Perfectionism
The designer's trap Eight friends go up a mountain for a winter weekend. In Until Dawn, every one of them can make it to sunrise, and every one of them can die. Supermassive Games put the perfect night in the code and then made it nearly impossible to
Therapy Skills
Somewhere on your caseload there's a client who has died to the same boss four hundred times, with the same sword at the same fog gate, under a YOU DIED screen in letters the size of their hope. Every time, they picked the controller back up and walked
Attachment
The Approval We Perform I have never completed a Renegade playthrough of the Mass Effect Trilogy. I have tried, more times than I can recall, and every time I abandoned the run somewhere in the first hours of gameplay, overwhelmed by the weight of being disliked, of being "mean.
Anxiety
A Game That Refuses to Show You Anything Most video games ask players to take in more. More visual detail, more icons, more motion competing for attention. Progress often depends on how quickly you can scan, prioritize, and react. For many people, especially those already managing sensory overload in daily
Games as Therapy
Some weeks a client comes in and says they barely did anything. Worked, came home, played a little, slept. The temptation, when caseload is heavy and the hour is short, is to redirect toward whatever you've flagged as clinically relevant: sleep, mood, the relationship, the medication change. Gaming
Resourcing
In Part One, we explored the clinical concept of resourcing onto Elden Ring's core design: the nervous system landscape of the Lands Between, Sites of Grace as externalized anchors, and the game's reframe of death as data rather than failure. That piece built the lens. This
Elden Ring
Elden Ring is a 2022 action RPG developed by FromSoftware, set in a vast open world called the Lands Between. The player takes the role of a "Tarnished"—an exiled figure called back to a broken land to restore something that has been shattered. The game is renowned
Coping Styles
The class you pick when everything is fine is fantasy fun. The class you pick when you're struggling might speak to your coping style. The Selection Screen You know the moment. Something has happened—a bad day, a grief wave, a conversation that left your chest tight and
God of War
Processing relational grief through Kratos and Atreus My father and I are learning how to love each other without my mother. We always loved each other—that was never in question. But for forty-three years, my mother did the work of translating that love into connection. My father is
God of War
Understanding How Autistic Brains Process Emotion Through Play After my mother died, I couldn't name what I was feeling. I knew something was happening inside me—something large and complicated and painful. But when I tried to identify it, to put words to it, I found only static.
Avatar Frontiers of Pandora
I'm a white therapist-in-training who writes about video games. I mention this upfront because the piece you're about to read requires it. This isn't a confession or a disclaimer. It's context. What Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora offers white players is
Disney
Villains are often framed as problems to be removed. In stories, they’re defeated, exiled, or destroyed so the world can return to order. In real life, we tend to apply the same logic internally. When anger, control, resentment, manipulation, fear, or emotional distance surface within us, we’re quick