Pokémon Go can relieve mild depressive symptoms, it turns out. A new study from the London School of Economics and Political Science entitled “Location-Based Mobile Gaming and Local Depression Trends: A Study of Pokémon Go”Claims it Pokémon Go “can relieve non-clinical forms of mild depression for users who play the game,” because it encourages physical activity outside and face-to-face socialization. The gamer first discovered and covered the study.
The study, published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, measures depression regionally using a “well-established mechanism from medical and public health literature, internet search of depression-related terms.” The research team uses Google Trends search data from the Google Misery Index (yes, that’s a real thing) to measure how much people search for terms like “depression,” “stress,” “anxiety,” and “fatigue” in a given region.
The data cover 166 different regions, 15 of which are in English-speaking countries, and extend over a period of 50 weeks between 1 January 2016 and 12 December 2016. (These dates include a time period covering before and after Pokémon Gos release.)
Pokémon Go is a mobile augmented reality game from Niantic where you can fight and capture Pokémon based on your location. While the developers changed the game due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it largely requires you to actually go out and take a walk to collect Pokémon and fight with them in virtual gyms. Other features of the game, such as Community Days, where certain Pokémon appear more often, encourage additional players to get outside and perhaps meet other players during the event. As the study explains, both of these factors can lead to relieving certain depressive symptoms.
If you want to play and connect with some other coaches, check out Polygon’s full list Pokémon Go Community Days in 2022.