Wallpaper, for Psychological Health

tropical wallpaperThere’s more than one way to curb toxicity in online gaming! At least, that’s the very beginning of my thesis. Most games nowadays have a system of reporting and banning to try to stop players from becoming abusive, and to punish players who take things too far. Over-Botch has something very similar, although it’s a well-known problem that people file false reports when they simply don’t like a person, or the career they’ve picked, or their managerial style.

But I’m hoping to stop all that with my new thesis, entitled ‘Wallpaper, and the Passive Benefits of Calming Surroundings’. Right now, many people play with wallpaper of a neutral colour. However, with the digital wallpaper revolution that allows people to customise their wallpaper choices, and even purchase wallpaper that is easy to remove. Thus, wallpaper with a calming quality can actually have a profound effect on a person’s mental state.

I haven’t been able to test this extensively as I’d like, but I was able to carry out several tests. My participants were placed in several different rooms and asked to play a stressful, competitive first-person shooter game. One control group was in a room with simply white walls, and they reported greatly-heightened aggression as a result of being scrubs. One participant even went so far as to break the console, which was…not really what I wanted, to be honest. However, control group two were placed in a room with decorative wallpaper displaying such things as peaceful mountain meditation scenes, stock photo families walking along the beach, and various pictures of ducklings and young squirrels gathering nuts.

The change was astounding. The wallpaper lowered aggression by as much as 80%, with one participant verbally noting at the end of a stressful game that “I would be angry, but I just look at this tropical wallpaper and I can think of only tropical things.”

Fascinating. We could eliminate toxicity altogether! Further testing required.

-Michael