Saturday 10 October 2015

Gaming for Mental Health

Video-gaming is saving my life. At a time when my mental health is as bad as it has ever been video-gaming is saving my life on a daily basis. I’m currently going through a phase I would describe as medically misanthropic, a profound sense of fear, alienation, and despair that manifests whenever I have to interact with people in anything but the most perfunctory way. The sheer awfulness of people has brought me to the point where I cannot imagine how people exist in the urban environment without attacking one another with machetes and improvised clubs. The world sickens me to the very core of my being. This, as one might imagine, makes living in the world something of a challenge. It’s OK though because video-gaming is saving my life.


I didn’t leave the house during July and August, the sense of panic was too raw and too visceral. Instead I stayed indoors and played video-games. I played quite a lot of Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, a fair amount of Nuclear Throne and worked my way through Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City. I barely read, except for a few comics here and there, didn’t watch television more demanding than old episodes of Friends, I more or less gave up on films. Now, somewhat recovered to the extent that I can leave the house and even go into shops and make purchases, I’m still spending large chunks of time in front of a screen. Dark Souls has been a revelation in this regard.

This guy is basically Jesus to me at this point


Video games help in a way that no other entertainment can help me because they require my attention. When reading a book or passively watching TV it’s all too easy to drift away from the text and into a nihilistic reverie. Games, good games, don’t allow me to do that - they demand that I participate, however liminally, in the experience. Lose concentration in Dark Souls and you are dead, you are required to maintain focus and rewarded for doing so. There is no better engine I know for turning today into tomorrow.


It seems perverse to think of a game as fundamentally hostile as Dark Souls as therapy but its depth of strangeness is intensely immersive. There’s a whole world of additional content created by the fans and, while I may struggle to concentrate on fiction I can binge watch YouTube content created by the Dark Souls community because it has relevance to my experience of the game. It creates a rich inner landscape that doesn’t solely consist of self-loathing and emptiness which are otherwise my default states of being. At a time when I feel unbelievably isolated from the rest of the human race it also creates a fragile sense of empathy and community, it keeps me from falling into the black abyss of my own worst impulses.

A nice bonus of playing games with people online is that they can't hear the screaming

Gaming is often examined through its negative impacts on mental health and where positive effects are observed they are often linked to cognition and executive function. It’s rare, though not unheard of, to hear about their effects on mood and socialisation. When I try and think about how I might get through the day in the absence of videogames I shudder. Drinking in the morning and then going back to bed seems like the best option. Cooking isn’t bad but there’s a limit to how many meals you can cook a day before you have to start throwing up to make room for the next one. Perhaps I’d be painting or teaching myself to play a new musical instrument but I somehow doubt it. Regardless, this World Mental Health Day I’m mostly going to be thinking about how I lucky I am to exist in a time and a place where avoiding the entire human race in favour of other worlds is a realistic option because I am significantly happier because of it.

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