Interesting take. I'm in my 30s and not sure I've ever known that kind of culture, yet I do understand the sentiment against heavy media consumption (which most video games fall under).

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.

Precisely. The 'hustle' culture and the fetishization of hyper-efficiency act as a catalyst for a wide range of systemic societal problems. I'm glad that I'm not part of that sphere.

A “certain culture” is an euphemism for bad economy, I assume?

Yeah, the state of China.

One of my favorites as well. A folk space exploration sim. I did find a few of the puzzles a bit too difficult though.

> I finally played Mario Odyssey

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.

My experience has been the opposite. For both “hardcore” PC games and “simpler” games like Mario, as an adult it’s not only hard to find time but once I do, games feel like an exhausting chore. I go in anticipating relaxation but can’t get it. Sometimes even just getting to the menu screen brings this feeling of dread. I’m not sure how to go back to the feeling of being a kid.

Totally relate to this. The movement in Mario 64 still holds up, 30 years later. When I picked up Odyssey, the first thing I did was figure out how much I could push the limits of the character physics, just like I did when I was 8.

I had the same experience, except that I grabbed Mario Odyssey and...felt incredibly disappointed, decided Nintendo is not for me and went back to my beloved indie games on PC, LOL

Wait until you play Super Mario Wonder!

I do this too, but it bothers me a little bit to think that my mind needs to be doing something all the time in order to feel relaxed. Video games are fun but the ones I play are not really that restful; ditto web browsing. I've been exploring breathing exercises, mindfulness, journaling, just listening to music by itself more but it's tough not to just get bored with it. Maybe that means I need to do it more.

People can be snobby about reading to the point of being too judgmental. Don’t feel guilty about your free time. There isn’t a hierarchy of pastimes with one better than another.

I find that the feeling for me isn't about unproductive time but rather unfulfilling time.

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.

> How do you realistically quantify someone's "overall happiness in life" and "burnout risk" into 1 number ?

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 fact this study even exists is a sign of something having gone very wrong IMHO.

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.

I agree, but hard work is nothing new. Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it. I'm uncertain how to think about burnout in this context. Did they have burnout and were forced to work through it? Were they better at pacing themselves? Maybe the type of work (mental rather than physical labor) or circumstances (working for a corporation) today are more conducive to burnout?

> 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.

Have you considered getting a job you like better?

You can also take sabbaticals. Or retire early.

This is the problem of evil right. Those human tribes who just chilled out after meeting the bare requirements of survival died off because some greedy assholes outcompeted them.

A recent HN thread I cannot seem to find discussed the idea that currently in the US work is the default state, and leisure exists to refuel for work. At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. This context affects everything in life - IE a microwave frozen meal is excellent in the work viewpoint (time value ratio), but if you enjoy cooking it’s horrible in the leisure viewpoint.

...I don't view myself as a consumable. I enjoy accomplishing. I do not enjoy burnout. I'm interested in ways to prevent it. It's really that simple.

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.

Especially since we're about to give birth to an entire species which is better suited to the task!

> This is a self-reported survey 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.

As I age, it gets harder to enjoy competitive games. I just can’t keep up with people who play 6 hours a day and are in their peak twitch-reflex years.

Some studies are better than others, and headlines / secondary sources don’t do enough to comment on this, but looking the source and having an opinion about their methodology, sample size, etc. can help a lot.

Wonder for reducing burnout risk?

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.

Yoshi’s Island still holds up, and I think it remains a contender for one of the best platformers of all time. Recently replayed with the little ones and they were completely captivated.

For me at least, competitive shooters are addictive, put me in an overstimulated reward-driven mindset that seeps into every aspect of life, affecting attention span, enjoyment, mood, and sleep. If there's childlike wonder in there it's not worth it for me.

Quit planetside 2 in high school after about 1000 hours.

Nice play of words. :-)

There's a "Yoshi" series now, but they specifically mean Yoshi’s Crafted World and Yoshi’s Woolly World.

It's "statistically significant", but it doesn't really say what the title says and they draw a lot of causal conclusions that don't really follow the data IMO. The main result is really that happiness and burnout risk were negatively correlated (what a surprise, people burning out aren't happy?), although the caveat is that's only shown in Mario-playing college students.

> as the final results are based on a study with 336 full-time university students.

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.