How Playing Video Games Affects Our Minds
In this Data Story, I tracked myself for 5 days to see how playing video games affects my mood and my thoughts. For this story, I decided to do 3 days during the week (Wednesday-Friday) and 2 days during the weekend (Saturday and Sunday).
The reason I decided to do this project is that I’ve played video games since I was a little kid, but now that I have more responsibilities as a college student, I realize that the amount of time I play actually affects my mood. At the end of each day, I wrote a quick summary of key moments that happened during the day on my phone notes.
The two biggest things about this project are the emotions that go on during and after I play video games and the amount of time I play video games each day.
For my first concept, I thought about creating a pie chart, divided into 5 sections, each section representing a day. Within those sections, I created subsections that represented key/important moments during the day and color-coded them based on how I was feeling during that moment or what I was doing. Along with the color-coded subsections, I also used the area within the main sections to represent time. The bigger I made the subsection, the more hours that certain events took. I would also divide the subsection in half or in thirds depending on if I felt multiple emotions during a specific time period.
Looking at the chart from the top and moving clockwise, the colors of each feeling are described at the top of the page. By doing this chart, I noticed that after playing video games at times it shouldn’t make me feel. During the week, I had a couple of projects and a few homework assignments due. The main thing I realized is that playing video games makes me feel happy, but I would have to face the consequences afterward. For example, on Wednesday, I had a couple of hours in the morning to play video games, deciding not to focus on my project due on Friday. When I turned off the game and went to school, anxiety hit me like a train because the reality of how much time the project would take me worried me.
The biggest lesson I learned during the recording of data during this project was between Day 1 and Day 2. As you can see, I played video games right after I got home from school on Day 1. But since I saw how much it worried me, I didn’t play any video games once I got home. Instead, I went straight to work and didn’t stop working until 2 AM.
Along with this chart, I wanted to take a deeper approach to the number of hours during the day I spent feeling a certain feeling. In this chart, I wrote the number of hours I spent playing video games in the center of the graph. On each side of the number, I wrote down shapes that each represent a certain feeling. Though the color is just there to coincide with the pie chart, the amount of shapes on each vertical or horizontal line represents an hour. If one line only has one shape attached to it, it means that I either spent an hour or less than an hour feeling that feeling.
The main difference between this chart and the other chart is that it shows an in-depth description of each hour and shows me how many hours I actually spend feeling a certain feeling.
My conclusion to this Data Story is that video games can have a negative effect on someone’s life. I’m not saying I am an expert in this field of study, however, I can see this similarly affecting someone else.
