Study reveals playing Breath of the Wild & watching Studio Ghibli films improves mental health
Nintendo A new study has found that playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and watching Studio Ghibli films can significantly boost young people’s overall happiness.
Researchers split 518 postgraduate students into four groups: one played the open-world game, one watched nostalgic films, one did both, and one did neither. Afterward, participants reported their levels of exploration, calm, mastery and skill, purpose and meaning, and overall life happiness.
Those who played Breath of the Wild reported higher happiness compared to those who did not. The effect was stronger when combined with the nostalgic impact of Studio Ghibli films.
Exploration, calm, and mastery played key roles
The researchers used bootstrapped mediation analysis to test how the interventions affected happiness. They found that feelings of exploration, calm, mastery, and purpose acted as mediators, meaning they explained how gameplay and nostalgia increased well-being.
The experiment showed that nostalgia enhanced the effects of open-world play, with participants in the combined group reporting the highest happiness scores.
NintendoUnlike observational surveys, this experiment allowed for stronger causal conclusions. The authors noted that the design—randomly assigning students to one of four conditions—helped isolate the effects of both open-world gameplay and nostalgic films.
The study was limited to postgraduate students and measured only short-term effects immediately after the interventions. Still, the results suggest that specific types of games and media can reliably generate measurable increases in mood and life satisfaction.
This is just the latest mood-related study to go viral online, too. One back in July revealed that eating cheese before bed could cause nightmares, while another revealed the most “emotionally triggering” text message.