Further, this game helped people feel more calm, more adventurous, and more skillful in their lives outside of the game context.
Further, this game helped people feel more calm, more adventurous, and more skillful in their lives outside of the game context.
This is the study:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12357126/
I’m going to say it’s very poorly designed such that any conclusions are manufactured.
They split 500 volunteers into 4 groups: with or without BotW and with or without nostalgia movies.
The obvious problem is that only people who have a pre-existing appreciation for this type of media would volunteer.
There’s a bunch of other problems. The studies author(s) are very clearly fans of the games and movies. It’ s impossible not to see that from the study design.
There’s no effort to control for external factors. For example, if you stop studying all night and do anything else, your mental health will probably improve. Given that the study ran for 3 weeks, my guess is that it was conducted over a semester break.
These are just the obvious problems.
If you enjoy games that’s great. You don’t need a study to tell you that doing things you enjoy is good for you.
I’m guessing this was a “let’s see if we can get a study approved for just playing video games” study.