Many people--including gamers--still see video games as a means of entertainment rather than self-actualization. Of course, you can and should use them for entertainment. But just like books, films, and other art forms, they can be profoundly transformational.

It simply requires you to come at games with an attitude of self-growth rather than self-escape. Asking questions like what can I learn from this? What does this say about the world? And, will my friends still love me if I blow up their house with TNT? No. The answer is no.

I've genuinely become a better person from playing video games, but to understand how, you need to hear a story about one of the greatest video games ever made, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

In The Witcher 3, you play as Geralt, part of a castaway class of monster hunters known as Witcher's, trained from an early age to protect the realm against monsters like Balrogs, Griffins, and Vampires. Using a mix of magic, swords, and a magnificent beard, you purge the land of these fowl creatures to better the world.

Geralt fighting a Fiend, image from Rock Paper Shotgun.

Alongside this, you solve assassination plots against kings, help a Bloody Barron reconcile with his alcohol addiction and the loss of his daughter, and even get Ol' Granny her missing cooking pot. You'd think with such a valiant job, everyone you come across would welcome you smiling, beer in hand, and supper waiting on the table.

Here's the thing: most people despise you... Witchers undergo such rigorous training and biological enhancement in the Trial Of Grasses many no longer see them as human. They find in you the very monsters you are trying to safeguard them against.

People talk behind your back in brothels. They brawl you in the streets when you stay too long. They underpay you for jobs they would never dream of doing themselves.

And yet, you continue helping them nonetheless...

It's here the Witcher gave me a key insight into being a good person: to act good when no one's watching, to stay true when no one's caring, to be virtuous when no one's noticing—that is the essence of virtue. Being virtuous is like winking in the dark--you're the only one who knows you did it. But you do it anyway. Always.

I remember playing The Witcher 3 for the first time as a sixteen year old boy had a huge influence on me. But it was truly the second time I played it at seventeen that it left its mark. I was beginning to create content on YouTube and my blog and confronted with a choice.

I could give away a portion of my content on reading and fitness tips for free and paywall the rest. Or, I could give away 99% of my content for free and only sell the implementation. Remembering The Witcher, I decided to go with the ladder, believing it immoral of me to paywall information I believed everyone should have access to. That's not all. While driving, I notice myself being more patient with people. When I spot a Reeses Peanut Butter wrapper on the ground, I pick it up, partly to check if there's still any left for me but also so I can recycle it.

The Witcher 3 became my first taste of video games' power for self-actualization, but it wasn't my last. Life Is Strange, Dark Souls 3, Civilization 6, Terraria, Minecraft, and many more have roots in making me the person I am today. In this video, I'm going to show you how to do the same--how to play video games for self-actualization.

What Makes Video Games Different From Other Art Mediums?

To learn how we can self-actualize through video games, we must understand what makes them unique to other art mediums.

To put it dirtily, video games are all the other art mediums, on crack--with some 5-hour energy poured in, and a pinch of curry powder. Video games incorporate every other art medium: music, digital graphics, 3D modeling, animation, photography, typography, narrative writing, and more. This gives them the most complexity of any medium. Honestly, it's a wonder video games are finished at all.

It took 1,500 people globally and over $81 million dollars over 3.5 years to create The Witcher 3. That's insane.

However, the one key difference between video games and other art mediums begins with the letter C: Choices.

You, make the choices in a video game. And that gives them tremendous power for transformation if played with the right mindset...

Participating in the choices gives you more skin in the game. It's one thing to read about the unfair oppression faced by Witcher's in The Witcher novels. It's a whole other thing to experience the oppression yourself in the video game.

You feel more viscerally. You understand--even to a small degree--what it might feel like to be oppressed, to help people in need, and to be in a relationship with a smoking hot sorceress (Yennifer is better). Hey, I'm only human.

However, this control over choice is also one of the things that gives video games their addicting nature. So as we move onto how to play video games for self-actualization, we must learn how to game healthily as well.

Psychology Of Healthy Gaming

It doesn't take a genius to realize addiction to video games probably don't help us in our self-actualization.

We want to avoid what happened to author and psychologist Anna Lembke as she describes in her book Dopamine Nation^[1]. She became addicted to romance novels. The addiction began innocently enough when she started reading them as a form of relaxation.

Every night before going to sleep, she lay back on her pillow and read for thirty minutes. Over time, she became increasingly drawn to the stories, craving the emotional highs and escape they provided. Her work as a clinical psychologist was stressful--long hours with difficult patients dealing with their own addictions. Reading about a werewolf's fantasy for a female vampire brought her out of that world.

Until, it became the only world she wanted to be in...

In her words "All I wanted to do was read romance novels, to the point where we were literally invited to a neighborhood barbecue. And I took a romance novel with me, and hid it in a room at these people's house. Now that is really weird. That's genuinely weird." Her work suffered. Her marriage suffered. Her RICE purity score suffered. Thankfully, she realized she had a problem once she started reading the novels first thing in the morning and started making a plan to stop.

If a clinical psychologist can get addicted to romance novels, how do we ensure this doesn't happen to us with video games?

I have a personal vendetta in this question because I used to be addicted to video games. I drowned away my real-life worries with women, schoolwork, and family through playing endless hours of Terraria, Civilization 6, Minecraft and more.

Me playing Oxygen Not Included when I should have been writing.

Jane McGonigal, author and game designer, sought to answer how we can play video games healthily by conducting a meta-analysis of more than 500 research papers^[2]. She proposes three tactics you can use to encourage healthier forms of gaming:

• Play with purpose. Before playing a game, ask yourself: why are you playing this? During and especially after each video game session, ask, how do you feel? Are you still having fun? What is the game making you think about?
• Keep gaming under 21 hours a week. The mental and emotional benefits of gaming decrease drastically when you play more than three hours per day.
• Try to avoid aggressive, competitive games against strangers online. I can attest that playing League Of Legends competitively alone with strangers online was one of the most negative periods of my life. However, no research has shown that competitive games increase hostility or aggression when played with people you know.

As long as you follow these three tactics, you should be well guarded against video game addiction. You're ready to learn how to play video games for self-actualization.

How To Play Video Games For Self Actualization

We're going to take a road trip back to our old buddy Maslow's hierarchy of needs which describes human self-actualization as a process of fulfilling five separate needs separated into deficiency and growth needs on a pyramid like structure (funnily enough, he never separated it into a pyramid but it has been turned into one by the popular media, ahhh regardless):

The problem is this makes self-actualization seem like a ladder. We complete one level, say safety, and then climb to the next level, never having to return and work on safety again. Or the other way around--we can't work on a level above where we are at. In reality, self-actualization is a constantly fluctuating process in which we often take two steps forward, and one step back, working on growth needs and deficiency needs simultaneously.

Clearly, we need a new analogy for self-actualization.

Instead of envisioning a pyramid, we can use the analogy of a sailboat Kaufman (2020) proposes in his excellent book Transcend^[3]:

The foundation of the boat represents deficiency needs, security, connection, and self-esteem and the sail is made up of growth needs of exploration, love, and purpose.

The foundation of a boat determines it's strength amidst hard waves, which showcases how fulfilling deficiency needs helps prepare people for the storms which will inevitably come in life. The sail influences how well we can use wind to move, which symbolizes how fulfilling growth needs helps us more effectively sail through life while simultaneously illuminating the danger and vulnerability in opening our sails and exposing ourselves to unpredictable wind.

Let's explore how video games can help us build our sailboat.

Safety

As cool as it would be, unfortunately, harvesting crops and building structures in Minecraft doesn't fulfill your safety needs for food, water, and shelter in real life. So, if you don't have these things already, this is the only part of self-actualization video games won't fulfill.

Connection

Speaking of Minecraft, some of my best memories from high school came from playing Minecraft Realms with my friends. We would split into two teams and spend the first week in a peace period of mining, building, and exploring. Once the peace ended, chaos...

Each team would spread out, hoping to find the other team's base before they found theirs. One time, I found my friend's cobblestone sky base using the famed Nether Portal trick. In Minecraft, one block in the Nether is eight blocks in the overworld. So by traveling in the Nether and building a Nether portal back to the overworld, you can travel vast distances in little time.

Plus, nether portals automatically connect to nether portals in the overworld if they are close enough. That meant you could quickly find someone else's base by travelling through the nether, building a nether portal, and hoping it connected to a portal they built.

Minecraft overworld nether portal connected to a nether portal in the Nether. Image by Rock Paper Shotgun.

Once I found the other teams base with my brother, we spent a week exploiting their villager farm (which they had conveniently made while we had not) and stole diamonds from their chest to spark infighting. Multiple times we joined their Discord to say "hi" but really all we wanted to see was the hilarious bickering between them as they tried to find their nonexistent bandit. Finally, I hired one of their team members as a double agent using two stacks of diamonds, got my entire team to drink invisibility potions, and blew up their base in one fell swoop, causing them to fall to their deaths in a maelstrom of chaotic delight. Glorious.

The experience was and still is a source of hilarious connection for our friend group to this day.

Any multiplayer video game can help you build connection like this. Research from Brigham Young University's School of Family Life shows playing video games together regularly in the same physical space increases the sense of connection between parent and child^[4]. Scientists theorize this is because while playing video games, we sync up with the people we are playing with. Not only are we synced in the sense we are experiencing the same game, but we can also be synced in autonomic state and physical movement. This syncing up creates an "upward spiral" of positive connection between two people^[5].

Video games are especially helpful when you aren't in the same physical space as your friends but want to stay in touch. However, as noted by Jane McGonigal earlier, you want to be playing with people you know. Competitive multiplayer games with strangers is linked to aggression and depression. As long as you stick to this rule, video games can help create some of the best connecting experiences of your life.

Self-Esteem

During high school summers, I used to play tons of Terraria with my friend Alejandro. Mining for ore, crafting items, and slaying bosses became my daily routine. But there was one boss we couldn't seem to defeat: Plantera. We spent hours upon hours and many late nights trying to beat that cursed flower. I read boss guides, watched videos, and studied forums.

Ale and I fighting Plantera.

Finally, after days of struggle, I dealt the finishing blow with 5 points of HP left as my dead friend Ale watched in anticipation. It was a magical moment. I felt a tremendous sense of self-esteem and accomplishment.

Any video game can help you build self-efficacy and in effect self-esteem. As McGonigal explains in her book, SuperBetter (2015)^[6], "This is the classic path to increased self-efficacy: accept a goal, make an effort, get feedback on that effort, improve a concrete skill, keep trying, and eventually succeed. You don't need a game to set off on this path. But because it is the very nature of games to challenge and improve our abilities, they are an incredibly reliable and efficient way to get there" (p. 95).

The obvious question is, does this self-esteem translate to real life?

One recent study showed that gamers exhibited "a dispositional need to complete difficult tasks" and "the desire to exhibit high standards of performance in the face of frustration^[7]." When presented with both easy and difficult puzzles, frequent gamers spent considerably more time tackling the challenging ones. In contrast, those who played games less often quickly abandoned the harder puzzles, displaying little interest in overcoming the difficulty.

What causes this shift to being willing to do hard things? While playing games, we adopt what Jane McGonigal calls a "gameful mindset." We're more willing to fail because we understand failure is a necessary aspect of success. It's impossible to progress in games like Terraria without dying at least a few times. The next time you play a game for self-esteem, try to bring that gameful mindset into real life.

Exploration

One of the topics I always struggled with in school was history. I simply didn't understand its relevance to my life. Why study the past when there is so much going on in the present and so much to think about for the future?

That was until I played Civilization 6.

Civilization 6 puts you at the head of an empire as one of history's great rulers. My first game ever I played as Trajan of Rome. I built trade caravans by the dozen. I constructed amphitheaters to attract tourism. I founded city after city, spreading my purple colors like an ocean wave across the world.

Me setting up trade routes like mad in Civilization 6.

Something magical happened. As I built my Roman Empire, I became interested in Greek and Roman history and philosophy. I began reading books such as the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Letters From A Stoic by Seneca, and so much more. Soon, this interest spread to other philosophies like Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, as well as other times of history like the Three Kingdoms Period of China, The Viking period, and more.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I had stumbled upon another means video games could be used for self-actualization: to explore ideas.

All you have to do is ask yourself these questions before playing a game:

• How can I play video games to get interested in topics that will help me in real life?
• How can I use video games to explore new concepts?
• How can I learn a real life skill through video games?

Tons of games are helping people explore right now. Duolingo has helped millions of people get into language learning. You can learn leadership skills as a guild leader in World Of Warcraft. You can get really meta and understand human motivation and psychological needs by studying games themselves, as is explored in the book Glued To Games^[8].

Why are games in particular so powerful for exploration?

Study upon study, book upon book come to the same conclusion: emotional connection is at the root of learning^[9]. If you want to make learnings stick, and especially if you want to build a passion for learning something, you need to spark an emotional connection. Emotion isn't the icing you add on top of the learning cake. It's the cake itself.

Because video games put you in the front seat of choice, they build emotional connection in droves. That's how they got me interested in history. And that's what makes them such powerful avenues for exploration.

Love And Purpose

One of my most memorable gaming moments occurred while playing Life Is Strange. I was consoling Chloe—the main friend of your character Max—after she had recently become paralyzed in a car accident. We were alone, sitting in the makeshift hospital room her parents made for her. After watching a movie and going through old photos, Chloe asked something big: she wanted me to euthanize her so her last memory could be with us...

Chloe awaiting your decision in Life Is Strange.

I remember sitting there for minutes agonizing over the decision. I went over every ethical and moral theory I could think of. I forgot I was playing a game. I believed I was deliberating over a real life.

The moment forced me to think about my own ethical beliefs regarding euthanasia. It was especially difficult considering my great aunt had recently gotten euthanized a few months earlier after taking a tumble. When I have to navigate euthanasia again in the future, I know I will think about Life Is Strange and the decision I came to.

Moments like this in video games can help you learn to love and find your purpose. They help you navigate your own philosophies on life and values and find meaning in connecting with others. Many games are made specifically for this. Planescape Torment, Balders Gate 3, Bioshock, and more all confront you with fundamental questions of life. But any game can help you build love and purpose if you ask these questions while playing:

• What philosophical implications does this game have?
• What is this game teaching me about myself, others, and the world?
• What is this game teaching me about being a better person?
• What is this game telling me about my values?

The Power Of Video Games For Self-Actualization

Video games are fun. I played them for most of middle and high school mainly for entertainment and escape.

But just like books, films, and other art mediums, they can be profound avenues for self-actualization. In many ways, they are arguably the best, because they are the most complex.

My journey to using video games for self-actualization started with The Witcher 3. But you can turn most video games into avenues for self-actualization. All it takes is some introspection.

So, what will you be playing next?

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References

1. Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: finding balance in the age of indulgence. New York, New York, Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. ↩︎
2. Jane McGonigal, SuperBetter (New York: Penguin, 2016), 415–424. ↩︎
3. Kaufman, S.B. (2020). Transcend: The new science of self-actualization. New York, NY: Tarcher Perigee. ↩︎
4. Sarah M. Coyne et al., "Game on . . . Girls: Associations Between Co-Playing Video Games and Adolescent Behavioral and Family Outcomes," Journal of Adolescent Health 49, no. 2 (2011): 160–65; Laura M. Padilla-Walker, Sarah M. Coyne, and Ashley M. Fraser, "Getting a High-Speed Family Connection: Associations Between Family Media Use and Family Connection," Family Relations 61, no. 3 (2012): 426–40; and Lydia Buswell et al., "The Relationship Between Father Involvement in Family Leisure and Family Functioning: The Importance of Daily Family Leisure," Leisure Sciences 34, no. 2 (2012): 172–90. ↩︎
5. Bethany E. Kok and Barbara L. Fredrickson, "Upward Spirals of the Heart: Autonomic Flexibility, as Indexed by Vagal Tone, Reciprocally and Prospectively Predicts Positive Emotions and Social Connectedness," Biological Psychology 85, no. 3 (2010): 432–36. ↩︎
6. McGonigal, Jane. 2015. SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully. Penguin Publishing Group. ↩︎
7. Matthew Ventura, Valerie Shute, and Weinan Zhao, "The Relationship Between Video Game Use and a Performance-Based Measure of Persistence," Computers and Education 60, no. 1 (2013): 52–58. 14. Treadway et al., "Dopaminergic Mechanisms of Individual Differences." ↩︎
8. Rigby, S., & Ryan, R. M. (2011). Glued to games: How video games draw us in and hold us spellbound. ↩︎
9. Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2008). Made to Stick. Arrow Books. ↩︎