Quarantine Journaling!

Quarantine has been hitting me pretty hard in terms of motivation, but it’s the home stretch for EMC so I’m excited to start rounding out my research.

I haven’t heard back from my friend at RPI so I plan to do some research into the GSAS curriculum and see what is being prioritized for learning for future game developers. I also plan to start doing research for my symposium speech. I’ve started looking into how video games affect human empathy and I found three interesting links. They were all written within weeks or months of each other and they say opposing things. The first (https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/01/04/brain-differences-in-avid-players-of-violent-video-games-suggest-they-are-callous-cool-and-in-control/) says that through electroencephalography which scans brain waves, positive responses for gamers were delayed in a signal response-based study (as compared to the control). In the second (https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/487217) and third (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0031-7 say that as a result of only short-term effects being measured, video games in the long-term (which are not shown to have any adverse effects on players) are being advertised as unsafe and possibly detrimental to players’ mental health.