The research ' which was done from December 2020 to March 2022 ' found that even just owning a game console increased life satisfaction and reduced psychological distress. The results were published today in Nature Human Behaviour. The findings are a first step towards demonstrating a causal link between gaming and mental-health benefits, says Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist who studies how video games influence players' mental health at the University of Oxford, UK. 'The study provides a worked example that games researchers all around the world should follow closely,' he says. But he adds that conducting the experiment during the pandemic could have amplified the mental-health benefits of gaming because people's mental health was generally poorer at that time and there were fewer opportunities to engage in other activities. The effect on well-being will need to be tested outside that situation, he says. Although studies have explored the effects of gaming on addiction, well-being, cognitive function and aggression, the results have been mixed2,3. Most of this research has relied on observational data, which cannot be used to tease apart cause and effect, says study co-author Hiroyuki Egami, a behavioural scientist at Nihon University in Tokyo. Many video-gaming studies are also done in controlled laboratory settings, making it difficult to assess the mental-health effects of gaming in daily life, adds Egami....

They started with fliers. The group of World of Warcraft developers at Activision Blizzard, determined to unionize, were testing the waters after Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition. Microsoft had pledged to honor a labor neutrality agreement, active 60 days after the deal's close, that would allow workers to explore collective bargaining without fear. Even with that agreement on their side, developers were still nervous about even showing interest in a union, says Paul Cox, a senior quest designer who served on the union's organizing committee. 'Prior to [the agreement], we had a lot of people who were like, 'I'm interested, but I'm really worried about retaliation. I am terrified about getting my name put anywhere.'' he adds. That fear wasn't unfounded. Prior to Microsoft's acquisition, when they were still under Activision Blizzard's leadership, unionized quality assurance workers at a studio in Albany, New York, accused management of engaging in union busting tactics. According to one QA tester WIRED spoke to at the time, management was hostile to their efforts, pulling employees into 'spontaneous meetings' and 'spread[ing] misleading or false information about unions and the unionization process' in a company Slack channel....

I'm a guy 'in real life,' but I've always played female characters in video games. More and more people say this means I'm either secretly gay/trans or a total creep. Am I allowed to just prefer it' 'Gender Player It sounds like you have a lot of people in your life, Player, who think they know you better than you know yourself. I won't pretend to have insight into your deepest self, but I can offer some ways of thinking about your choice: Seeing as you're not grossed out by the idea of meat grown 'in a peach tree dish,' as Marjorie Taylor Greene put it, I assume your vegetarianism is ethically or religiously motivated. Hence the fear of hypocrisy'but I don't think that's the right word, exactly, for what you're feeling. A hypocrite is someone who claims moral standards that their behavior flatly contradicts, and lab meat, if we are to believe the hype, promises to be both humane and sustainable. Like many technological solutions that transform a vice into a neutral choice (clean energy, NA beer), it cancels out the moral calculus and relieves us of the duty to make sacrifices for a better world, or a better self. You can have your happy cows and eat them, too....

Over by the pool, a slap fight breaks out. Two cast members, no longer content to trade insults, are flailing at each other with the fervor of a schoolyard fight. Camera screen bouncing, the producer sprints over to get footage. It's 1999, and players are producing the latest season of the hot reality show, The Crush House. That job includes picking the cast, capturing the drama, and above all satisfying the ever-changing audience to keep the show on the air. Fail, and you're canceled, in the most traditional sense of the word. Until 2024, the role of 'reality TV producer' was a largely unexplored video game hero. The Crush House ends that trend. Part satire, part love letter to the indomitable industry of reality TV, the 'thirst person shooter,' which is expected to launch later this year, is director Nicole He's way of exploring the genre in a fun, yet critical way. Crush House is also not the only reality-TV-tinged title to make waves this week. Content Warning, a co-op horror game about filming your friends to try and go viral, pulled in more than 200,000 concurrent players after an April Fools' Day launch....