In the forums you may have noticed that a series of topics around health and wellness have begun to pop up. The reason? I’m a strength and conditioning coach – so health and wellness are the corner stone of my existence! 

Today I want to address something that impacts all of us here at FG – Sleep. If you’ve played with me at all you know that I often log off first and go to bed at around 9.30pm, why?

Well according to several studies there is a link between video games and the quality of sleep we can get. Sleep is one of, if not the, most important factors influencing our physical and mental health and wellbeing. Getting a solid 8 hours of sleep every night is truly the fountain of youth as it has links to lower blood pressure, weight loss, cancer…..you name it – sleep impacts on it.

In a recent study it was found that even the smallest exposure to video games led to: 

“The analysis indicated a reduction of Total Sleep Time (TST) and an increase of Sleep Onset Latency (SOL), modifications of the REM sleep and Slow Wave Sleep (SWS), and increased sleepiness and self-perceived fatigue.”

That means when you play video games the amount of sleep you get is reduced, the time it takes you to fall asleep takes longer and you don’t get as good quality REM sleep (the important part of sleep). 

To mitigate this, I have made the following recommendations on the forum:

1.     Be in bed with enough time to fall asleep and get at least 8 hours sleep. For me that’s 10pm, so I log off at 9.30pm, make my lunch and bits for the next day and get in bed by 10pm. 

2.     Stop drinking caffeine after midday. This one is a tricky one as people like their tea and coffee etc. However, the half-life of caffeine is actually 5 – 6 hours on average, that means if you had a black coffee at midday that’s 100mg of caffeine in your system, by 6pm that’s still 50mg in your system, by midnight 25mg. See the problem? If you drink coffee at 6pm with your dinner it’s still raving out in your system at midnight.

Something to think about is that the issues with video games and sleep are acute. You play video games, you have poor sleep, you wake up and you’re tired. You don’t play video games that evening, you sleep well – all is good, right?

Wrong. The acute effects of video games and sleep soon build up and the study suggests that long term exposure to video games can have long term chronic issues related to elevated heart rates and blood pressure, obesity and other various ailments. 

Hopefully this information might help you to make some different choices about how often you play video games, how late you play them and if you can find ways to mitigate the impact.

Here are the final conclusions from the study, which is linked below:

In summary, exposure to VGs before falling asleep can have important effects on the subsequent sleep characteristics, in both children/adolescents and adults. The reduction of Total Sleep Time (TST) and an increase of Sleep Onset Latency (SOL) and the possible change of components of sleep (mainly SWS and REM) identified in the study investigated, are clear indicators of poor sleep quality, higher tiredness and fatigue that may have repercussion on cognitive and behavioural activities of the subsequent waking. In fact, some cognitive abilities as sustained attention and verbal memory, can result worsened as a consequence of VGs exposure. Since the relevance of sleep for health and life quality, a great effort is required to address additional research for clarifying the role of acute and chronic exposures to videogames.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6361300

This past week, @Rumelylady and Myself were in Columbus Ohio for Origins Game Fair 2022, working with Six Sides of Gaming to provide the A/V feed as well as streaming from the main hall of the con.  It was both our first time in Columbus and I really liked the city as a whole.  Great people and some amazing food in and around the convention centre/downtown core.  

The con itself was shrouded in some controversy thanks in no small part to two of the "Special Guests" having they're true colors revealed to the TTRPG community by a large amount of people sharing their experiences with these two, and just how horrible, disrespectful, and unprofessional they've both been when working with them in the past.  Needless to say, It was a topic of discussion for a lot of people on the show floor as most were trying to distance themselves from them.  Both people in question were removed from all appearances they were scheduled to make and replaced rather quickly by some other more professional people in the industry.

Aside from that, The turn out suffered as well thanks to a mask mandate being in place for the convention.  A lot of people that were going to attend cancelled due to the back and forth by the con with regards to this.  Shame really, as they missed a pretty good show.

Our job went off without a hitch.  Audio/Video quality for the sow was top notch and we were praised for our work we put into it.  Our streaming however was fairly lacklustre due to one member of the company failing to obtain people for most of our convention programming.  Attendance was mediocre, but that was the case for most of the convention as a whole.  A lot of demo room, panels, performances, and even the costume contest (Which had some amazing outfits) all had a poor showing but fun was had none the less.

To get into everything from the floor here would take a lot, so I'll choose a couple things that we bought that really caught our eyes.  First was a board game called Wonder Book by DV Games 

Wonder Book Board Game

WWW.WONDERBOOK-BOARDGAME.COM

This one caught our eyes right away thanks to the creative way they've implemented the game board.  It opens up like a book, but as you progress through the chapters of the game, It turns into a big pop up book with movable tabs!  It's truly something you have to see up close to appreciate, and we were happy to buy this from them.

The other was various sets of dice and cards by a group called Inkwell Ideas https://inkwellideas.com/

They had an assortments of dice and cards that created dungeon maps, terrain, and NPCs for random TTRPG adventures that really blew us away.  There's so many options you could end up with using these products and it really expands what can be done with a random generated TTRPG adventure setting using say 5E rules.  We spend a lot of money here.  Excellent products that I would recommend to any TTRPG game master looking to add a few things to their bag of tricks.

It was a fun week, but also the last we will have working with Six Sides of Gaming.  A lot of issues have caused Sarah, Myself and our Friend Adrian to step away, BUT... We have already begun the work to start our next endeavour based around our podcast called Dice to Pixels.  We will be starting this up within the next few weeks and we fully intend to fire up some TTRPG streams and some boardgames play-through and walkthroughs as well.

All in all, Origins was good especially thanks to some of the people we had the chance to hang out with and enjoy together.  Columbus was a nice city that I would 100% return to and who knows, Maybe we will be back next year to do the same thing.  Only with our new group.

Cheers Folks!