Video games: A promising tool for anxiety and depression
dumpsterlid @ dumpsterlid @lemmy.world Posts 4Comments 674Joined 2 yr. ago
dumpsterlid @ dumpsterlid @lemmy.world
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Texas is the dumbest place on the North American continent. The humans aren’t biologically inferior, I am not making some kind of ableist insult, these fuckers actually choose consciously and willingly over and over again to be hateful worthless bigots which really hurts my brain to think about sometimes.
Even though everybody seems convinced our attention spans have decreased, there is no conclusive evidence of it and scientists don’t even really think it is useful to talk about attention outside the context of motivation anyways.
Your attention span is fine, you are just too burned out from modern life to invest energy into things that take a lot of sustained focus that aren’t essential to survival.
You also have to be way more picky with what content you choose to engage with because there is sooooooo much more content now and that may look like a “short attention span” when your brain optimizes for tossing out the 95% off fluff to get right to the thing you actually wanted.
Our attention spans are fine, this has been the most boring moral panic ever but that is really all it is.
I mean, he has done some stuff. NRLB has been good, antitrust has been really promising.
It comes down to who the cabinet members are right? Especially for someone so old (not that trump isn’t older and more unhinged anyways).
This isn’t a play Biden has really every done his entire time as a politician. Biden is the definition of a politician who identifies the status quo and builds their platform from it.
Whatever, most of the time it doesn’t matter, but it is truly incredible in this moment how much more politicians like Biden could be successful if they just promised to tax billionaires and then actually did it. Yes you would receive zero campaign funding from the rich for the rest of your life but you would also become extremely popular in the eyes of the public?
Small donation campaign financing works, this isn’t black magic.
Who put those contaminants there though?
Swamp creatures didn’t, the swamp didn’t, we did.
True I don’t mean to insinuate there aren’t dangerous creatures in swamps, they are the cities of nature, you find everything there.
Like human cities though, there is a safety in the crowd, in the wild variety of different forms and tendencies. It means that no particular process or force is likely to swing wildly out of control, no animal is going to overrun the swamp. If the swamp becomes full of some icky animal, let’s say cockroaches (or imagine locusts in a landscape of monoculture agriculture), then the swamp will soon become full of bullfrogs and other predators and only somewhat full of cockroaches lol. Things are smoothed out in a very complex way that makes swamps a much “safer” environment than you might expect because the constant ecological conversation between everything in the swamp keeps things in check.
What happens when that system breaks down is like what you see with ticks in the eastern US. The general hardwood landscapes of the east have had their ecological engine thrown so far out of whack (doesn’t help that the two most titular, climax species of eastern US hardwoods, Elms and Chestnuts are functionally extinct in the wild from diseases introduced by Europeans) that tick populations are skyrocketing along with tick borne diseases. The forests are not functioning like a swamp where an element going too far out of whack is inevitably mediated by another element. If you live in a place like I grew up in SE New England it has gotten so bad you can’t really go for a walk in the woods without becoming covered in ticks. This was NOT something my parents generation had to worry about, ticks were like leeches, something awful you very infrequently encountered in the wild. Not a daily risk on your health.
It is no coincidence that so many freshwater wetlands were erased wholesale from the landscape of America, filled in, polluted beyond function or destroyed. It is tragically poetic that North America's most impressive city, Mexico City, was built around an ancient and complex interweaving of humans with a wetland, the Spanish Conquistadors were too primitive to understand complex technology though and drained most of it (well, many of them probably did and the violence to the landscape was a feature not a bug). The nutrient efficiency and sophistication of aqua-cultural techniques developed in concert with a surrounding lake/wetland must have been incredibly impressive (look into chinampas ), remember we are talking about the same people who somehow bred basic-ass meadow grass into corn, which the more you look into the breeding and development of the more bewildered you get.
I think the unsettling thing is that the whole biome is crawling or buzzing. Feeling like inhaling will choke you on a gnat cloud, every surface has some grouchy venomous thing that’ll stick ya
Without the cities of the forest, without healthy freshwater wetlands, the ecological web between animals, plants, nutrients and resources has become fragile to stresses like climate change. The landscape of SE New England has become absolutely covered in ticks in exactly the same creepy way that thinking about being covered in bugs in a swamp makes you feel, and it is because we destroyed the swamps.
That is what I mean when I say swamps are the cleanest places in nature.
I know this seems pedantic but this is “european classical music”, just calling it “classical music” helps cement the narrative that music is a European project that white Europeans pioneered, developed and mastered instead of music being a global phenomena of human culture stretching back millennia.
I mean whatever I am not saying calling it classical music is absolutely terrible but it is worth thinking about because there is actually a lottttt of politics behind “Classical Music” and none of it is cute or fun.
While swamps seem “gross” they are actually the cleanest things in nature.
Wetlands are massive water quality processors, they are the opposite of dirty or gross, though I completely understand that feeling that stomping through thick mud is gross.
Of course you shouldn’t but there is a categorical difference between the risk of a corporation exploiting you because of a power imbalance (you want to use Reddit, there aren’t alternatives in this hypothetical scenario) and the rando running your fediverse instance abandoning the project or being weird about your data.
The second category can definitely be problematic, but it just isn’t the same level of awfulness and systematic exploitation that corporations wield every day to extract a profit.
It sounds like a weird statement because we have been trained to think the average “other” we will encounter in society as dangerous, but if you actually think about the statistics then yes absolutely it makes way more sense to trust a random person or handful of people to run your instance than a corporation. Publicly traded corporations are legally required to be assholes in the pursuit of profit, on the other hand most of the time randos usually aren’t assholes, though to be safe you should always be cautious as you say.
sigh the truth is exhaustingly awful
I don’t have it, I think it changes up the game quite a bit and thus is more geared for someone who has played the shit out of the base game.
I do think Slay The Spire and Monster Train are basically must buys for the genre as boring of answer as that is. They both just have so much depth to their mechanics, and depth of mechanics is everything in this genre.
UNWRA losing funding is catastrophic, they were one of the only functioning aid groups in Gaza and the Biden administrator just tossed them in the dumpster as soon as Israel made a lazy, unsourced claim about a couple of employees who supposedly had connections to Hamas (that UNWRA immediately fired after the baseless accusations were made anyways).
It’s too bad genocide Joe can’t get it through his head that he is directly enabling mass murder. I love when he airdropped supplies into Gaza, I can’t imagine a more humiliating way to avoid the question of why an ally of the US won’t let the US deliver aid to an ongoing genocide with ….trucks …….on pre-existing roads…..
Why did you have to airdrop the aid into Gaza, Biden? Who is stopping you from loading up a bunch of cheap, normal trucks and just driving them into Gaza to directly deliver aid? Why won’t you do anything about the people who are forcing you to deliver aid to a mass starvation event via airdrops?
Motor Town, I am hopelessly obsessed because I am an easy mark. Give me a game with realistic driving mechanics and tire grip modeling that doesn’t force me to go around in circles on a closed race track but rather lets me roam around an open world doing taxi jobs and other stuff and I will become utterly obsessed.
Especially on my steam deck the fact that I can just jump in and out of playing or set my car to autopilot and put the steam deck down while I do other stuff… it is the perfect chill cozy game for me because I can interface with the game any way I want from chill autopilot jobs to pushing 120mph while trying to weave through traffic and keep the car on the road.
It doesn’t run amazing on the steam deck, but it runs well enough the benefits of being able to walk around/chill on the couch while playing outweigh the occasional performance hiccups.
The best way I can describe Motor Town is like if old school Top Gear made a driving game where you can absolutely drive around like it’s Euro Truck Simulator and follow the rules, or you can throw a monster engine into a vehicle and drive it like an utter fucking madman. There are vehicles all the way from sports cars to dump trucks to tow trucks to 18 wheelers so when you get bored of one driving style you can just jump in a different category of vehicle and mix it up.
I don’t know, the prices aren’t really a sale on any of the games I see popping up and honestly in terms of mechanics I still don’t think you can beat Slay The Spire and Monster Train.
edit Vault Of The Void and Tainted Grail look good too, Chrono Ark as well.
Its ok to be ignorant, but you have to understand we are talking about this like it is an unpaid loan or some material bullshit.
This is an entire people and their landscape being erased. Every moment of "increasing pressure" that doesn't create material policy change is horrifically extending hell on earth.
It’s a waste of time — Especially in an election year with so much on the line and post-primaries — to criticize Biden and instead better to criticize the groups who continue to support Israel. When the polls shift, the administration will shift… As has already occurred.
It is clear as day that the only thing actually making Biden think twice about unconditionally supporting the mass slaughter of Palestinians is that he might actually lose the election because his opinions are so unpopular and brutal on the Palestinian genocide.
Right now is THE TIME to grind everything about the Democratic Party to a halt until Biden gets the message that halting the supply of weapons to an ongoing genocide is a non-negotiable aspect of getting leftist (and muslim) voters. He doesn’t give a shit though that much is clear, once the election is over if he wins than all the pressure to actually do anything other than say empty words goes away.
Diplomacy should always take precedence over added conflict though.
Then we should start doing diplomacy and actually put pressure on Netanyahu to stop the genocide.
Until then we aren’t doing diplomacy we are appeasing a genocide of at this point probably ~50,000 Palestinians.
Wait… what happens if you use the Hamas recognition software on Netanyahu…….?
Cover it up probably
It’s called the original Peggie!
Also, game developers are already doing that subconsciously and consciously as artists. Scientists may be able to explain why certain game elements effect people in certain ways but the idea that the science and medical industries can build games that help with anxiety and depression more than game developers with similar objectives is I think a common misunderstanding.
Scientists might be able to show that certain types of music powerfully impact people emotionally, but that doesn’t mean that scientists are able to take that information and make music that maximally emotionally impacts people.
We need artists to do that, and they already are with video games the problem is the industry treats it’s workers like trash.
The original Peggle is extraordinarily good at just making you feel good and calming you down. Then it had its spine ripped out in a Mortal Kombat finishing move by EA when they bought Popcap.