Leveling up: Can video games treat mental illness?
Leveling up: Can video games treat mental illness?
Leveling up: Can video games treat mental illness?
By Tim Brinkhof
October 18, 2020
Summary
"Dark Souls came into my life at just the right time," Hamish Black, the creator of the YouTube channel Writing on Games confessed in a video.
In a 2010 issue of The Sun, pop star Miley Cyrus called for a ban on video games because they allegedly fostered depression, especially in young people.
Whereas personal problems often seem as though they are too large and multifarious to confront head-on, video games provide players with clear-cut objectives the completion of which is all but intuitive.
Devised by American psychologist Martin Seligman, it is a theory of flourishing mental health that's made up of five components, each of which happens to correspond with a particular pillar of video game design.
In 2008, a study by the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media found that many people played video games to relax and knowingly turned to their consoles as a means of regulating their mood.
A lot of video games revolve around players improving their in-game characters, like using experience points gained while playing to increase abilities, upgrade armor and unlock new skillsets.
Researchers are dissecting commercial video games in order to construct their own.
"It's used in counseling all the time, and to great success. Because video games have the potential to elicit strong negative emotions and create difficult situations that feel real, we thought they would be a good medium to use."
Such treatment is made all the more difficult by the fact that, as a variety of studies have indicated, video games tend to be of help to people who play in moderation, but harmful to the ones that game excessively.
"If someone is using video games as a way to escape, it may be more appropriate to treat whatever is prompting them to do that in the first place."
Reference
Brinkhof, T. (2020, October 18). Leveling up: Can video games treat mental illness? Retrieved November 02, 2020, from https://www.inputmag.com/features/leveling-up-can-video-games-treat-mental-illness