Super Mario Odyssey reduces depression symptoms by nearly 50%, beating out brain trainers, pharmaceuticals and traditional therapies by a wide margin.
Study author Moritz Bergmann and his colleagues wanted to investigate whether a six-week video game intervention leads to improvements in depressed mood, training motivation, and visuo-spatial memory functions in individuals with major depressive disorder.
The study involved 46 individuals diagnosed with depression who reported infrequent video game play in their leisure time. These participants were randomly divided into three groups: one playing “Super Mario Odyssey,†one using the “CogPack†program, and one receiving standard clinical treatment, which included medication and psychotherapy.
Results showed that the percentage of participants with high levels of depressive symptoms decreased the most in the “Super Mario Odyssey†group. Their number almost halved and their motivation for therapy was the highest.
The decreases in the other two study groups were considerably smaller and insufficient to exclude the possibility that they were due to random variations in answers instead of treatment effects.
This is a small sample size, but the findings remain consistent with other studies we have shared showing engaging commercial video games having much greater effect on mental health and cognition than other more traditional mental health interventions and certainly much higher effects than “brain trainersâ€.
I believe in 2024 video games will begin to be recognized for their massive therapeutic potential and a shift towards mainstream immersive medicine will begin. In the end, results like these cannot be ignored and the help is arriving when we need it most.
