New Study Finds Even More Evidence That Gaming Can Improve Overall Happiness
www.gamespot.com
Scientists have found that playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild can spark joy, improve life satisfaction, and help build feelings of skill and mastery.

Further, this game helped people feel more calm, more adventurous, and more skillful in their lives outside of the game context.

  • Infrapink@thebrainbin.org
    101·
    5 days ago

    BOTW helped me process my depression.

    I was born in 1986, and ever since I had been doing what was expected of me. Immediate family were all aggressively opposed to me ever making a decision or having any agency, yet somehow I always ended up doing the wrong thing, even when I did the exact opposite of the wrong thing.

    I’d always liked games, but had started to feel like I was just going through the motions, acting out a predetermined path. Then, in 2018, I played BOTW. Holy crap. “Your goal is to save the princess. How you go about that is up to you.”

    And there was so much freedom! I could go anywhere, do anything I wanted. I could run off to look at something twitching off the path. I could be a berserker, a knight, or a ninja (ninja wherever possible). There were no guardrails, no predetermined paths, just a vast, beautiful world where I could do as I pleased.

    I was also getting therapy at the time and working out my feelings. I had been thinking a lot about being a supporting character in my own life story, but when I played BOTW, I was truly in control in a way I had never experienced in real life. Seeing and feeling this freedom, comparing it with my own life, really clarified a lot about where my depression arose from and how I could manage it.

    (My depression is fortunately mild enough that drugs would do more harm than good. I’m no longer suicidal and have a few personal strategies I use when I have an attack).