Pokémon GO Might Reduce Mild Depression According to Study

Pokémon defined an entire generation in the 90s and remains extremely popular to this day. Likewise, the Pokémon Go app redefined mobile games. It successfully deployed a new technology: augmented reality. It got people out of the house and made them more active. Now, studies are beginning to see largely positive effects from this.

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The news is a consistent source of entertainment, knowledge and discovery that never ceases to exist. It always comes out with more and more material each day. It plays such a vital part in our lives and is so important to keep up with. Without a doubt, it is a piece of your everyday routine that can’t go ignored.

Whether it is to understand the ramifications of recent legislation passed, to hear about recent events and grasp the potential consequences to your country, or simply hear about what is happening in other countries in order to compare them to what’s happening in yours, the news is certainly a staple in our lives and the most consistent way to get information.

Scrambled Eggs has decided to unite two of your biggest worlds: learning English and keeping up with what is happening in the world. We hope our challenging daily exercises, composed of listening, vocabulary and comprehension exercises in English, will satisfy both of those above worlds in a satisfactory and also entertaining way.

So enough about introductions, let’s get to today’s Learn English with the News topic:

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Full Text:

Playing location-based games, such as the augmented reality game Pokémon GO, may alleviate non-clinical forms of mild depression, a new study has found. Location-based games are those that revolve and progress around a player’s physical location. This is often monitored using GPS technology. In a new study by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), researchers examined the effect of location-based mobile gaming on local depression trends.

Using the introduction of Pokémon GO as a case study, the researchers exploited the staggered release of the game over 50 weeks in 2016 into 166 regions in 12 English-speaking countries.

They measured local depression levels using Google Trends data to calculate internet searches for depression-related terms such as “depression,” “stress,” and “anxiety.” Using internet search data is a well-established mechanism for measuring mild depression in medical and public health literature. They found the release of Pokémon GO was associated with a significant short-term decrease in depression-related internet searches.

The authors argue that playing these types of games may reduce mild depression because they encourage outdoor physical activity, face-to-face socialization and exposure to nature. All factors which have all been shown as having a positive impact on mental health.

In the paper, published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, the authors were keen to stress that their findings only relate to those suffering from mild depression—not chronic or severe depressive disorders.