'Sense of belonging': How gaming can help fight anxiety, depression

I recently sat on a panel discussion at the Sync Digital Wellbeing Summit in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. This pioneering event explored the myriad ways technology impacts – for better and for worse – our physical, mental, and social well-being. This particular panel discussion focused on gaming, and I had the honour of sitting alongside Abdulaziz Alshehri, the first player from Saudi Arabia (the first player in the entire continent of Asia) to win eFootball’s highest accolade – the Fifa eWorld Cup.

Alshehri talked about the passion and dedication it takes to become an Esports world champ, but he also emphasised the need for balance, taking breaks, and prioritising education and health. I suspect his perspective landed well with any concerned parents in the audience. When the panel ended, I glimpsed Alshehri’s legend status as fans, beaming with adoration, flocked to the stage to get photos and perhaps a few tactical tips on how to raise their own games.

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Rather than overly focusing on the harms and dangers, our session celebrated gaming and Esports and the many psychological benefits they bring. After all, video games are only the latest incarnation of humanity’s innate playfulness. Anthropologists tell us that games are simply the formalised expression of play. Games involve rules, competition, chance, fiction, and personal enjoyment. Playing games is universal, found across all cultures, and arguably as old as humanity.

One obvious benefit of playing games is that it can help us make friends. In many parts of the world today, “online” is where young people form and maintain friendships. Surveys by the Pew Research Centre suggest that more than half of US teens have made new friends online, with a little more than a third reporting that they met their new friends through gaming. Additionally, most US teens spend more time with their friends online than in person.

For many people, gaming is a friend-making opportunity and the glue that helps maintain those connections. Decades of research underscore the benefits of friendships and strong ties. Friends are a vital source of actual and perceived social support, buffering us against stress and loneliness – a protective factor that positively influences our health and well-being.

At a more profound level, gaming can also feed into our social identity, providing us with a group to belong to, a category of humanity to call our own. We might have many social identities: nationality, tribe, profession. Calling oneself a “gamer” is asserting a valued social identity. Alexander Haslam, a professor of psychology renowned for his work on social identity, writes: “ … social identities – and the notions of ‘us-ness’ that they embody and help create – are central to health and well-being”.

Humans need other humans; we need to feel like we belong. There are scores of studies supporting this idea. The take-home message from much of this research is that the deeper the sense of belonging, the better the health outcomes. This has been well-demonstrated for depression, heart disease, stroke, and many other chronic health complaints. The evidence of this “belonging effect” is now so strong that we call it the “Social Cure”: the notion that strengthening social identity can prevent illness, accelerate recovery, and reduce relapse for numerous health problems.

More recently, psychologists have even been exploring gaming as an add-on to traditional forms of psychotherapy. The idea is that video games provide a sense of engagement and immersion that traditional psychotherapeutic methods may lack. Video games can also help patients/clients learn adaptive problem-solving skills and coping strategies in a controlled and safe environment. These game-based techniques have been trialled, with some success, in conditions such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is undoubtedly an important area for further research.

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