There are quite a few movies which suggest that a mathematically-inclined mind makes you prone to depression. In fact, not that many famous mathematicians suffered crippling mental illness, apart from David Hilbert, Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Isaac Newton, Carl Gauss, Pierre de Fermat, Alexander Grothendieck, John Nash, Paul Erdös, Henri Poincaré, Bernhard Riemann, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Évariste Galois, Ludwig Boltzmann, Marius Lie, Emil Post, Charles Babbage, Augustin Cauchy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Blaise Pascal…
First, some background on recent studies in social science:
The study by Jared Piazza of the University of Pennsylvania and Paulo Sousa of Queen’s University Belfast, which included a total of 688 participants, found religious individuals and political conservatives consistently invoked deontological ethics. In other words, they judged the morality of actions based on a universal rule such as, “You should not kill.” Political liberals, on the other hand, consistently invoked consequentialist ethics, meaning they judged the morality of actions based on their positive or negative outcomes.
It’s obviously tough to approach a game like Depression Quest without any expectations, if you follow the gaming scene at all. I had read about it pre launch, and made a vague mental note to check it out, but by the time the game launched and the #gamergate shitshow blew up I was busy with Borderlands 2. (Yes, I’m probably the last person to start playing Borderlands; I hate paid DLC so I waited until I could buy pretty much the whole thing on disc in a ‘Game of the Year’ edition.