. To be honest this feels like an undergraduate level assignment where students are asking to give a survey and do some statistical analyses. The students usually pick a topic close to their own life (like Super Mario Games) and then come up with some result by playing with their survey numbers until they find something.
> They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant.
Is this just cynicism or based on anything? From reading the methods section it doesn't appear this is what happened
From the paper:
> Methods:
> We used a mixed methods approach. 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%; mean age 22.51, SD 1.52 years) with university students who had experience playing Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi. Second, quantitative data were collected in a cross-sectional survey…
So interviews with a biased sample (students with experience playing the game) and then a survey.
Also, try adding up those n= numbers. They don’t sum to 41. The abstract can’t even get basic math or proofreading right.
If the body of the paper describes something different than the abstract, that’s another problem
Seems like n=11 should have been n=1. Use 19, 21, and 1 as a numerator of /41 and you end up with all the same percentages written in the abstract. A typo that should have been caught, but surely nothing more than that and certainly not substantive enough to qualify the claim below:
> This paper is very bad. The numbers in the abstract don’t even add up, which any reviewer should have caught.
It looks like "prefer not to disclose sex" was typoed and should be 1 instead of 11.
I agree, but hard work is nothing new. Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it. I'm uncertain how to think about burnout in this context. Did they have burnout and were forced to work through it? Were they better at pacing themselves? Maybe the type of work (mental rather than physical labor) or circumstances (working for a corporation) today are more conducive to burnout?
I don’t have any citations, but I don’t think that “work” was at all similar to what we do now. Early hominid work would have involved many different tasks throughout the day, such as tracking, hunting, cleaning, gathering, building, repairing, traveling, etc, right? Compare that to “do this one task 8-16 hours in a row,” and it does seem like a mode of work we would be particularly ill suited for. Orrrr maybe I’m wrong, I’m using general knowledge and inductive reasoning, so I would not be suprised to learn I’m off base here.
> Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it.
Recent anthropological and archaeological research is challenging the traditional view that ancient lives were "nasty, brutish, and short." Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day and frequently took time off for festivals or to travel long distances to visit friends and family. And unlike today, work usually had a more flexible rhythm where short periods of hard work were separated by long periods of light work and rest.
> Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day
This statement is technically correct if you let the word “many” do the heavy lifting and ignore the people doing the work (slaves, etc)
Claiming that average life in the past was easier is just false, though. If it was easier to shelter, feed, and clothe yourself in the past then those methods wouldn’t have disappeared. You’d be able to do them now if you wanted to. Easier than before, in fact, because you can walk to the store and buy some wood instead of chopping down trees by hand and letting them dry for a few seasons before building, and so on.
Can you provide the specific research you are referring to?
A recent HN thread I cannot seem to find discussed the idea that currently in the US work is the default state, and leisure exists to refuel for work. At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. This context affects everything in life - IE a microwave frozen meal is excellent in the work viewpoint (time value ratio), but if you enjoy cooking it’s horrible in the leisure viewpoint.
At which time exactly was leisure "the default state"? The only way to have this is by having a slave-like class while the idle elite could enjoy "leisure", or live in very low density, caloric rich environment, which doesn't last long or ends up with wars (and being enslaved by the neighboring tribe, if you are from subsaharian Africa).
My girlfriend and I were talking about this the other day. We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended.
It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
> We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended.
Do you have extra long hours and/or an extreme long (1 hour) commute?
It’s common in my social circles for parents to work 8-5 or 9-6 and still cook weekday meals that are healthy. With some meal and grocery planning it’s not that hard, unless you of course have on of those 90+ minute commutes and a job that keeps you in office until 8PM.
Unless your definition of “real meal” is something more than I’m thinking of, like something that requires hours of prep.
> It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
There are a lot of healthy meal planning (ahead of time prep) or quick and easy recipes out there. It’s pretty easy to prepare a healthy meal with steamed vegetables and a warmed protein in 10 minutes. We can even make an entire healthy meal in 30 minutes start to finish after doing it for years.
More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch (or I’m just incredibly slow).
Cooking a full meal would at least take me an hour end-to-end. As any sibling comment mentioned, it’s more that when I finally get home (6:30 -7pm), I rarely have the energy to put in that kind of time.
So I end up making a quick pasta or other such dish that is ready in 30 minutes.
How many hours does your job and commute require?
I'd genuinely like to understand a job that is so time consuming that a person wouldn't be able to cook dinner. That doesn't seem ok to me.
Not op, the job is so soul and mentally draining that you “can’t afford” cooking.
Brutal comment because I’m a random Internet AI:
You can adjust what “real meal” means for you so that cooking at home is possible. The hardest part is finding time together if schedules don’t line up.
For two weeks write down what you do with your time, and then evaluate it afterwards and decide if it was the best use.
> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure
It wasn’t that long ago that a lot of hard work was necessary to even survive through the winter each year.
What times in history had leisure as the default state? When was life so much easier than it is right now? Where were all the food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment materials coming from during this time and why was it so much more efficient than today?
> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure.
What times/places are you thinking of when you write this?
I think there is a growing online mix up of "leisure" time in the past. 99% of people were farmers, farming season is 3-4mo a year. That doesn't mean they had 9mo to do whatever they wanted. The time off was technically not their job but they were doing work on other survival tasks. If you consider re-roofing your shelter leisure time then yeah past people had more leisure time.
We have much more non-survival leisure time now.
Especially since we're about to give birth to an entire species which is better suited to the task!
"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.
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.)
A “certain culture” is an euphemism for bad economy, I assume?
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.
I do this too, but it bothers me a little bit to think that my mind needs to be doing something all the time in order to feel relaxed. Video games are fun but the ones I play are not really that restful; ditto web browsing. I've been exploring breathing exercises, mindfulness, journaling, just listening to music by itself more but it's tough not to just get bored with it. Maybe that means I need to do it more.
FWIW I've had a meditation practice for over a decade and do use things like box breathing and journaling too. But sometimes my brain just needs stimulation and this has never gone away. I've learned that the thing I need to avoid is engaging with my monkey mind in spiraling thoughts, so video games are ideal as they require enough attention to prevent me getting distracted but I can also zone out and just play.
People can be snobby about reading to the point of being too judgmental. Don’t feel guilty about your free time. There isn’t a hierarchy of pastimes with one better than another.
I hear this more and more as I age. This isn't what original comment was doing, but when discussing recent readings or hobbies with my friends or community I often must prod for the actual object of their pass-time or sit through a winded preface devaluing their enjoyment. It saddens me that people can so easily betray their own experiences.
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
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.
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.
As I age, it gets harder to enjoy competitive games. I just can’t keep up with people who play 6 hours a day and are in their peak twitch-reflex years.
I see this sentiment and rationalization a lot but I don't understand it.
Age aside, presently, are you saying you cannot meet a threshold you would label competitive? Competitive games are almost always played on a spectrum? I would argue your placement in the spectrum should curate the ground for competition if the player base is large enough (and ladder system coherent).
Now with my framing understood, how does age fit in? I can buy that as you age you have less time to put into a game and potentially weaker reflexes (I'm not going to pretend to know the science here), but this should simply inform your placement on the ladder?
I don't think it has anything to do with "people who play 6 hours a day and are in their peak twitch-reflex years" unless you mean your enjoyment is derived from overcoming this archetype.
Competitiveness implies desire to win. There’s no fun if you constantly lose, and you’ll always lose against a kid who spends half of their living day making sure they’re better than you in the game.
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)."
> as the final results are based on a study with 336 full-time university students.
The final results were from a survey, not a study where they trialed Super Mario games on students and followed their progress.
Also did you notice that the numbers in your quote don’t even agree? In parentheses the numbers are out of 41, not 336.
This is not a serious paper.
> Also did you notice that the numbers in your quote don’t even agree? In parentheses the numbers are out of 41, not 336.
I agree that it's at least sloppy.
> The final results were from a survey, not a study where they trialed Super Mario games on students and followed their progress.
afaik a study can consist of one single survey
> This is not a serious paper.
Maybe, maybe not, my only point was about the sample size which was surprising if you read only the top part.
I’m skeptical of most studies, these days, but I’ll gladly reference this one as a justification for slacking off.
Some studies are better than others, and headlines / secondary sources don’t do enough to comment on this, but looking the source and having an opinion about their methodology, sample size, etc. can help a lot.
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.
Yoshi’s Island still holds up, and I think it remains a contender for one of the best platformers of all time. Recently replayed with the little ones and they were completely captivated.
Wonder for reducing burnout risk?
I don't know, maybe it's because my experience with Wonder was unique, to a degree.
My autistic stepson has the game. Loves Mario. Will gladly get into any game, whether it is an RPG like the Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi series, platformers like the core Mario games, or the action/adventure Luigi's Mansion. However there are parts and levels he knows he cannot do.
He also loves schedules. Monday is the "free" day, but every other day of the week has a planned activity. He's gotten better at being flexible, but he still likes the regularity.
And that's where I come in. I'm the "hard level" guy. And the last level of Mario Wonder, The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon, was just miserable. Eventually, I had to just tell him that if he wants to play another game, we'll just have to give this one up. The last section where you have to play blind is just too much.
So we moved on to Super Mario 3D World. Eventually, I did beat Champion's Road, but once again, it was just a chore.
I think the burnout reduction mostly comes from the ability to play in general. In my case, these games have become obligations for me.
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.
What about Call of Duty?
For me at least, competitive shooters are addictive, put me in an overstimulated reward-driven mindset that seeps into every aspect of life, affecting attention span, enjoyment, mood, and sleep. If there's childlike wonder in there it's not worth it for me.
Quit planetside 2 in high school after about 1000 hours.
Nice play of words. :-)
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.