Probably not when it comes to mental health in general. But when it comes to "complete social isolation will make you go crazy" it probably counts—someone stuck in solitary confinement might relish in the opportunity to get in a pointless internet argument because at least it's interacting with another human.
The press release is quite short, Would be interesting to compare RPG with other hobbies/wellbeing activity. Is playing RPG better than going out for a hike with your friends ?
The actual paper is directly linked in this press release. It contains three threats to validity:
First, due to the small sample size, demographic factors (such as prior experience with D&D and COVID-19 experiences) could not be entered into the statistical models as control variables. […]
Second, the single-arm design is vulnerable to participant-related effects (participants responding to the demand characteristics of the research situation and placebo effects) and experimenter expectancy effects. […]
Third, due to the age of participants (mean age was around 28), we should be cautious when generalizing these findings to other groups, such as geriatric or paediatric populations.
Overall, this is not very strong evidence. The primary conclusion from the researchers seems to be “promising for further research”.
One curious note:
Interestingly, only two of the five outcome variables were found to change from T1 to T2. This could indicate that the positive effects of D&D take time to manifest or that a threshold of exposure is needed before positive effects begin to manifest.
They had 8 weekly 1h sessions. T1 is “before the first session” and T2 is the middle “after 4 of 8 sessions”. (They also measured T3 “after eight sessions” and T4 “one month after the last session”).
I mean, there’s a number of reasons that might be the case, not the least of which being it’s a group activity, which is really beneficial for social creatures like humans.
It’s interesting, I hope this research leads to a higher population to back it up. I mean, you could probably just reach out to different groups of people and pay for the snacks/connect them with a dm/supply the adventure and amp the population much higher.
No, then you have many compounding and interacting variables. Maybe it’s free snacks that improve mental health. Maybe it’s the features of the room. Maybe it’s specific adventures.
Even with large numbers, experiments need some controls. You either need to know the context details so you can account for them, or ensure they’re the same across all observations.
Good points. Could you control for those factors? Granted thr room features one would be hard to do in an inexpensive way, so third parties may not be the option. Food for thought, thank you.
With a large enough test, you could provide several adventures, several systems even (there’s zero reason to make the claim specifically about one commercial product when TTRPGs are a whole hobby category), with or without snacks, in a controlled environment, with a set roster of GMs. It would just take many thousands of participants over years to run the study.
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