The Psychology of Gaming

Thanks to Twitter I've run across a quite excellent blog called The Psychology of Video Games. Here is an excerpt from an interesting recent post about how gaming functions as a recovery experience, allowing us to recuperate from stress and feel revived.

"Andrew Miller, a guy I know,1 spends his days in an office cubicle, working as a Procurement Officer for a large telecommunications company. Every day he spends his limited patience and good will towards humanity on arguments with various middle managers about why they can’t go out and buy this or hire a contractor to do that without following the company’s procurement policies. He also audits purchasing invoices, haggles with suppliers to get good prices, and tries to keep various budgets from into devolving into chaos. He’s good at his job, but by the end of the week he’s totally beat and ready to get away from work for a while. And so every weekend he goes on raids, rushes capture points, slays ogres, and battles to keep his place on the StarCraft II ladders.

And you know what? Come Monday morning he’s a better employee because he played video games." More

The articles site genuine scientific/psychology studies and are written with humor and personality. I highly recommend you check it out.

Also here is a video of a Korean singer Narsha from Brown Eyed Girls with her first solo single that my friend Andy turned me on to. The video is uncharacteristically awesome.