Gaming As An Effective Form Of Escapism

Throughout human history, children have come together to play with each other. Cross-platform games that can be played on computers, televisions or mobile phones have made it easier for young adults to stay connected to the online world since its inception.

In today’s technology-driven society, games have become a way for us to dissociate ourselves from the demands of our daily lives and connect with new ones. Another form of escapism is to play games in which you leave the drudgery of your old world, experience new things, become a new character, and live out a fantasy that you had no chance of having before.

Games can be fun, but part of their purpose is to offer an escape from the real world. Gaming can also be a way for creativity and art to decompress. Video games can provide a much-needed respite as an opportunity to escape reality and, in return, break away from the world and give us the energy we need to confront our demons.

Digital games are conducive to escapism, because they take place within the boundaries of a virtual space that is separate from the real. In addition, most games contain artificial conflicts and actions that have no impact on real life.

In this way, sports and leisure players escape reality into virtual worlds, which leads to different mechanisms and psychological backgrounds. The mental health, stress levels, psychosocial well-being and self-esteem of professional players can be altered by the effects of escapism and the development of gambling disorders.

A study by Porter and Goolkasian found that those who played the combat game Mortal Kombat mastered it better and experienced a stronger cardiovascular stress response than puzzle games like Tetris, while players who did not did better.

A key element of video game addiction and its impact on the mental health of young adults is that it can be used to prevent negative emotions. Video games offer a way out of stress offline, and they can help the players to avoid anxiety and depression, and address and overcome them. Whether games help us deal with stress, and whether they do it in a healthy way, is not up for debate.

However, to be fair – we also have to pay attention to how many hours we spend playing games a day and how often we play games. If you spend 12 hours a day playing games to escape the shame or hesitation, you have a problem.

Some players have an unhealthy attachment to games because they are the only thing in their lives that helps them overcome their problems. The prevailing fantasy is that there is nothing wrong with being a player, but when you tell them it is too much for many players to be in the middle of a paper activity other than video games, they are entering a secondary world of video games and do not want to return to the primary world.

One of the reasons video games are associated with delay is their ability to provide instant gratification and feedback, while providing a distraction from less tempting and less rewarding tasks. Abstract background procrastination has been seen as a serious problem among young people, and many factors are associated with it, and video games are one of them.

Those who played video games to escape reality and relieve themselves of stress showed the highest levels of hesitation, whether for entertainment purposes, to escape from the everyday life or to increase the social value of the game. However, we did not find that delays related to procrastination were accounted for. It seems that although these individuals used video games to hesitate, they did not report spending more time playing video games than hesitating.

This finding should not come as a surprise, as this coping mechanism can become a dependency if the root of the problem is not addressed. However, escapism provides a healthy form of coping strategy for players.

As a player, my relationship with video games had an impact on my struggles with my daily problems. The fictional worlds, storylines and characters help me to temporarily neglect daily complicated personal issues that were going on in my life. Thus I can say that video games helped me to cope the real world greatly by offering a form of escapism.

Despite the criticisms on gaming here and there, let’s understand that a wide range of popular games can be a great and healthy addition to the lives of people. You have a wide range of games to choose, from sports such as FIFA21, survival horror such as Resident Evil series, shooting such as Call of Duty, games with great storylines such as The Last of Us or open-world games such as Death Stranding.

It’s a world of endless possibilities.