I was going to post another let’s play, but I started writing this and thought that this might be a better post, at least for this evening.
We often hear it, most times after an incident like a mass shooting. "X person also liked to play video games.” Video games have been used as a scapegoat for horrendous actions almost since they were made. The most notable of these incidents was the columbine shooting when it was found out that the two shooters were fond of shooter video games. Almost anytime something like this happens, I know that video games are going to get mentioned one way or another. The truth is video games don’t make people violent. There isn’t some magic wand that dangles out of the tv when you boot a game up that casts a spell on you to become violent. People with violent tendencies are still going to have those tendencies after playing a game, just as a person without them will still be without them after gaming. In this article I’m going to do something a little bit different, and talk about a subject that is close to my heart. And that is video games and their impact on people’s mental health.
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If anyone has read some of my previous post, you might already know that I suffer from G.A.D(Generalized Anxiety Disorder) and Depression. I was diagnosed with these pretty early in my life and it affects me almost every day of my life. Video games to me have been a godsend. They helped me out of some of the darkest pits I’ve ever been in, and have always been there to help me escape reality when I needed to. So to say I’m passionate about them is an understatement. I followed that passion when I went to college. Before dropping out, I was taking Video Game Development and Design. I’m very opened about my mental health so everyone in the class knew what I was dealing with, but what I didn’t expect to find out was that the majority of my classmates also had some sort of mental health problem. So it got me thinking, what exactly draws people like us towards video games?
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The answer I came up with was that we were all trying to escape from something. Video games offered us a sense of normality that we usually wouldn’t have. There have been studies done that show that people who play video games are less likely to experience depressive symptoms . Research also shows it helps combat other mental disorders such as anxiety, dementia, ADHD, and even PTSD. In fact, there is something called VRET (Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy) that is used specifically to help a variety of anxiety disorders. What interests me about it is that they are actually using it to help treat PTSD, by putting the subject into a VR recreation of the situation that caused their PTSD, and showing them that they can deal with it.
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All this is good and all, but if I didn’t explore both sides (the good and the bad) of gaming, what kind of article would this be? It would be easy for me to say video games are great, and are never the root of anything bad, but that’s just not true. Like I said, I don’t believe video games cause people to be violent and that they get a HUGELY undeserved wrap by the media. But, I do think that they can increase those urges just like if an alcoholic walked into a liquor story. And like most things, video games are good if they’re not over consumed. But unfortunately some people do over-consuming, and I was one of them.
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2012-2013 was the start to a series of the worse years of my life. My depression was at an all-time high because my anxiety wouldn’t let me go to highschool. It got that bad that I would take anxiety attacks just thinking about school the next day. During this time, I found a game called Mass effect and fell in love with it. Because of this, I went searching for other BioWare games and found the Dragon Age series and later Star Wars: The Old Republic. Now my problem was with SWTOR. I became obsessed with that game. The moment I woke up, I would play it, up until the moment I fell asleep. It made me forget about the world outside. In SWTOR I was a powerful Force User without a worry in a world. The real world didn’t exist, only SWTOR did.
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If I was away from SWTOR for any length of time, I started to get angry, anxious, and generally an asshole to be around. At the start of the darkest time in my life, I latched onto SWTOR like it was a life raft and I was adrift in an ocean of depression, trying desperately not to drown. But it became a problem. Now I could tell you that I overcame this and stopped on my own accord, but that would be a lie. I got banned for an entire month for some reason I can’t remember. And that finally broke the grip the game had on me. But things didn’t get better, at least not until around 2014. But that’s a story for another day. You may ask why I just told you this about myself, well it’s simple. The next part of this article is going to talk about Video Game Addiction.
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I’m a firm believer that anything we can get enjoyment out of can become addictive. In 2018 W.H.O listed ‘Gaming Disorder’ in the book ‘International Classification of Diseases.’ (Source: https://www.webmd.com/ Is Video Game Addiction a real thing?) In fact, there is even a list of symptoms to watch out for, and all of them mimic the symptoms of other addiction disorders. I talked about the benefits that gaming could have on mental health, but on the other end of the spectrum, it can do the exact opposite. It can increase things like depression and anxiety disorders, and it’s clear to see why.
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Gamers often forget that when they play a multiplayer game, that they are playing with real people and not NPC’s, and with the sense of security anonymity offers them (And the fear of not getting punched in the face) they feel like they can say whatever they want to. I live in the country, and as a result there aren’t a lot of activities that happen that people my age (24) attend. So I love being able to interact with people online when I play games, but the ironic thing is, is that it takes a lot for me to do that. So when I have an unpleasant experience with a player in terms of being social, it stings and it does make me a bit sad and makes me think twice about my next interaction. I have a cousin who plays games a lot, and also suffers from anxiety and depression, and an incident like the one I just described would stay with him for days and could send him into a depressive episode. In fact, they would fit all the symptoms for ‘Gaming Disorder’. So I can understand why it can increase the symptoms of these things.
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"But Gamergeek, what about video games being blamed for violence,” you might be asking? Well, the answer is simple. The media does this because they know it will get people riled up. Parents who know nothing about video games will believe this. It’s just what the media does. Does anyone else remembered when fox news claimed the Mass effect showed full frontal nudity? I trust Fox News as much as I trust CNN, and that’s to say I don’t. In fact, contrary to what the news would have us believe, studies have shown that there are no direct links to violence in individuals and video games. Despite this, the media runs with the narrative that Video Games are the devil to strum up those views.
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When I was a kid, I used to read true crime books that had pictures of bloodied crime scenes in them, and no one batted an eye. But if I so much as mentioned a violent video game in school, the teachers would chew me out (it’s along story that involves bullying and the teachers disliking me). Any kid can go into a bookstore and pick up one of these books, but they can’t go into a Gamestop and buy a rated M game legally.
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I may have gotten a bit off track there, but let me finish by saying this. I am the prime example of the narrative that ‘video games cause violence’ is wrong. I’ve been playing rated M games since I was around 5. I remember playing a game called Whacked, playing Ninja Gaiden, GTA 3, Kane and Lynch, and a bunch more. When I was younger, I had a policy that if that case didn’t have an M on it, it wasn’t worth my time. And you know what happened? Well, you probably don’t unless you can read minds, and if you can then STOP IT! What happened was that my parents always got compliments about how good of a young man I was. And want to know why that is? Because, along with the morales my parents instilled in me, I adopted sets that I learned from video games. And the most important one was to never give up. And that is why, I’ll never leave this depression win. Thanks for reading!
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Note: Sorry about the spelling mistakes, the editor I use is going a bit nuts.