Your Brain on 'Animal Crossing'Top Story - May 2019
Content Warning: Depression, anxiety, and mental health.
Video games have always been under scrutiny when talking about the player's health, more specifically the mental and social "toll" of spending time in virtual worlds. Scientific research revolving around adolescents behavior while "being on Video Games" (known as IAD, Internet Addiction Disorder) started way back in the 1980s in papers such as "Media violence and the self: The impact of personalized gaming characters in aggressive video games on aggressive behavior." (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 137)Since then, the stigma of people who enjoy passing their free time with video games has not lightened. YouTube is stuffed full of clips of aggressively toxic behavior on online platforms, even frustration with single player games that do not have social interaction. These montages are usually publicly posted in a humorous light, or to shame a player for saying things that are morally unacceptable. Granted, denying the toxicity in the gaming community is pure blissful ignorance, despite the best efforts of gaming developers. An example of a gaming company trying to force the metaphorical chill pill down its player's throats is Blizzard's Overwatch 1.25 update, which adds an endorsement system for positive interaction with teammates.