> In this study, we investigate the relations between video games and positive mental health, namely affective well-
being of players (from here on called well-being)....
> We designed a survey measuring players’ well-being, self-reported play, and motivations for play and discussed the survey structure with Electronic Arts.
> We assessed well-being with the validated Scale of Positive and Negative Experiences [59], which measures the affective dimension of well-being [38]. We asked respondents to think about how they had been feeling in the past two weeks and report how often they experienced each of six positive and six negative feelings.
If you gave heroin addicts and unrestricted supply of heroin and performed a similar study, would you find that heroin use is "positively correlated with will being"?
I have a young toddler. When I was reading about letting them watch TV, an article I read made a good point: babies and toddlers enjoy watching TV, but it doesn't do them any good (they're too young to make sense of the pictures) and tends to deprive them of experiences (e.g. language exposure) actually that does do them good. My intuition is video games are similar for adults.
My mind immediately went to surveying the participants in a Skinner box on their perceived well being. It would be incredible if people DIDN'T self-report feeling great after pulling the dopamine levers
No idea why you're being downvoted. The vast majority of today's games are literally designed from the ground up to be habit forming. They use timed random rewards in order to impose schedules on players. EA is of course a major offender, it's one of the reasons why they are universally hated.
The article essentially concludes that being rewarded feels good in the short term. What I'd like to see is long-term happiness and socioeconomic impact.
> We designed a survey measuring players’ well-being, self-reported play, and motivations for play and discussed the survey structure with Electronic Arts.
> We assessed well-being with the validated Scale of Positive and Negative Experiences [59], which measures the affective dimension of well-being [38]. We asked respondents to think about how they had been feeling in the past two weeks and report how often they experienced each of six positive and six negative feelings.
If you gave heroin addicts and unrestricted supply of heroin and performed a similar study, would you find that heroin use is "positively correlated with will being"?
I have a young toddler. When I was reading about letting them watch TV, an article I read made a good point: babies and toddlers enjoy watching TV, but it doesn't do them any good (they're too young to make sense of the pictures) and tends to deprive them of experiences (e.g. language exposure) actually that does do them good. My intuition is video games are similar for adults.