Jack

introduction

When it came to the question of how games affect people’s mental health, I immediately thought of challenges that games give the players and how they have a positive effect on mental health. Though at first glance, challenges are annoying and frustrating, however when the challenge is beaten and the player overcame the challenge, it helps them to beat real life challenges such as depression. This is my opinion based on my experiences with games and a range of topics within games such as difficulty, self-efficacy and how games have affected me.

challenges

First, challenges have quite an affect on players mental health, for example hard difficulty. Challenges in games can seem rather negative at first because they are plain frustrating and annoying. Dark Souls is a strong example because of the bosses in the game. Dying repeatedly to the same boss can leave players feeling unmotivated, bored and especially angry. If these feelings of boredom and being unmotivated persists a player may stop playing the game all together. However, when the player eventually overcomes and defeats the boss, they will feel a rush of satisfaction and happiness. This effect will leave players motivated and want to beat even more challenges. Beating challenges in games will help players overcome real life challenges such as depression. [1]A dark Souls player names “NakeyJakey” published a video titled “Dark Souls Saved me” where he talks about his experience with depression but explains that Dark Souls saved his life. “At a time where I was super depressed and didn’t have any direction, all my friends were in college and I was barely making any money, it sort of made me feel like I had some sense of purpose.” This shows that Dark Souls clearly affected the players mental health positively as people with depression can often feel a lack of purpose. [2]Another point that “NakeyJakey” made was how proud and satisfied he felt when he defeated a dark souls boss “finally beating them by myself and nonetheless felt more proud and satisfied.” This further proves that the satisfaction a player can feel makes challenges relevant to improving overall mental health.

Self-efficacy

[3]Self-efficacy is the sense of belief in one’s capabilities, like how someone feels when the get the hang of something and get more skilled. Self-efficacy applies to challenging games because the more the player overcome the challenges the more confident, they will feel with the game. This affects the players skill in the game, [4]in Dark Soul’s case the player’s dodges will be timed better and their parries will be more precise. The same can be said for real life, the more self-efficacy a person has the greater their mental health will be. [5]Study proves that a strong sense of self-efficacy enhances accomplishment and general well-being. People who have a strong belief in their own capabilities have significantly reduced stress, anxiety and vulnerability to depression. In contrast people with low self-efficacy avoid potentially difficult tasks, have low motivation and have small commitment to any goals the choose to pursue. So, in the case of games, players can develop a sense of self-efficacy and self-belief through the challenges the game has to offer.

 Personal experience

In my personal experience Risk of Rain 2 helped me rebuild my mental health up. Risk of Rain 2 is a third person indie game, the game challenges you on 3 difficulties, drizzle, rainstorm and monsoon, monsoon being the hardest. The game works by clearing stages as quickly as possible because as time goes on the overall difficulty increases. Beating monsoon difficulty was very challenging for me because of how easily it is to lose all your health and how difficult it is to regain health. The most challenging part of all was trying to find which items help the most. In Risk of Rain 2 chests appear around each stage which give the player an item, trying to find the best items was very difficult. The final boss, Mithrix was also one of most difficult sections of the game as he can drain most of if not all the players health instantly. When I beat Mithrix I felt a rush of emotion and joy, this also left me wanting to do it again with a different character in the game. Conquering the challenge of monsoon difficulty helped my mental health because I learned persistence, motivation and how to fight back issues such as depression. There were multiple times I felt like giving up after failing countless times and started to intensely doubt my skills to succeed in the game. I got unmotivated a lot and felt frustrated with my lack of progress. However, the game has a very active community where help with items and strategies are easy to access, along with persistence and self-efficacy allowed me to eventually defeat the final boss and I was satisfied.

Conclusion

In conclusion it’s certainly clear that games can have a significant effect on people’s mental health, especially with the challenges that games offer considering the level of satisfaction and happiness a player may feel when challenge is overcome. While the negatives are there at first such as being unmotivated as well as bored, the positives in challenges heavily outweigh the negatives, going as far as to even save someone from the deep depths of depression. The case of self-efficacy plays a huge role in affecting a player’s mental health as completing difficult challenges boosts their beliefs in their own capabilities, which study clearly shows that self-efficacy can play a significant role in mental health in various ways, reducing stress, anxiety, intense depression and can even push people to become more social. My own personal experience supports this as Risk of Rain 2 helped me dramatically with depression and becoming more confident with myself and my own capabilities. So, overall, in my opinion I strongly believe that games are highly effective at improving mental health as well as having fun in the games they play, I also think that people playing games can relax them and take their mind off issues in their everyday life and so, reduces overall stress.

Links:

[1]Dark Souls Saved Me – NakeyJakey 4:10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSJkxLdIlyE&ab_channel=NakeyJakey

[2]Dark Souls Saved Me – NakeyJakey 6:29

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSJkxLdIlyE&ab_channel=NakeyJakey

[3]The definition of self-efficacy

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3939966/

[4]How Souls Games Save You – Daryl Talks Games 7:38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keIWG6hSD7Q&t=546s&ab_channel=DarylTalksGames

[5]Relationship Between Self-Efficacy and Symptoms of Anxiety, Depression, Worry and Social Avoidance

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3939966/