The Daily Balance

If you were to stand on LittleBigPlanet and try to imagine a more astounding, fantastic, and creative place, full of enthralling adventure, uncanny characters, and brilliant things to do… you couldn’t. All imagination is here, and what you do with it all is entirely up to you.

Build new levels and expand the environment, collect the many and varied tools and objects to make your mark on this world, or just simply enjoy the people and puzzles they’ve set.

LittleBigPlanet is the manifested embodiment of your perfect dream world…

Doesn’t it sound magical?!

I’ve really enjoyed playing this game with the Mister and bonding over the challenges we complete together (even if most of the time he yells at my poor little sackgirl…she tries!). But in addition to the fun and laughs we’re sharing together, we’re also improving our mental health.

It’s true!

The Washington Post recently reported that playing video games helps relieve stress, fight depression and also fine-tune cognitive skills.

From James Gee, a professor of learning sciences  at the University of Wisconsin and expert on the subject:

To understand why games might be good for the mind, begin by shedding the cliché that they are about improving hand-eye coordination and firing virtual weapons. The majority of video games on the best-seller list contain no more bloodshed than a game of Risk. The most popular games are not simply difficult in the sense of challenging manual dexterity; they challenge mental dexterity as well. The best-selling game of all time, The Sims, involves almost no hand-eye coordination or quick reflexes. One manages a household of characters, each endowed with distinct drives and personality traits, each cycling through an endless series of short-term needs (companionship, say, or food), each enmeshed in a network of relationships with other characters. Playing the game is a nonstop balancing act: sending one character off to work, cleaning the kitchen with another, searching through the classifieds for work with another. Even a violent game like Grand Theft Auto involves networks of characters that the player must navigate and master, picking up clues and detecting patterns. The text walk-through for Grand Theft Auto III—a document that describes all the variables involved in playing the game through to the finish—is 53,000 words long, the length of a short novel. But despite the complexity of these environments, most gamers eschew reading manuals or walk-throughs altogether, preferring to feel their way through the game space.

My point is, it’s simple to stereotype video games as bad. And yes, in some cases, people can take it too far – recall the South Park World of Warcraft episode? But for me, unwinding at the end of the day by building imaginary worlds and trying on the latest fairy wings and tiaras with my Mister seems to be just what the doctor ordered And plus, it’s way too cold to do anything else!

How do you unwind at the end of the day? Do you ever play video games?