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Therapeutic Gaming: The Psychological Benefits of Gaming

As the gaming market and community have steadily expanded globally, it has also created a safe space and escapism for gamers with mental health issues. Today, medical therapists are beginning to incorporate gaming into their professional treatment sessions. But how does it all work?

The COVID-19 pandemic, more than any time previously, drew people to gaming as a coping mechanism. People turned to all different sorts of gaming, including both role playing games and more traditional gambling platforms, such as those found at Top Casino Reviews New Zealand.

Some sources argue that gaming was one of the two main coping strategies used during the COVID-19 pandemic together with exercising. While exercise is a method with significant amounts of supportive data to back its psychological benefits, gaming has garnered mixed responses.

How is gaming an effective mental health tool?

There are several ways that researchers have found gaming to positively impact mental health. These include:

• Anxiety reduction:

Perhaps the main way that gaming aids with mental health is by reducing anxiety levels. The entrance into the digital realm requires full focus which helps players to stop thinking about what is causing them to experience anxiety, and to escape the emotional turmoil for a while. Gaming’s centering focus might actually help in clearing and narrowing issues that seemed to grow ever so big inside one’s head, while providing a place where one can systematically organize one’s thoughts.

• Awareness and familiarity:

Games that follow characters that struggle with mental health issues themselves, such as Sea of Solitude and GRIS, can aid in spreading awareness around issues like depression and anxiety. Furthermore, these types of games help players feel validated in their own struggles, and can help in creating familiarity and acceptance of these types of experiences. These games can also inspire dealing with these types of emotions, which is exemplified in the slogan for Sea of Solitude which reads “Face Your Fears”.

• Developing emotional regulation skills:

Lastly, gaming can aid in developing and strengthening emotional intelligence and regulatory skills. Therapists who incorporate gaming into their sessions mention exercises such as frustration tolerance and patience through gaming as an effective tool to adapting these types of regulations outside of the digital realm as well. Relating to this, gamers learn that persistence matters: if you try again every time you fail, you will eventually be able to overcome the barriers and tasks that seemed impossible at first.

Therapy-session gaming

Research has found that women in particular use gaming as a self-medication or coping process to deal with the anxieties of day-to-day life. The anonymity of online gaming provides a sense of stress-relief. Escape gaming provides a platform where women can relieve themselves of situational stress and monetary problems while exercising some degree of autonomy.

In other places, gaming is integrated into professional therapy theory, particularly as it relates to children and young adults. Monet Goldman, a therapist in Santa Clara, California, has started using videogames as an extended version of “play therapy”, which is a common methodology for children’s therapy where physical activity encourages talking about trauma. In an interview with Wired, the therapist explained how the gaming platform allowed the children to become more comfortable and confident as they found a new and more adventurous identity in the gaming realm. It has also worked as a pandemic-friendly Zoom-therapy tool.

Some sources argue that gaming doesn’t only affect mental health in terms of emotional responses. There is actually some scientific proof that playing videogames can increase intelligence in children. According to a study by the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, children between 10 and 12 who played videogames more than the average increased their IQ by 2.5 points more than the average over a two year period. The intelligence measure included factors such as reading comprehension, attention, visual-spatial perception, etc.

The study also found that the average child has a screen time of four hours, and the top 25% of users recorded six hours of average daily screen time. Children who spent their screen time watching movies or browsing social media did not have the same increased intelligence effect as those playing videogames.

Concluding notes

Gaming in moderate amounts can provide a psychological ice-breaker to battling mental health issues. This is further validated by the use of gaming in professional therapy sessions, as well as the continuous research on the effects of gaming.

However, it is important to note that none of the studies which have concluded positive benefits from gaming have recommended unlimited gaming. Gaming addiction, or gaming disorder, has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a genuine illness which is represented by approximately 3% of gamers worldwide.