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.
I have no words for how good that game is. It is both fresh and nostalgic at the same time. And the hat thing is done perfectly. Like, the more hats the bosses have the better they are, duh, of course.
Dark(er) side of the moon gets really challanging for adults too.
It would be so easy for Nintendo to just spam Mario games but they don't.
My experience has been the opposite. For both “hardcore” PC games and “simpler” games like Mario, as an adult it’s not only hard to find time but once I do, games feel like an exhausting chore. I go in anticipating relaxation but can’t get it. Sometimes even just getting to the menu screen brings this feeling of dread. I’m not sure how to go back to the feeling of being a kid.
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.)
Interesting take. I'm in my 30s and not sure I've ever known that kind of culture, yet I do understand the sentiment against heavy media consumption (which most video games fall under).
Video games, TV, and movies put me in a situation where I must gamble several hours of my time to digest them. That kind of time investment cannot be isolated from the rest of a day. Media has a tendency to set my mood regardless if I liked it. Most fandoms are radioactive as well. I'm pretty sure what I'm saying is the majority opinion, so it shouldn't be a surprise that so many people shrug their shoulders and strongly avoid both that media and its fans. It doesn't help that there are no shortcuts around this either because if honest critics ever existed they definitely don't now.
The result is that many have a very high bar, and even when it's met they still don't want to sink more than about an hour into it at a time. It's less about efficiency and more about having better things to do.
Precisely. The 'hustle' culture and the fetishization of hyper-efficiency act as a catalyst for a wide range of systemic societal problems. I'm glad that I'm not part of that sphere.
"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.
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.
I find that the feeling for me isn't about unproductive time but rather unfulfilling time.
A game can be fulfilling in some ways. Maybe it's a really good game. Or it's a way to socialize with friends or family.
It can also turn into a compulsion. That's why I avoid solo queue competitive multiplayer gaming. I try to only queue up with a friend, else I should go do something else.
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.
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
> How do you realistically quantify someone's "overall happiness in life" and "burnout risk" into 1 number ?
There's existing survey methodologies for these, and then they added a Mario-specific set of questions (IMO these questions were poorly designed, they expected people to be able to accurately report how much Mario games specifically change their childlike wonder, which even if true, kind of changes the conclusion they should be able to make).
> I'm not sure how they did the control group
It's not that kind of study. They didn't sit half the participants down with Mario and half took a nap, it's interviews and surveys. Their only "control" was showing it didn't correlate with gender.
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.
This study reminds me of the types of projects I did when I took statistical psychology classes in undergrad. I was hoping to see data taken directly after participants had actually played the games in a controlled environment. Also, why focus on just Nintendo games?
Judging by the authors' affiliations and Nintendo-approved rhetoric, this does appear to be a shill.
> 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
It does seem to be cynicism, they're convinced the authors "gave people surveys with a lot of questions and then tried to find correlations in the data", but nothing indicates they did more than the 9 questions (plus one more for sex as a control) the paper includes, and restricted it to only Mario/Yoshi players. Ten questions is pretty short.
> 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
EDIT: Yes, I know the n=11 was supposed to be an n=1. Having a glaring and easily caught error in the abstract is not a good signal for the quality of a paper. This is on the level of an undergraduate paper-writing exercise, not a scientific study as people are assuming.
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.
> A typo that should have been caught, but surely nothing more than that and certainly not substantive enough to qualify the claim below:
Such an obvious error should have been caught by the authors proofreading their own work, to be honest. Any reviewer would also catch it when evaluating the quality of the sample size.
I find it strange that people are bending over backward to defend this paper and its obvious flaws and limitations.
> 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.
Have you considered getting a job you like better?
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.
I don’t know what research they saw, but the claim was mainstreamed by the popular book “Sapiens”. The author romanticized past life and made claims that life was leisurely until agriculture came along and made us all miserable as we toiled working the soil. Before that we supposedly relaxed all day as our food was easy to catch and we didn’t have to build anything because we were always on the move. There are some very obvious problems with that statement that will be easily spotted by anyone who has ever done any hunting or camping.
I'm not sure how environmental factors play into this either. As a Gen-Xer, it often feels like the current late teens and early 20-somethings all have a crippling level of "anxiety" over what should be relatively simple human interaction, and this started well before COVID solidified this influence. Does this in general have an outsized effect on burnout?
I've felt true burnout twice in my life, the first time was after several years without any vacation time taken and about 3 months of 60-80 hour weeks. I literally hit a wall and couldn't even open a project in front of the computer, I was in a haze and not safe to even do anything. My brain was like, "nope!" More recently, a couple years ago it's been a larger state of dissolution about my career without a clear alternative so much as something that I would consider a disablement.
> Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do?
Unambiguously yes. This is well documented and impossible to ignore.
Marshal Sahlins described it best in Stone Age Economics but reading Graeber will get you there or Levi Strauss if you’re into the whole structural anthropology thing
It's not about leisure time. It's about the meaning of work. In the past, effects of your work were very direct - carry shitload of stone from one place to another together with your cousin, build a house for you and your family. Nowadays it's all very abstract - have a useless Teams meeting with people you don't care about so that you can do press buttons that maybe change some metrics you don't even understand. What was the last time you felt "I'm happy I built this"?
This is the problem of evil right. Those human tribes who just chilled out after meeting the bare requirements of survival died off because some greedy assholes outcompeted them.
> Those human tribes who just chilled out after meeting the bare requirements of survival died off because some greedy assholes outcompeted them.
The idea of tribes just “chilling out” to survive is a modern anachronism projected on a romanticized past. We’re so disconnected from the realities of clothing, feeding and sheltering ourselves without modern amenities that it’s hard to imagine what pre-industrial like was like. Thinking that “chilling out” was a viable path to survival is a symptom of that disconnectedness.
If you look at a tiger, for instance, they sleep 16 hours a day (or a closer animal, take a look at the night monkey). I realize a human isn't as powerful or have the same needs as a tiger, but I don't see why a (pre-historic) humans have to work that much harder than a tiger merely to eat and reproduce and live long enough that enough survive to do that. A human can work smarter than a tiger, after all... surely we can "chill" as many hours a day as the tiger can.
I'm only a casual follower of ancient human evolution and anthropology, but this doesn't mesh with my impression. Lots of human groups have been able to relax in relatively hospitable environments, over long spans of time.
They were overwhelmingly overpowered by those who took advantage of the fact they didn't have black powder, rifles, or western ships.
A few who managed to evade this past WWII took advantage of the fact everyone was desperate to freeze things in place to avoid nuclear war, those are the fortunate few who are locked into place for the indefinite future.
Of course there's also the heart of Africa, with no great navigable waterways or geography to trade to europe, north america, or asia, no one gives much a shit what they do.
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>I don't think happened because of evolutionary pressure on tribes as the previous poster claimed.
Not a necessary precondition, it can happen through cultural pressure. I don't recall previous poster requiring it happen through gene expression.
I don't think happened because of evolutionary pressure on tribes as the previous poster claimed. Certainly that's not clear from the evidence. The human genotype was pretty well set by the time all that was happening, which means whatever evolutionary basis exists for "the problem of evil" had already acted, including on all the people living easy (or at least manageable) subsistence lifestyles for centuries previously.
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 a 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.
> More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch
I was responding to the part of your comment about not being able to eat healthy.
Cooking traditional French cuisine on weeknights is not the only way to have a healthy meal. Eating homemade French cuisine every weeknight would be a luxury for working class standards just about anywhere.
Super normal. Let’s say at the simplest, you take 30 mins to get ready to leave from waking up, 30 mins from front door to sitting at your desk, 30 mins to get to bed and sleep that’s 2 hours of your 24 just kinda handling the bare functional minumum. Sleep for 8 and now you are left with 12 hours. Work plus breaks at work is probably 8-10 at the best.
So OK, 3-5 hours left over for everything else, assuming perfect execution on the other parts. Do you have family or pets that need something? Do you have dishes and laundry and trash days and bills to pay? Do you want to watch TV, play a game, do any kind of hobby or leaning? Are you sick? Do you have friendships? Are you tired from work being physically or mentally demanding? Do you need to exercise?
All of those things need to be handled in the same few “outside work” hours each day.
I should have clarified it, but you hit the nail on the head. I arrive home with little energy after a day in the office.
By the time I’m home it’s at least 6:30pm, usually a bit later. If I would work until 6:30 but from home instead of the office, I’d probably still be up for cooking.
Although you also need to get gym time in, family time, chores and other stuff…
I have the same, my commute is a 10min walk, I have no dependants and make a good salary and I find it impossible to cook, I'm just depleted after work. If I add exercise and some social interaction then my time is spent recovering energy... It's probably a sign of burn out or of a bad job
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.
...I don't view myself as a consumable. I enjoy accomplishing. I do not enjoy burnout. I'm interested in ways to prevent it. It's really that simple.
I don't particularly find this survey compelling, but I also don't want to be judged as some vampiric capitalist just because I'd like to have more work bandwidth.
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.
Thank you for this post! The headline claim struck me as one that would be difficult to evidence with any scientific rigor. Reading the abstract furthered this feeling but I couldn't be bothered to read the methodology, so thanks for doing it.
> 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.
Indeed. Even the idea that individuals can reliably self-diagnose "burn-out" in an objective way is highly dubious.
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.
"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" is true, but hardly reality for the reasons I provided.
While I appreciate you leaving the value of competitiveness in the air... on the other hand, by defining it so purely, you've essentially resigned yourself from participating.
I'm curious what games have molded this perspective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)."
It's "statistically significant", but it doesn't really say what the title says and they draw a lot of causal conclusions that don't really follow the data IMO. The main result is really that happiness and burnout risk were negatively correlated (what a surprise, people burning out aren't happy?), although the caveat is that's only shown in Mario-playing college students.
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.
I have no words for how good that game is. It is both fresh and nostalgic at the same time. And the hat thing is done perfectly. Like, the more hats the bosses have the better they are, duh, of course.
Dark(er) side of the moon gets really challanging for adults too.
It would be so easy for Nintendo to just spam Mario games but they don't.
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.)
Video games, TV, and movies put me in a situation where I must gamble several hours of my time to digest them. That kind of time investment cannot be isolated from the rest of a day. Media has a tendency to set my mood regardless if I liked it. Most fandoms are radioactive as well. I'm pretty sure what I'm saying is the majority opinion, so it shouldn't be a surprise that so many people shrug their shoulders and strongly avoid both that media and its fans. It doesn't help that there are no shortcuts around this either because if honest critics ever existed they definitely don't now.
The result is that many have a very high bar, and even when it's met they still don't want to sink more than about an hour into it at a time. It's less about efficiency and more about having better things to do.
Obviously not very poor but relatively poor.
In other words, there's no correlation.
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.
A game can be fulfilling in some ways. Maybe it's a really good game. Or it's a way to socialize with friends or family.
It can also turn into a compulsion. That's why I avoid solo queue competitive multiplayer gaming. I try to only queue up with a friend, else I should go do something else.
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
There's existing survey methodologies for these, and then they added a Mario-specific set of questions (IMO these questions were poorly designed, they expected people to be able to accurately report how much Mario games specifically change their childlike wonder, which even if true, kind of changes the conclusion they should be able to make).
> I'm not sure how they did the control group
It's not that kind of study. They didn't sit half the participants down with Mario and half took a nap, it's interviews and surveys. Their only "control" was showing it didn't correlate with gender.
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 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.
Judging by the authors' affiliations and Nintendo-approved rhetoric, this does appear to be a shill.
Is this just cynicism or based on anything? From reading the methods section it doesn't appear this is what happened
> 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
EDIT: Yes, I know the n=11 was supposed to be an n=1. Having a glaring and easily caught error in the abstract is not a good signal for the quality of a paper. This is on the level of an undergraduate paper-writing exercise, not a scientific study as people are assuming.
> This paper is very bad. The numbers in the abstract don’t even add up, which any reviewer should have caught.
Such an obvious error should have been caught by the authors proofreading their own work, to be honest. Any reviewer would also catch it when evaluating the quality of the sample size.
I find it strange that people are bending over backward to defend this paper and its obvious flaws and limitations.
Have you considered getting a job you like better?
You can also take sabbaticals. Or retire early.
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.
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.
I've felt true burnout twice in my life, the first time was after several years without any vacation time taken and about 3 months of 60-80 hour weeks. I literally hit a wall and couldn't even open a project in front of the computer, I was in a haze and not safe to even do anything. My brain was like, "nope!" More recently, a couple years ago it's been a larger state of dissolution about my career without a clear alternative so much as something that I would consider a disablement.
Unambiguously yes. This is well documented and impossible to ignore.
Marshal Sahlins described it best in Stone Age Economics but reading Graeber will get you there or Levi Strauss if you’re into the whole structural anthropology thing
The idea of tribes just “chilling out” to survive is a modern anachronism projected on a romanticized past. We’re so disconnected from the realities of clothing, feeding and sheltering ourselves without modern amenities that it’s hard to imagine what pre-industrial like was like. Thinking that “chilling out” was a viable path to survival is a symptom of that disconnectedness.
A few who managed to evade this past WWII took advantage of the fact everyone was desperate to freeze things in place to avoid nuclear war, those are the fortunate few who are locked into place for the indefinite future.
Of course there's also the heart of Africa, with no great navigable waterways or geography to trade to europe, north america, or asia, no one gives much a shit what they do.
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>I don't think happened because of evolutionary pressure on tribes as the previous poster claimed.
Not a necessary precondition, it can happen through cultural pressure. I don't recall previous poster requiring it happen through gene expression.
It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
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.
Cooking a full meal would at least take me an hour end-to-end. As a 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.
I was responding to the part of your comment about not being able to eat healthy.
Cooking traditional French cuisine on weeknights is not the only way to have a healthy meal. Eating homemade French cuisine every weeknight would be a luxury for working class standards just about anywhere.
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.
So OK, 3-5 hours left over for everything else, assuming perfect execution on the other parts. Do you have family or pets that need something? Do you have dishes and laundry and trash days and bills to pay? Do you want to watch TV, play a game, do any kind of hobby or leaning? Are you sick? Do you have friendships? Are you tired from work being physically or mentally demanding? Do you need to exercise?
All of those things need to be handled in the same few “outside work” hours each day.
By the time I’m home it’s at least 6:30pm, usually a bit later. If I would work until 6:30 but from home instead of the office, I’d probably still be up for cooking.
Although you also need to get gym time in, family time, chores and other stuff…
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.
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?
Well, not all parts of the world have winters.
What times/places are you thinking of when you write this?
We have much more non-survival leisure time now.
I don't particularly find this survey compelling, but I also don't want to be judged as some vampiric capitalist just because I'd like to have more work bandwidth.
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.
Thank you for this post! The headline claim struck me as one that would be difficult to evidence with any scientific rigor. Reading the abstract furthered this feeling but I couldn't be bothered to read the methodology, so thanks for doing it.
> 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.
Indeed. Even the idea that individuals can reliably self-diagnose "burn-out" in an objective way is highly dubious.
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.
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.
While I appreciate you leaving the value of competitiveness in the air... on the other hand, by defining it so purely, you've essentially resigned yourself from participating.
I'm curious what games have molded this perspective.
For anyone playing The Finals, I’m hovering around 30-40k ELO. Definitely mid-tier.
I play about 4h a week fwiw.
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.
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.
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.
Quit planetside 2 in high school after about 1000 hours.
Some tiktok videos have deeper research than this.
> 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)."
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.
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.
It definitely can (and they had interviews too), although there's a lot of limitations with their methodology they don't address in the paper.