Online Gaming and Anxiety

[CVanOeveren]

Anyone do any online gaming? How do you feel it effects your anxiety?


Personally, I feel like games like World of Warcraft which contain free communication can oscillate wildly between being fun and stressful. It's all fine when I'm with a decent guild or whatever, but a while ago a young kid added me and started begging me to run him through dungeons constantly, and when I said no he'd beg and whine to the point where I just had to block him and went to play single player games for a while.


On the other side of things, I'm really liking games like Rocket League, Overwatch and Hearthstone in which a lot of the communication is done through simple emotes, which I find really help eliminate the issues of uncertain tone that come with text communication, and tend to encourage positive feedback between players.

 

[MissTea]

I play a couple of games online, and I can tell you that it's always been fun for me. It's actually a great stress reliever. I just always make sure that I play with friends that I"m comfortable with or else I will just play single player mode. I live Civ V the most and I've spent a lot of wonderful hours playing and having fun.

 

[fuzyon]

I opened a thread about this a while ago, gaming is probably the most therapeutic thing for me. I stopped playing games like League of Legends because the competitiveness got stressful but I've recently fell in love with the RPG genre, I've been playing The Witcher 3 for a while and the story basically takes me away from the real world. All lights out and a pair of good headphones is all that I need to be engrossed in what's going on in the game.

 

[kelden]

Played plenty of league of legends in the past, the communication with others is pretty much a self esteem roller-coaster trip, sometimes you will feel smart and confident and others as an utter useless idiot. And there is not middle terms, people either insult you or praise you. I usually recommend against playing this game, LOL went down a lot since a coupled years, hearthstone is better in that regard, and Over watch looks more promising.

 

[It'sJaz]

I like online gaming but greatly prefer individual games where I don't come into contact with anyone else playing the game. It's very stressful to talk to them and also find out that they're doing much better than me, because I tend to compare that way. For games where I'm just on my own, I can just relax and play at my own pace.

 

[majorcupcake]

Gaming helps me a lot, even simple phone app games. I played WoW for a long time, but the social aspect of it bothered me a lot at times. I would hate running an instance with a group that had sour apples in it. Being part of a guild would stress me out too, because there is so much expected as far as responding when someone says "Good Morning!" or asking favors. It amazes me constantly that even online interactions can bother me as much as they do. I tend to play solo a lot because of that.

 

[thecorinthian]

Online gaming has actually helped me to be a little more social and open to teamwork. I play League of Legends when I'm bored and really in MMORPG games you're forced to be in teams with other people and the winning rate depends on your roles and willingness to help each other. I think I've carried those values in my real life and my siblings have actually noticed my positive outlook in life because of LoL.

 

[janemariesayed]

Playing online games has helped me heaps and bounds to escape into another world and forget my anxieties and depression. The problem is that is aides procrastination. It means that I don't spend time doing my own gardening or housework and then my home suffers.

I have finally managed to get off of playing online games and I feel brilliant because of it. I am doing so much more and feel so much better for it. My housework is getting done, my garden is looking better. I spend more time with my dogs and I care about myself more.

So the one good thing about gaming was also assisting to ruin my life. I became addicted which in turn depressed me. I was also embarrassed about it.

It was really difficult to give up gaming. I even got paranoid at one point as I thought that games were putting subliminal messages in, to make us addicted.