danielalonk/gaming-and-mental-health

# Gaming and Mental Health: Analysis of Daily Impact

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## Project Overview
This project explores the relationship between gaming habits and daily life functions, including academic performance (GPA), productivity, and social isolation. The goal is to determine if game genre and daily play-time significantly affect a person's well-being and efficiency.

## The Dataset
* **Source:** [Gaming and Mental Health Dataset (Kaggle)](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/shaistashahid/gaming-and-mental-health)
* **Size:** ~1,000+ rows.
* **Key Features:** Age, Daily Gaming Hours, Sleep Hours, GPA, Productivity Score, Social Isolation Score, Game Genre, and Monthly Spending.

## Research Questions & Insights

### 1. Social Isolation by Genre
**Question:** Which game genre is associated with the highest level of social isolation?
* **Insight:** Players of **RPG (Role-Playing Games)** showed the highest average social isolation scores.
* **Visualization:** A bar chart comparing mean isolation scores across genres.

### 2. Gaming vs. Academic Performance (GPA)
**Question:** Does more time spent gaming lead to lower grades?
* **Insight:** Surprisingly, the correlation between gaming hours and GPA was very weak.
* **Analysis:** This might be due to the diverse age range of the sample, where many participants are not currently in school, or because high-performing individuals manage their time effectively.

### 3. Financial Patterns
**Question:** Is there a correlation between age and monthly spending on games?
* **Insight:** The analysis showed that spending doesn't necessarily spike with age, suggesting that younger and older gamers alike invest similarly in their hobby.

## Key Data Decisions (EDA)
* **Data Cleaning:** Removed irrelevant and non numeric columns like `record_id` and physical symptoms (`back_neck_pain`) to focus on cognitive and social performance.
* **Handling Missing Values:** Used **Median Imputation** for GPA and Productivity scores to avoid bias from outliers.
* **Outliers:** Identified extreme values in gaming hours (e.g., 15+ hours). These were kept in the dataset as they represent genuine "power users" which are critical for understanding gaming addiction/impact.

## Visualizations


## Conclusions
My analysis shows that high gaming hours significantly impact most aspects of daily life, such as sleep and social interaction. However, RPG games stand out as the most harmful genre for social isolation. Interestingly, academic performance (GPA) remains largely unaffected by gaming time, proving that the relationship between gaming and success is more complex than it seems.