Games’ affordance of childlike wonder and reduced burnout risk in young adults
games.jmir.org
games.jmir.org
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.
In other words, there's no correlation.
It is more of moral judgement thing, completely divorced from both needs and outcomes.
Obviously not very poor but relatively poor.
Number and value of child’s toys/belongings correlated directly with parental income, with parental attitude as an independent variable.
For example, my parents were probably at the lower-end-of-comfortable but definitely not wealthy, but I had less money spent on me as a result of their beliefs around raising a child, and politics more broadly.
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 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.
Y’know: if all else fails :)
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.
Do you not see the problem with drawing conclusions from a sample set that pre-selects for Mario/Yoshi players?
How do you think they’re determining that playing Mario/Yoshi prevents burnout if they only surveyed Mario/Yoshi players?
I really don’t understand all of the push to support this paper and disregard critiques as cynicism. The paper is not a serious study, or even a well written paper. Is it a contrarian reflex to deny any observations about a paper that don’t feel positive or agreeable enough?
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
Yes. In the middle ages (and presumably in any agrarian society) people would work intensely for a few weeks and have the most of the year free.
That thing simply ignores everything it takes to keep animals alive year round, keep kids alive year round, create and repair tools, keep house warm, create fabric, sew cloth, actually cook without modern tools and so on and so forth.
Just because there is a rush time does not mean workers do nothing the rest od the time.
Have you considered getting a job you like better?
You can also take sabbaticals. Or retire early.
> 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.
If you value your family so much, you are effectively working for them, not for the little rest at the end of your life.
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 (also something passed down by the generations in tribes). I don't recall previous poster requiring it happen through gene expression.
I feel it was implied in the vision of competing tribes, which hasn't really been how it works for a long time. But still, whatever the trait transmission mechanism, I don't think the supposed complete out-competing of non-conquest-oriented groups necessary for their hypothesis actually happened at scale. Humans content to "chill out" have persisted for all of recorded history.
If this is your standard for a relaxing “chilled out” lifestyle then I’m afraid you’d be deeply disappointed if you saw the realities of living like this. In many places simply maintaining a consistent supply of food and drinkable water is nearly a full time job, and that’s with the various contentions of aid coming in.
Not my standard, the standard presented by the previous poster, where getting food/water/shelter is "chilling" and doing that plus conquering etc is the "less chill" version.
I wasn't explaining why the heart of Africa is "chilled out." I was explaining why at least the initial waves of people with guns who spent an inordinate amount of their "chill time" scheming on how to conquer others, didn't bother much with inner central Africa, thus even if they were chilling they were a bit safer from western ships and guns.
I don't think I ever made the claim all of the heart of africa is just chillin. I'm explaining why there is the potential people in some places could focus more on just eating and sheltering and watering and not as much time fighting against people who spend time on gunpowder and ships. All else equal it should cost less time to eat and shelter than to do that plus other things, and by the standards here, that was the "chill" that was relative to doing all that plus worrying about conquering.
>>Those human tribes who just chilled out after meeting the bare requirements of survival died off because some greedy assholes outcompeted them
>If this is your standard for a relaxing “chilled out” lifestyle then I’m afraid you’d be deeply disappointed if you saw the realities of living like this.
What you've done is redefined chilling out, from what the OG poster had it at (basically food + shelter), and instead you're arguing against someone else that their original definition we were already working on is wrong.
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.
This is a baffling comparison.
A tiger can sleep outside wherever it wants. It has fur to stay warm. Its offspring are up and running quickly on their own. A tiger can chase down animals and eat them immediately, raw. A tiger can drink water from a stream without getting infections.
The list goes on and on and on. If you think it’s trivial to live off the land and find your own food and shelter, why do you suppose people aren’t doing it?
Have you ever seen videos or documentaries about people who live in the middle of nowhere in self sufficient manners? They’re not having a great time. It’s hard work. Their health declines and they suffer. Their clothes are tattered. They still use a lot of cast-offs and tools and other things that they can find or acquire from society.
As for meat, yeah I've eaten lots of raw meat and seafood. Even better if you immediately caught it. Not a lot more work though if one tribal member makes a fire, catching it is more intensive than throwing some meat on some hot rocks to char the outside. There are also a lot of places/climates on the earth where you can survive without a shelter that costs more than a very small fraction of your total time to maintain and build, this is where many of the tribes ended up.
Regarding the young, cubs stay with their mothers for 2-3 years or about 20% the life of a tiger. Tribal kids stayed glued as strongly dependent on their parents until they were closer to 12, so a little bit longer than 20% of the lifespan of someone who has already survived long enough to mother/father a child (life expectancy was low in tribal times, but much larger expected lifespan by the time you reach the age of reproduction). A win for the tiger, but not by a longshot.
>A tiger can drink water from a stream without getting infections.
Nah the tiger can also get infections.
I think you're conflating the fact you wouldn't find it fun, with the idea that they were working that much harder than industrial societies. Industrial societies get more for their work, but due to the economies it actually might cost you even more time to get to a relatively self supporting subsistence level in some industrial societies since you would get arrested for being homeless, get arrested or kicked out for building a hut on your own land (you must spend a gazillion dollars on an up to code and permitted house), you'd get arrested for most forms of hunting, you'd have to pay to pick most wild growing fruits, etc etc.
Overall the tiger provides a pretty useful comparison of time spent working, although the tiger (or night monkey, again if you prefer a closer animal) does appear to have worked slightly more depending on which study you go by.
We have much more non-survival leisure time now.
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.
24 - 2 - 8 leaves you with 14 hours, not 12 hours.
Sounds pedantic, but 2 hours is a lot in the context of your argument that we only have a few hours per day to do anything.
This conversation gets repeated ad nauseum on social media, yet in the real world it’s common for people to operate fine on normal weekly work schedules. Back when I was still reading Reddit there was an endless stream of posts like this complaining that there was no time left to do anything after work. Every time when the OP was asked where their time was going, it revealed one of two things: Either they were taking way too long to go through the basic motions of life (e.g 2 hour morning routines and 2 hour dinner prep every day with a 1 hour bedtime ritual) or they realized they actually had a lot of time but it was just disappearing somewhere and they couldn’t figure it out. That latter one could almost always be traced to spending too much time on phones or in front of TV.
There are a few other unrealistic things too, but they fall in the other direction. Like I think it’s almost impossible to spend only 30 mins to leave my front door, get in the car, park at work and get into the building, get all the way to my desk and actually be in work mode. When I used to commute it was more like an hour, in busy traffic.
I have lived a lot of my life not having enough time to cook dinner mainly because I have often had a part time job in addition to a full time job, and was studying for a career change. So for a few years I was just kinda spinning plates. So that’s another way people end up caught out for time.
> in the real world it’s common for people to operate fine on normal weekly work schedules
I think it’s common but also maybe not even the majority of people are this way? There’s no good reason that “40 hours of work plus an arbitrary commute time” is a functional pattern for most people.
I think we have a mix of people who find this totally fine and have some energy left over at the end of the day, with people who are fully drained by their jobs. It’s hard for each cohort to relate to the other.
For some people, almost all leisure time is lost in an impossible quest to relax/recharge “enough” for the next day/week of work. Sometimes that explains the phone use or TV patterns. It’s an attempt to rest (plus their attention-taking and holding techniques work better on us when we are tired). It’s hard to plan on cooking if you know you’ll be in that state.
I tend to believe If you can find the right work and the right hours for you it’s a huge improvement in your life, and if you are on the wrong pattern with those it’s very bad and leads to a spiral. A lot of us have to accept the wrong pattern to make enough money to live and retire and support family.
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?
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.
For anyone playing The Finals, I’m hovering around 30-40k ELO. Definitely mid-tier.
I play about 4h a week fwiw.
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.
Yeah, you'll lose a few matches as the ranking system figures out where to place you, but the cost of competition is unfortunately the mortifying ordeal of learning that you are not in fact the best in the world.
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.
But your original claim simply doesnt apply to most of these (MMORPGs are exception). What I suspect is that the barrier for reaching "flow" or analogous competitive states has gotten too high for _you_ for whatever reason.
In face of this you've constructed an absurd reality to justify your feelings where its the children with infinite time mucking it up.
The truth is, many adults still tap into the competitive spirit in spite of the barriers youve folded to, which I do agree exist, but always have.
Pick subjects who aren't used to video games and then let us see.
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.