This 3-Minute Video Game Is Surprisingly Good at Spotting Depression
Researchers at New York University have developed a three-minute video game that may help identify clinical depression. The game measures how players respond to collecting apples, revealing differences in behavior between those with and without depression. The team aims to have the game approved as a diagnostic tool by the FDA, potentially allowing for easier tracking of depression symptoms.
- ▪The game was designed to identify a key aspect of depression by observing how players collect apples.
- ▪People with major depression switched to new trees earlier than healthy controls, indicating a lack of response to novel experiences.
- ▪The researchers hope the game could serve as a quick and accessible tool for assessing and monitoring depression symptoms.
Gizmodo files mainly under tech. We currently carry 619 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/this-3-minute-video-game-is-surprisingly-good-at-spotting-depression-2000761315 |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 18:15:53 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T18:20:02.955Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T18:20:02.955Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | KKFB8Qlj7IM6 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Though they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, video games can be some of the most fun you can have on a lazy day. The inherent bliss that comes with playing a video game just might help doctors tell whether someone has clinical depression, new research shows.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"92b7b46b-43ed-4e0e-b21b-2c999302d9d7","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.gizmodo.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"2000761315","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"science","SECTION":"health","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"health","TAGS":"depression,mental-health,video-games","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); Scientists at New York University developed a three-minute-long game designed to identify a key aspect of depression.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Gizmodo
