{"id":220486,"date":"2025-08-20T07:29:33","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T12:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/how-zelda-and-studio-ghibli-inspire-happiness-and-purpose"},"modified":"2025-08-20T07:29:33","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T12:29:33","slug":"how-zelda-and-studio-ghibli-inspire-happiness-and-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/how-zelda-and-studio-ghibli-inspire-happiness-and-purpose","title":{"rendered":"How Zelda and Studio Ghibli inspire happiness and purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-zelda-and-studio-ghibli-inspire-happiness-and-purpose2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A new <a href=\"https:\/\/games.jmir.org\/2025\/1\/e76522\" target=\"_blank\">study<\/a> published in <i>JMIR Serious Games<\/i> reveals that playing the open-world video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and watching Studio Ghibli films can significantly improve young people\u2019s overall happiness and sense of purpose in life.<\/p>\n<p>Led by researchers from Imperial College London, Kyushu Sangyo University, and Georgia State University, the exploratory randomized controlled study, titled \u201cEffects of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Studio Ghibli Films on Young People\u2019s Sense of Exploration, Calm, Mastery and Skill, Purpose and Meaning, and Overall Happiness in Life: Exploratory Randomized Controlled Study,\u201d involved 518 postgraduate students.<\/p>\n<p>Participants were randomly assigned to either play Zelda or not and to either watch nostalgic Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki\u2019s Delivery Service or not. Researchers then measured feelings of exploration, calm, skill mastery, purpose, and life happiness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study published in JMIR Serious Games reveals that playing the open-world video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and watching Studio Ghibli films can significantly improve young people\u2019s overall happiness and sense of purpose in life. Led by researchers from Imperial College London, Kyushu Sangyo University, and Georgia State University, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1509],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}