Do you think stressful games are kind of bad for your health?
I like to play games, but lately I've been avoiding certain types because I think they are not good for my health. At least, they don't make me feel well afterward. For me, this is a particular type of game that requires a very high level of skill, concentration, and dexterity.
I noticed this years ago when I would play online multiplayer. After the game, I would feel extremely aggressive and I could tell that my blood pressure must have been much higher than normal.
More recently, I notice this on very difficult games such as Elden Ring, specifically the boss fights. After playing for a while I have the same feeling that I would have if I had just walked away from a near fatal accident or something. Then sometimes that evening I would have trouble sleeping.
I'm sure my physiology is different than other people. I seem to retain adrenaline/cortisol levels longer than most others. And I know that some people find the adrenaline high to be one of the main points of gaming. Still, I wonder if in general it isn't good for people to stress themselves like this when they aren't burning it off with physical activity.
I read about this online a little bit. There seem to have been some studies about it that were mostly inconclusive. Most of the findings are more interested in games being a substitute for more physical activity, so gamers may be more sedentary or overweight than normal.
Now that I'm in middle age with various responsibilities and other stressors in my life, I play video games with the express goal of taking away stress and not adding to it. Playing stressful games would probably be bad for me because it's the opposite of what I'm seeking to get out of the experience.
Other people will have different goals (seeking a challenge and sense of accomplishment from mastering a difficult game, etc) and be drawn to different games, and that's totally fine too. I don't think these people are doing themselves any harm, assuming they play for reasonable hours and still get enough exercise.
We are living in an age where there is a seemingly endless supply of games for every audience and I can only hope it continues.
You made me wonder if there's perhaps a "normal" stress balance we instinctually strive for. If you have a lot of stress in your life, chances are you don't play stressful games. If you don't have a lot of stress in your life, you're OK playing more stressful games.
You may be interested in this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law
Anecdotally, I've noticed this a lot when talking to people about retirement. I've had conversations with people who are retired and bored out of their minds, so are constantly looking for things to do and projects to work on. Meanwhile, younger people working long hours with tons of stresses in their lives can't wait for the day they can just leave that all behind and do nothing all day. Seems to me very much like a 'grass is always greener' sort of problem, where you seek the thing that you don't have (free time if you're stressed and overworked, or mental stimulation and new challenges if you're bored).
I'm guessing the same would apply to video games.
I guess the key word is "balance" and striking that balance is a lifelong pursuit.
I find Fromsoft games relaxing for some reason.. I'd say I'm pretty bad at dealing with stress in real life, but in those games I often laugh after dying to something stupid.
The one thing that will without fail make me freak out while gaming is playing online on the same team as people who get really pissed off if someone makes a mistake (looking at you rocket league).
Can agree. I used to play Dead Cells for relaxation and mind relief. It's a fast paced 2d kinda metroidvania with lots of weapons and enemies, and, honestly, it's somehow relaxing to mindlessly slice through levels killing all alive and not so alive enemies.
My favorite loadout for Dead Cells relaxation is the spartan sandals. I don't know why, but it's just really fun to yeet enemies into walls and off cliffs.
I think there are good and bad types of stress.
Stress from being put in situations where you're approaching the limits of your abilities, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing can lead to feelings of reward, states of flow and fullfilment that are hard to replicate elsewhere. This type of enjoyment can be good, and I'm guessing like other "good stress" from outside games, will probably have positive health benefits.
Stress from being frustrated, giving up unfulfilled, hating life more and more, feeling time is wasted and other types of negative stress are probably just that: Negative. I assume the effects here will be similar to other types of negative stress, like wasting your time, being absorbed negatively, stressing out, thinking about failures etc.
With that in mind, I think people have to find for themselves if playing some super-hardcore permanent death grind game is the right kind of enjoyable stress for them or not.
Or playing team games with random strangers online. Is it just frustrating for me, or enjoyable?
Do I play games in ways that let me just have fun? Should I be comparing myself to professionals, looking at build guides, grinding currency or min/maxing?
Personally, the answer is often that I'll play "inefficiently", impose self-restrictions to avoid doing things I don't enjoy in a game and that way I'll have way more fun. Sometimes that involves being disciplined in staying away from streamers, videos, guides etc. that take the fun out of a game for -me-.
Great comment. I agree about the different kinds of stresses. Besides the stuff that you mention, another thing I can think of is that 'good' stresses often have a finite time to them. Like an exercise at the gym, or a challenging video game, or a mentally-stimulating puzzle. You know that it will end and you'll hopefully be left with a sense of satisfaction at yourself for having accomplished something. A 'bad' stress would be something that has no end in sight. Like an unfulfilling job or relationship. May not always be the case, but applies to a lot of things in life.
As a long time player of an extreme version Tetris, I can report no ill effect expect a fear of having stuff too organized lest they disappear.
Joke aside, I've always like a good challenge in my games and high skill / concentration situation tends to make me enter flow state instead of anxiety. But this happens more in games where the cost of retry is low ; I too am stressed when I cross a field boss and have 2 or 3 levels worth of runes in Elden Ring and no fire camp nearby.
Is high skill / low barrier to retry is also a big stressor for you? I'm thinking Celeste, Super Meat Boy, rhythm game in hard/expert mode.
I tend to have an analytical mindset (the above video is a 30 minutes nerd out about Tetris) so for combat it's less "me fighting the immortal archer lord" and more "he's gonna do the 1-2 combo, then I have a small opening to punish, then there's this wide sweep I haven't figured out yet how to avoid". It's not that I cannot immerse myself in a game either ; I loved the vibes of Jusant and that snowcone sidequest in Yakuza 8 left me in tears.
I don't play multilayer games though (at best, co-op).
I quit League of Legends (in 2015 or so) after a several-months-long journey of realizing it was more stressful than it was fun. So, yes
In a similar vein, I quit DotA for good in 2018 after ~14 years of having a love-hate relationship with it. One of the best decisions I've ever made, up there with quitting smoking.
More than twenty years ago (🥲) I used to play a lot of Quake3 Arena, and while it was a very stressful game, I experienced this mostly in a flow state and as such I felt this to be very rewarding and even relaxing.
However, when I initially bought Doom Eternal a few years ago, I had to stop playing it, because it made me feel very anxious. The game is at times - similar to Q3A - a relentless attack on the senses, with very fast gameplay and an extremely compressed soundscape, and it was just too much when I tried to play it.
The difference between the two experiences are about twenty years and an anxiety disorder that got worse with time.
So I think for people who are susceptible to stress playing certain games can definitely be a very negative experience with a similar effect like 'noise torture'. It's just overwhelming and I'd bet it has measurable negative effects on peoples health.
(That said, for me this effect varies greatly with my general stress level in life. I played through Doom Eternal months later, and it was as enjoyable as it should be.)
20 years ago I played a lot of Unreal Tournament 2004. When Doom (2016) came out it was the closest I got to that feeling in years (because UT3 sucked).
Then Doom Eternal comes out to rave reviews and...I hated it, and I can say with certainty it's because they force you to play a specific way. You gotta do this combo for ammo and then this combo for health and then back to this and then that and it's just constant bullshit management. Anyway I played it for a couple hours and never touched it again.
Yeah, I agree, I wasn't a fan of that, too. For me Eternal is still an ok game though, but I prefer Doom 2016, too.
I've had a similar experience with games that might stress me out. I was really excited to play the resident evil 2 remake as I had fond memories of playing the original with my best friend in his basement and getting freaked out together. Turns out me playing alone in my 40s at night with the door shut and better graphics was making me feel super anxious so I had to just stop playing despite loving the update and what they did with the game.
In terms of stopping via speed demands, as someone who also used to go hard on games in my youth, and sometimes play games with my kids, i realize how easy speed is for them and for me speed takes a great amount of effort to call up when it used to just be there for free. I can compensate with prediction and the like, but there is just no longer a raw ability to move fast with no effort, so I find games demanding that level of speed/flow no longer a fun way to spend my time.
That said I feel like a lot of game design short of multiplayer has moved away from hyperactivity in favor of timing (dark souls etc) so that's been working out, even something like sekiero which might feel fast still has distinct timing windows rather than 'as fast as possible', which is great.
I’ve always been the kind of person who has more fun playing with cheat codes for infinite life. I never enjoyed the stress even when I was young.
I'm the kind of person who tries to eliminate stress in my life, but I've found you need a little stress, if for no other reason than to be able to handle it when more stress comes along (and it will, whether you invite it or not.) However, as with anything else, it's the nature and amount of the stress that I feel is important.
PvP stress, as a prominent example, is a rough one, mostly because it's random and chaotic. Some people thrive on that, some people can't tolerate it. It's also the easiest to isolate and eliminate.
That said, if your ceiling for stress doesn't accommodate stress in your games... don't! There's no one way to play that works universally, so play to your comfort level, whatever that may be (except, of course, if your comfort level is dependent on depriving others of their comfort... don't be that gamer.)
I learned a long time ago that there are certain games, or at least certain ways to play games, that I'm just not compatible with. I don't bother with PVP-only games because whatever fun they provide is completely offset by how angry and frustrated they make me. I also don't bother with "hard by design" games like Elden Ring because they're practically built from the ground up to piss me off. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy a challenge. I like playing certain games at medium difficulty and then challenging myself by ramping the difficulty up once I've mastered the game play a bit. Fallout 4's Survival Mode comes to mind. I also have a Hardcode Classic WoW character I play from time-to-time.
These days I mostly just play games that let me build something: Stardew Valley, Cities: Skylines, Factorio, Civilization (another game I love ramping difficulty up on for a challenge), Minecraft, etc. That way I can set my own goals and challenges and if I fail, the stakes are low. But if I succeed it feels GREAT to accomplish something.
When Doom 3 came out (Eternal?, whatever the first one was with the huge jump in graphics quality), I stopped playing that after a few levels. Constantly having enemies surprise spawn behind me in every room was far too nerve wracking. So...yes? Maybe?
There's Doom 3, which came out in 2004 and has a decent graphics jump up from the original. Then there's DOOM which came out in 2016 and is a huge jump up, Doom Eternal in 2020 which had basically the same graphics style, and now Doom: The Dark Ages later this year, which is supposedly a prequel to 2016 and uses the same style.
I've only played Doom 2016 and part of the original Doom, so unfortunately can't be more helpful about which one has the gameplay you're talking about. I think there were some rooms that had enemies surrounding you, but not every room. Doom 3 may have been different though.
The jump scare monster closets were specific to Doom 3. In the more recent games, you're the one doing the jump scares on the enemies.
That was definitely the Doom 3 from 2004. It was more horror, and full of cheap jump scares.
The flashlight dependence kept me away. I'd rather not shit my pants thank you very much
lmao, now that you mention it, I remember the protagonist being unable to hold a gun and a flashlight at the same time! One of the first mods was literally called "Duct Tape"
The duct tape mod became a standard feature when Bethesda repackaged the game for the "BFG Edition" several years later.
Must have been Doom 3, that time frame sounds right. And yeah it seemed every room you ran into there'd be 1-2 guys ahead, and then you'd hear a teleport sounds and some weird vaguely melee guy would launch themselves at you and attack. Got very tired of that.
How did you play the game? Did you play it like a cover shooter? Hiding behind cover and jumping out to fire?
Cause if so, that's why it wasn't working for you, that's not how it's intended to be played. DOOM is a run and gun game, you're meant to be moving constantly, running, jumping, shooting, ripping, tearing. With this constant movement there really is no behind you as you are spinning and swiveling to see the whole battlefield. Most of the time you're basically circling the area around the edges so you're "back" is to the wall or cliff and enemies aren't spawning behind you, cause they all spawn in the battlefield area.
It's a welcome change of pace to most modern shooters that have you hide behind cover and shoot at opportune moments.
I take it you've never played Doom 3. It's pretty unique when it comes to Doom games. It's still not a cover shooter, but it's more horror than FPS. You can't play it like the others or you will die immediately.
I never played Doom 3, cause I heard nothing but bad things about it, but OP mentioned Eternal and a jump in graphics, so I assume they were talking about DOOM 2016
Doom 3 was not a bad game, just different. It received generally favorable reviews. It also came with a significant jump in graphics considering there was about 8 years (and a console generation) between Doom 64 and Doom 3.
That said, I also don't know which game OP is referring to.
Oh I was running and gunning. I grew up on the real shooters, not these milsim bore fests :D
Jetpacks, laser guns, hover vehicles...all the fun stuff that has mostly disappeared :(
Oh then I'm not sure what to tell you, maybe it's just not your game I suppose?
Only if it's not rewarding for some other reason. I don't regret my time with League, but it's because I played all 2000+ games with my friends and literally never solo queued.
I think random matchmaking in team games is definitely a major cause for unnecessary stress.
Knowing the people you're playing a game with makes it easier to forgive mistakes.
Depends on the catharsis really. For a while, Dark Souls 2 was my "I need to relax" game. As in, the game I played TO relax because, at the end of the day, my struggle was usually met with some kind of progress. Like going to the gym, putting in a few reps on a boss and going nowhere meant I was at least learning patterns.
I'm not into grindy games unless there is a social element with co-op play with friends, but don't mind games that are hard, unique, or frustrating. I actually really enjoy a game that sets an objective challenge, must be this tall to ride, no easy mode, no fiddling, you either make it or don't. Things like GTFO were fun.
But I also beat "Getting over it" so I might not be a good reference case. stupid cauldron-dwelling homunculi
I think overall, there are definitely games that will do you more harm than good. Competitive games which rely on communication with toxic players will stress you out with little benefit. A well-paced jump scare at a pivitol moment is great, perpetual random jumpscares tend to just be exhausting.
Sometimes what feels bad is good for you though. My kid just had their first major loss of all their stuff in Minecraft survival when they were trying to relocate mains. And it reminded me of how long it took to really get used to 'losing everything'.
Rust was a punishing hellscape. 7 Days to Die was less punishing, but still rough sometimes. It wasn't until I started playing hardcore Diablo 3 when I learned to love and appreciate losing everything after putting hours in. I think it's also because I became more adept at handling the mourning cycle that accompanies spending 20 hours on a character and then losing it to a dumb mistake.
In the end, I enjoy games more now.
I know what you mean about that feeling of aggression and stress. I'm generally not very good at pvp games, and I'm definitely not a very competitive person. That really didn't mix well with my friends that wanted to play League of Legends back in the day (not to mention the fairly toxic community). I enjoyed playing against bots, but up against other people was simply not my cup of tea. It would ruin my mood for hours to get stomped repeatedly, even if I did have a perfect play here and there.
I've also had some trouble getting too wrapped up in playing harder difficulties on games as well. I was playing the FF7 Remake on hard for reasons I no longer remember, and playing one of the most challenging bosses. I must have tried that boss at least 10 times one night in particular and I was getting really steamed. At one point, I checked my Fitbit and saw that my pulse was about 170 bpm, then decided that the game wasn't worth having a literal heart attack over, lowered the difficulty, and started enjoying it again. I haven't really gone back to hard difficulties since then, I'd much prefer to enjoy my time gaming than stress about it.
I just wanted to add in that I've really moved away from online games with other people and spend most of my time with a friend while we go through various games, usually spending the most time in games like 7 days to die, factorio/satisfactory, or path of exile. Basically, where we can take on stuff together without much hassle.
I still really enjoy playing against other people, but the modern landscape of gaming for, well, a really long time now, has introduced the need for teammates in almost every style of game. No matter how old I get nor how much I tell myself the healthy viewpoint, when a teammate starts talking at me for any misplays/errors or even is just flat wrong about what is going on and yelling, it sits with me after the game, and it's really hard for me to relax and let go. If the shit talker is on the other side, I just either just ignore them or chin kill them if it's a game I'm good at, and it negates the talking rattling around in my head, but will still affect me after I'm done, just not as deeply.
So similarly when I'm stressed out after a game is put away, the game hasn't fulfilled the objective of making me have a good time, so I find myself less willing to click an icon to play it and risk having to let things rattle around in my head.
Even in the absence of someone being a bad teammate, it also can be frustrating because it becomes hard for me to identify if I misplayed, my teammate misplayed, or we didn't play well together, or the other side is laying better as a team, or an individual is better etc. Generally it is hard for my brain to figure out what needs to change to improve in the team format due to a lot happening at once. In a 1v1 game, I can look at my opponent's moves and my moves and figure out what is going on and what to work on. It's really how I love gaming best where I am basically labbing myself into getting better at my own pace and each day I log on, it's something to goof around and figure out new things about the game or how I play. In a team game it is much harder to do this and hard to justify intention losses given out while just figuring something out for a week or so. For myself, I don't care if I chain die while figure out if a move or character is any good in any situation, but with a teammate, I would feel bad not trying my best for them too.
All in all, I just can't find many games that fit my desire for online opponents, so I generally don't play them much anymore, despite not actually disliking them or really being worried about dying too much. I even remember way back in the day playing subspace where I spent a reset cycle trying to get to 1000 deaths. I remember during that time I learned a lot about the game and it made me a better player after I was done. Turns out there are some skills to getting people to rapidly kill you and that when you posture up in people's faces they all react differently, and some people would even not shoot at you due to passive playing, so I'd have to basically manipulate my ship's body language to look hostile while giving wide open shots and keeping my energy low.
Ending this out with my blanket advice that if something is causing you to not feel great while doing it, stop doing the thing, even if you want to be doing it. If you can't alter the way you think about it and not get overly stressed out or angry, it's best to find something else or some other type of game to play that will leave you less upset at the end of the day.
Cop out answer: it depends.
To elaborate, there are many different reasons people play video games, some of them mutually exclusive. I personally like games that put a challenge in front of me and task me to figure out how to overcome it. To others, this would be a needless obstacle to the enjoyment they seek. Some want to experience a well crafted narrative, others consider it a distraction from the engaging gameplay they're looking for. Some approach video games as a way to satisfy a desire for competitiveness among other players, to others this breeds toxicity that actively harms their enjoyment of the game. Of course there is nuance to each of these aspects and isn't fixed in time for a given person, but ultimately I think stress induced by video games can both be harmful (and, indeed, to the point of negatively impacting one's health as stress is wont to do) or a desirable part of the experience depending on the context and the person playing it. I'll give two personal examples in both directions.
FTL: Faster Than Light is one of my favorite games. Until you get the hang of the mechanics and know what to expect from the game, it's a brutally difficult roguelite that can and will wipe out your progress in a run from a single misstep that you might not even have realized what was doomed your run at the time. To me, that was part of the appeal, to others this is unacceptably unfair and they wouldn't enjoy this game. I've seen at least one streamer on Twitch trying the game out launching into a tear-filled angry rant after one too many punished mistakes about how the game was blatantly rigged and the AI was cheating (which is even more pitiful when you know that in FTL, the "AI" is barely a step above a random number generator because that's what it takes for the game to not be completely impossible). The stress from this game was clearly negatively affecting them.
On the flipside, I used to play World of Tanks, a MMO battle arena/shooter/vehicular combat hybrid. The tank combat aspect appealed to me, and I not only played it for a long time but also invested money into it despite it being free-to-play
and pay-to-win, but between various other grievances I have against the game and Wargaming.net that I won't get into because they're irrelevant to this thread and the ostensibly team-based competitive aspect being undermined by individual goals that fostered selfish behavior and toxicity, I eventually got so fed up I swore off not only the game but the entire genre. With how much stress I suffered, I definitely would say it negatively impacted my emotional well-being at the time (if not physical, though it's not like there's a hard divide between the two) and based on that I certainly would never entertain the thought of trying out, say, League of Legends. My personal experience doesn't mean the entire genre is necessarily harmful, it's just not for me, or at least not anymore.In any case it's pretty clear to me from my own experience, seeing it happen to others, and various second-hand accounts, that video games can absolutely induce sufficiently intense stress to negatively impact one's health, sometimes for the very same reasons others enjoy the game.
EDIT: reworded some parts to be more relevant to the specific question asked in the thread and retracted a too-subjective statement
You're not alone. What I go to games for has changed. The shift occurred sometime after putting almost 200 hours into Borderlands 2. Not that that games is like some of the others mentioned here. I didn't make it far in Doom 3 or Dead Space because of how elevated my heart rate would be, but also I can't stand having to invest my learning time for a game into complex fighting systems or anything that requires intense reflexes like Elden Ring or whatever. I don't get joy out of it anymore.
Now, I sometimes play RTS (Stellaris) or turn-based RPGs (Baulder's Gate 3), but lately I've just been farming in Stardew Valley.
I had a very similar experience as you did in Dark Souls 3. I made it to the Abyss Watchers and grinded that fight for approximately 8 hours. Once I finally defeated the boss I wasn't relieved at all. I felt genuinely discouraged and frustrated. Whenever I played a different game afterwards and made it to a boss or some kind of final challenge I would always get flashbacks to the Abyss Watchers and my motivation to play would vanish. I'd shut the game off and play something else more casual.
Years later when Elden Ring came out I decided to give the genre another go, but I gave myself some boundaries. If I ever got stuck at a boss I would only try again a certain amount of times before quitting and doing something else. Not only that, but I would try to relax as much as possible while playing and if I noticed my frustration rising I would take a break for a few minutes. Not only did I end up enjoying the game, but I made it a lot farther than I would have if I hadn't tried to emotionally regulate. I still haven't beaten the game but it doesn't really bother me. My mindset changed and I started to see what made these games so excellent. I went from banging my head against the wall to understanding that persistence and patience is the key to success. I've even applied this idea to my education and it has worked out well.
As for health, I definitely had worse sleep and poorer emotional regulation when I used to game for a lot longer, multiplayer or not. Nowadays I keep to a strict sleep schedule and I have a program on my computer that automatically logs me out in the evening a few hours before I need to go to bed. I'm also a lot more physically active these days which has helped me with emotional regulation. Running and exercising are much more effective stress relievers than video games in my experience.