A new scientific study has found significant effects of open-world gaming on people’s quality of life and emotional well-being. It also shows that playing games in tandem with watching nostalgia-inducing movies like Studio Ghibli’s films can have an even bigger effect, indicating that different types of media can interact with each other.
Writing in the journal JMIR Serious Games, which focuses on games studies research, a team of scientists presents evidence that playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild can have a range of positive outcomes. Testing with a sample of postgraduate students–a community famous for its high levels of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and burnout–the authors show that playing Breath of the Wild on its own can help spark a sense of purpose and meaning. Further, this game helped people feel more calm, more adventurous, and more skillful in their lives outside of the game context.
Investigating potential interactions between games and watching film, the authors also instruct a subset of participants to play Breath of the Wild and watch a clip from Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service in close succession. Theorizing that the film clips spark a positive sense of nostalgia among participants, the authors find an even stronger effect on overall happiness and life purpose among this subset.
While this study only includes postgraduate students and can’t say much about the longevity of these positive impacts, it represents yet another piece of scientific evidence showing beneficial effects of gaming. For instance, scholars have found encouraging results for games as a tool to help mitigate substance abuse and improve mental health. Games have been shown to induce pro-social activity and improve community-building, and evidence suggests that they can even serve to reduce the effects of cognitive disorders.
This new study comes at a time of intense focus on the games industry and renewed calls from politicians to regulate games and game-adjacent spaces. Scientists have long studied the potential dark sides of gaming, from the potential risks from certain fringe gaming communities to the effects of certain types of multiplayer games on social psychology. However, recent proposals to investigate game companies have often rehashed old and unsupported allegations that violent video games directly cause violence.
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