Depression and Gaming: Is Mental Health Affecting Your Hobby?

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When I created this blog, I was excited to start posting; however, mental health had other plans.

I’ll be honest, progress here has been much slower than I expected. Funny how life works that way. This has affected many areas of my life. I won’t go into all the details, but it’s been medicine changes, side effects, withdrawal, general health, and a long-running flu season stacked on top of it all. Things have just been down a lot.
Depression has had a major effect on gaming habits too. Of all the things I expected to lose time and energy to, gaming is one of them, and it always makes me sad. It’s been my hobby and my coping mechanism for 35 years. Having it go quiet on me has been one of the harder parts of all this.
Gaming isn’t passive entertainment for me. When I enjoy a game, it’s not just the visuals. It’s the audio, the feel of the controller in my hands. All of it works together to create that response, that pull to keep playing, to want to come back to it the next day. With depression, none of that creates the same response anymore. The visuals are still there, the audio still plays, the controller still feels the same in my hands, but the reaction to it just isn’t.
I’ve been frustrated with it all. I haven’t been gaming nearly as much. I’ve started a few games over the past while, but not much has stuck. Some sessions end after ten minutes. Others I don’t come back to for weeks. Here’s what that’s actually looked like, game by game.
One afternoon I went back to some classic NES games. Pooyan and Circus Charlie frustrated me the most. Normally, the stiff controls, wonkiness and unfair difficulty of those old games are part of the charm. When you’re feeling good, that clunkiness is nostalgic, it’s part of what makes retro gaming what it is. When you’re in a flare-up, irritated and worn down, those same charms turn straight into annoyance. The exact same game, the exact same controls, and yet a completely different experience depending on what state you’re in when you sit down with it.
I’ve played a few hours of Life is Strange: Double Exposure. Some of the voice acting is genuinely great, and there’s a scene looking at a giant moon and also a scene with stars through a telescope that felt magical, one of the few moments in all this playing where something actually landed the way it’s supposed to. I’m still not sure how I feel about the reality-shift mechanic and the puzzle elements tied to switching between them. Before the Storm is my favourite game in the series, and that’s a big part of why I’m still willing to give Double Exposure another session, even if I’m not fully sold yet.
I’ve been playing a little Stardew Valley online with a friend. The music and pixel art are beautiful, genuinely some of the best in the genre. But when you’re in a flare-up, hanging out with people online is hard. At least it is for me. I don’t have the social energy for it. Some days I barely have the energy to play something on my own, let alone coordinate with someone else, keep up a conversation, and hold up my end of a shared farm.
I recently started Kingdoms of Amalur again, a fun action RPG I originally played on Xbox 360. This time I’m giving it a go on the Switch OLED. I never finished it back then, I fell into the trap of chasing endless side quests and full map exploration until I burned myself out. This time I’m trying to stick mostly to the main quest, with a bit of side content sprinkled in, to see how far I actually get. It’s a big game for someone with my habits. Just opening the map and seeing all the unexplored areas can feel overwhelming before I’ve even picked a direction to walk in.
That’s not new to this flare-up, it’s an old pattern. My patience for long games usually runs out somewhere around the 30 to 40 hour mark. Persona 4 Golden is one of the exceptions, I stuck with that one for around 80 hours. Normally, what happens is I get the urge to play something else, and by the time I come back, I’ve forgotten most of what was going on, who I was, what I was doing, why it mattered. The game quietly never gets finished. It just sits there, half done, waiting for a version of me that has the energy to pick it back up properly.
I’ve also been playing a bit of Mortal Kombat 1 on PS5 through PS Plus. It’s a decent romp, the visuals are enhanced, and the cutscenes are cinematic, but underneath that it’s a pretty safe, standard Mortal Kombat game. Good, really great at moments, but nothing that surprises you. I still mean to get back to it, whenever the pull to actually sit down and play returns.
Something I keep coming back to is the fear that the enjoyment might never return. That gaming will just stay flat forever, that the response I used to get from the visuals and the audio and the controller in my hands is simply gone for good. It’s happened before, more than once, whenever depression settles in for a long streak. And it has come back, every time, eventually. Knowing that doesn’t make the waiting any easier, but it’s something to hold onto when the console is sitting there, and nothing about it feels like anything.
During flare-ups, I still check YouTube and gaming news. I try to make myself excited for something coming up, but excitement isn’t something you can force. It either shows up, or it doesn’t. So I keep checking anyway, half out of habit, half hoping something will finally click.
I was asked what I’d want someone without depression to understand about a hobby you love going flat on you, and honestly, I didn’t have a good answer. I was also asked what I’d want to say to another gamer sitting there staring at their console, feeling nothing. I didn’t have an answer for that one either.
I think that not having an answer is kind of the point. Depression doesn’t just take the enjoyment out of gaming, some days it takes the words too. Even trying to offer comfort to someone else going through the same thing can feel like more than you’ve got in you. It’s hard to hand someone else a hopeful line when you’re not entirely sure you believe it yourself in that moment.
I don’t have a neat way to close this one out. Gaming has been my coping mechanism for 35 years, and right now it’s not doing what it usually does. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from going through this before, it’s that the streak ends eventually. Gaming will feel like something again. It always has.
Until then, I’m still here, still checking the game news, still opening Kingdoms of Amalur even on days it feels like too much. That counts for something.

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