Devlog #1: Research

The Assignment

In class recently, we learned a lot about how the rest of the semester is going to go, and the big project we'll be working on is a game centered around a topic of our choice. We were given a list of potential topics we could use, and I ended up going with doomscrolling. For those who might not know what that is, doomscrolling is essentially the habit of scrolling through disheartening news for an extended period of time, and it can contribute to poor mental health. A large part of the young adult population has been doing it recently as more news comes out. Before, people were doomscrolling for news on Trump's term in office as US president, and now people are doomscrolling for news on the pandemic.

Finding Sources

With that explanation out of the way, our most recent assignment was to write a research report on the topic we chose. So as I said, I picked doomscrolling, and I wanted to focus on the effects of it specifically as it pertains to political controversies surrounding the government, mainly in the USA. I spent a lot of time looking for sources with things like Google Scholar with additions from the Sheridan Library, but in the end I couldn't find many scholarly works related to doomscrolling and the US political landscape. I did find some, but not as many as I would've liked. I feel this has to do with how doomscrolling is a relatively new term that was popularized during the COVID pandemic, and as such, many studies regarding doomscrolling focus more on the pandemic and less on the government.

Writing the Report

When it came time to read up on doomscrolling and write up the report, I was learning quite a bit about how it works in relation to mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, and other things like that. One fact that was interesting to read is how the mental health effects caused in part by doomscrolling are unique to social media. They don't occur nearly as prevalently in people who use traditional forms of media, like television for example. It was also very interesting to learn about the rate in which media pumps out news and content, and how much it increases when current events begin affecting the population the media is based in. For example, in Norway, media coverage regarding the pandemic was really low, but skyrocketed the moment Norway has its first COVID case. It made me think of how high the rate of news publishing must've been in the US back when the Trump administration was in power, and how much people were doomscrolling in those days. In any case, I learned a lot about my topic, and this was really informative. I already have some thoughts for how I could implement what I learned into the design of a game, but it will take a lot more time to have them fully fleshed out.