Does playing video games improve your mood?

Affective Uplift During Video Game Play: A Naturalistic Case Study
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659464

Do video games affect players’ well-being? In this case study, we examined 162,325 intensive longitudinal in-game mood reports from 67,328 play sessions of 8,695 players of the popular game PowerWash Simulator. We compared players’ moods at the beginning of play sessions with their moods during play and found that the average player reported 0.034 (0.032, 0.036) visual analog scale (VAS; 0-1) units greater mood during than at the beginning of play sessions. Moreover, we predict that 72.1% (70.8%, 73.5%) of similar players experience this affective uplift during play, and that the bulk of it happens during the first 15 minutes of play.

Sources (tentatively) say yes!

A short list of fun places that are probably illegal and possibly very dangerous

Question #5: Dark tourism is the recreational practice of visiting locations associated with death and disaster. Please give an example of one such location and explain why this is (or isn’t) “dark.”

Student answers include:

- USP Florence prison
- Pripyat in Chernobyl
- Pablo Escobar's house
- New York sewer system
- Beijing Amazon warehouse
- Krak de Chevaliers in Syria
- Century III mall in Pittsburgh
- Korean demilitarized zone
- Area 51 in Nevada
- Waffle House

Someone also wrote "single-player Minecraft," and I gave them full credit.

ETA: In retrospect, I realize that the majority of these answers were generated by ChatGPT. I sure hope the students using ChatGPT for college quizzes now aren't going to be using ChatGPT as law students and medical interns in a few years haha oh man. It's fine, we're all fine.