You Are the Hero: Video Games as a Tool for Coping with Anxiety
In this blog piece, a gameHER shares her story of struggling with severe anxiety, and how gaming became an important tool in moving forward when times were particularly tough. She frames her experience with research on the healing power of video games to empower players with personal agency, create social connection, and escape into alternate worlds.
By Holly Hughes-Rowlands
Throughout my life, I have struggled with anxiety. I have found that, in a variety of ways, my video games have helped me manage and deal with the various negative effects of my mental health. They told me I mattered when I thought I didn’t, they gave me friendship and social interaction when I couldn’t find it myself, they let me escape when things felt too hard, and they made me feel in control when I lacked control in my own life.
Image of a woman gaming, illustration by Olga Dubrovina via iStock
You Are the Hero: Video Games and Escapism
Video games offer the player a distraction from the stresses of their everyday existence. For people struggling with mental health problems, especially any form of anxiety or irrational stress, this can provide a break from the alarm bells that are set off from simply existing. On days when my anxiety is particularly bad, my mind becomes like a bar of soap that I cannot keep hold of no matter how hard I try, circling round and round the same issue for hours. On days like this, the only respite I am able to have is when I forget to think about it, when I can find distraction.
Of course, books, films and music all do much the same thing, and have helped me relax in the past. However, I believe video games go one step further, in that beyond distraction, they are the ultimate form of escapism. Reading a book, watching a film, or listening to a song puts you into a passive relationship with the media you are consuming. You watch the story unfold, but it is separate from you. You are a voyeur, finding snapshots of other worlds through a window. Video games make you the player, an active participant. You have an effect on how these events will play out. This effect could be absolutely monumental, such as in games with multiple choice endings like Life is Strange, or as small as what route across the room you take to reach the treasure chest in Uncharted. But you have an effect all the same. Were you to do nothing, the events of the game could not play out. In an article for Microsoft news, author Deborah Bach quotes psychologist Keli Dunlap, saying “games are exceptionally good at helping us feel like our decisions matter.” Video games are not just made to be viewed by you, as a book or film is, they’re made specifically for you – for you to exist and live and move in. Games make you the hero. As Dunlap states, games make you matter.
Although I still struggle with social anxiety today, I have not experienced anything as awful or as all-consuming as the social anxiety I had between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. I was anxious about how I looked, how I talked, how I walked, how tall I was, what my friends thought of me, what everyone who wasn’t my friend thought of me, what my teachers thought of me. I could not have a single conversation without mulling it over for hours upon hours, I could not walk into a room with people in it without wanting to scream under the weight of them noticing I existed. The long term effects of this constant anxiety around my peers eventually came to feel like a glass box that I had somehow become trapped in. So many things I didn’t do, friends I didn’t make, groups I didn’t join, opportunities I didn’t take because anxiety made me say no, I can’t do it, not today. In my own mind, I started to justify this to myself. They probably didn’t want you to go with them anyway. I convinced myself that I didn’t matter to other people so I had an excuse to surrender to my anxiety, because fighting it was too hard.
What offered me the most solace and rest at this time was my brother’s Xbox sitting in the back room of our house. At school I daydreamed about what I had been playing the night before and what I wanted to play when I got home, be it thinking about Ezio’s next assassination in Assassin’s Creed 2, or if I should join the Mages Guild or Dark Brotherhood next in Skyrim. Back then, these games were some of the only things I had to look forward to, since anxiety limited so much of what I did in real life. In video games, I was Ezio, I was the Dragonborn. I had no limits, and I was the most important person in this world.
Dunlap argues that “self-defeating narratives” caused by depression and anxiety can be countered in video games. She states
“People rarely have that experience when they’re playing games, because games induce the opposite — you’re the hero, you are Master Chief saving the universe from intergalactic space zombies, [...] You can do the thing, and there’s constant feedback about ‘you’re doing good and you’re progressing.’”
During the initial COVID lockdown in March 2020, Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Dragon Age series offered me the same escapism. My last year of school was cut short and I was unable to see my friends, but I could escape into the world of Thedas or Arthur Morgan if I ever needed to. When I felt the most disconnected from the world and my own life, I could find a tether in video games. I cared about Arthur Morgan, and I cared about Ezio, and their stories couldn’t finish without me. I could play them again and again, and they would never be exactly the same as they were the first time, because of my choices. Video games made me feel that I mattered during the times I felt the most worthless.
Mental Health, Isolation, and Video Games as a Social Medium
Many links have been drawn between isolation and declining mental health, both as its cause and as a symptom. When I came home after withdrawing from University, it was the middle of the third national UK lockdown, and immediately after that most of my close friends went back to University. From January to July, I felt the most isolated I had ever been, and my mental health took a downturn. I had felt fatigue and a lack of motivation while at University, but on coming home it was ten times worse. I didn’t have the energy to do anything, from watching a tv show to trying to find a job. All of it was too much effort.
In the JMIR Serious Games paper Gaming Your Mental Health: A Narrative Review on Mitigating Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using Commercial Video Games, the authors write:
“accepting that the pandemic has entailed less movement and social restrictions, commercially available web-based multiplayer games might be a potentially viable tool to connect isolated individuals. For example, researchers have noted the efficacy in games such as Minecraft or Animal Crossing: New Horizons for social connectedness, fighting loneliness, maintenance of social interaction, and ultimately the alleviation of depressive symptoms.”
Online gaming gives the chance to interact with people in a fun, safe environment. For people with anxiety, the fact that you cannot see the people you’re talking to, and that there is a high likelihood you will never see them again, can be especially useful in filling the gap where everyday social interaction should have been. Although I have never been one for playing with strangers, I spent much of my time this year playing Fortnite and Overcooked online with my best friend from school, whom I was not able to see in person. These are both simple, cartoonishly bright games; we were pretty terrible at both of them, but we laughed constantly. Afterwards, I felt energized, awake and much less stressed. Another friend whom I was often unable to see started playing Assassin’s Creed II this year, and in the evenings we would sometimes go on video call and chat while they played the game (and I called out instructions). These games gave me a crucial point of connection with an aspect of my life – social interaction and friendship – that had been taken away from me by the COVID-19 measures, and in doing so, provided relief from the symptoms of anxiety.
Video games and regaining lost control
If there was one thing I lost in the pandemic it was the feeling that I had control of my life. Or of anything in my life. Arguably, this had always been the case; I didn’t decide to go to school, or to sixth form. I did it partly because I wanted to, but partly because I had to. Yet in 2020, at University, I became overwhelmed with the loss of control in my life. Suddenly, I couldn’t find a single reason why I was there, why I had chosen the course, or what I wanted to do with it. The entire context I had grounded my sense of being in – my school, my home and my friends – was gone, and I was left drifting. That’s the only way I can describe it: I felt untethered. Drifting on the sea without a paddle. Looking back on it, dropping out was possibly an expression of that, a desperate attempt to direct my life, getting myself off the train tracks in any way that I could. Once I was home, this feeling got no better. If anything, it was worse, because I still had no school or friends, only now I had to worry about not having a job too. And I had no money of my own, no qualifications (although I always intended to return to University) to give me any sense of independence. I couldn’t even drive.
Once again, video games came to rescue. After withdrawing from University, I played one game frequently over the following months: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I don’t particularly like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, it’s too big and too much of an RPG to give me what I want out of an Assassin’s Creed game (though I won’t go into that now). And yet, I also hold a certain fondness for it in my heart for what it gave me in this time, which was a sense of purpose and control. I might have no clue what I would be doing in real life, but as Kassandra, I knew every task, and every job was written out in a list in my Quest journal. I could escape into a character who always had something to be doing, who always had a purpose. Kassandra’s life was simple to me, I found a person in need, considered whether or not to help them, and then completed the quest. It was immensely satisfying to watch the list of jobs get slowly ticked off, especially when in real life I didn’t have a single task to try to complete. AC Odyssey has such an insane amount of side content, playing it also made me feel like I was in control for once. I decided what quests to do, how to complete them, whom to kill and whom to spare. And the choices are generally so simple they don’t require any agonizing over. In the game I was able to be the opposite of my anxious indecisive self; I was decisive, ruthless and full of agency.
“My blade may break, my arrows fall wide, but my will shall never be broken”:
Depression, Dark Souls, and Ori and The Blind Forest
My life in the last few years would have been markedly worse without video games. In this piece I’ve barely scratched the surface of how they’ve helped me and given me comfort from anxiety. Beyond my personal experience, Dark Souls has been frequently noted as an allegory for depression with its dark and punishingly hard world and the insistence of repetition. You will die in Dark Souls. And you will have to fight this boss again, and again, until eventually you overcome it, and then move on to the next one. Just as in real life, people who suffer from depression must wake and face the world again and again in what can feel like a never ending battle.
In September I started University again. And a few weeks ago, I finished the first term. This time, I have no desire to drop out. It's been difficult; I won’t deny it. I have many of the same problems. But I knew them a bit better this time. I could manage them.
Over the years I have been slowly making my way through Ori and the Blind Forest. It's a platformer about a small light spirit called Ori who must traverse the woods and restore the light. I’m playing it very slowly (I don’t have a huge amount of spare time these days) but slowly making progress. Bit by bit, Ori and I move through the forest. We fight off the monsters, solve the puzzles and bring back the light.
And if I can do it there, I can do it out here too.
For some more reading on the subjects in this piece, Holly recommends:
Don’t Go Hollow: How 'Dark Souls' Is Defeating Depression
Dark Souls reminds me I’m a speck in the universe (who can parry like a badass)
Mind Games: How gaming can play a positive role in mental health
Holly Hughes-Rowlands, photo courtesy of the author
About the Author:
Holly Hughes-Rowlands is a student and writer from the United Kingdom. Her love of gaming began when she was given Pippa Funnell Ranch Rescue on the Wii for her seventh birthday, which she quickly went on to complete several times over. She is now a lover of fantasy and historical fiction, especially in video games, and her current favourites include Assassin’s Creed 2 and anything from the Dragon Age series. She is a firm believer that video games are just as worthy a medium for storytelling as books and films.
For more blogs by Holly, check out:
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