Gaming as therapy?

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I've been into Second Life for over two years now. I love being able to talk to people more easily through it and not having to worry about a lot of my issues. I've also found that certain areas of it are almost a therapy for me.

When I was six, I was pretty much a normal kid. My experience in first grade was mostly positive, I had friends and I felt like there wasn't really anything wrong with me. Once I hit seven, everything went down the tubes and I became an outcast. After talking to some people I know in SL, I decided to give being a child avatar and going to school a try, to see if it could help me "remake" the memories of my childhood in school. Lo and behold, it has worked. Being able to regress myself back to that age and act as a kid again, then going to school and not being bullied or feeling weird helps me feel more at peace with my childhood.

Has anyone else felt like gaming, in any form, has helped them mentally or acted as a kind of therapy?

Gaming gives me the delusion that people love me.
It also makes me act how I want without fear of anything...
Who knows if this form of being an outcast is better in the long run but I am trying on both fronts.

Gaming has always been my escape from the stresses of the real world but I can become compulsive while gaming too...not sleeping or eating for hours and maybe even days at a time so I have had to learn to budget my time and control my drive and need to win.

I have often played RTS (real time strategy) or RPG (role playing games) and I tend to avoid online play as my compulsive nature tends to come out more when real people are involved. I have been gaming since....well for more than 20 years and I prefer PC gaming rather than consoles though I have both. Games I have played...Civilization in all it's forms, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Starcraft, Myst (all of them), Morrowind, System Shock I and II (the precursors of Bio shock), Mass Effect, and many others....oh yeah and I have a crazy affection for Plants vs Zombies...go figure.

Playing video games is a form of therapy for myself I think. I like to play FPSs a lot, and RPGs like Final Fantasy even more. It's a means of escape, controlling anger, and a form of entertainment.

yea...i play ALOT of games......a little too much at times...i prefer RPGs and FPS....i also prefer the PC games over the console but i do play on both lately i've been playing Diablo II, Morrowind, Arcanum, (all on PC) and Suikoden I-V, LOTR the third age, (on PS2), and Fallout 3, and Batman: Arkham Asylum (on PS3).....i do find games helpful I've actually improved my reaction times and hand eye coordination by playing lots of Guitar Hero games....and i've seen it work on others too mostly with my Ex's youngest son....and when i get frustrated nothing helps more than to load up an FPS and take out my anger on video game bad guys....lol

Videogames have always been a form of therapy for me, though I see them more as an escape from reality. In reality I'm no one, but in a game I can be anything I want to be.

Racing games (like the Forza Motorsport series) are almost cathartic for me? While I'm racing I block out everything else in my life and focus on what needs to be done. No other videogames are like that for me. You kind of get into a "zone" and.....thats it. Nothing else matters. Pay attention to the revs, slow in/fast out, time your shifts, and just win.

After a long day of work i love to settle down on my couch pour a cold mountain dew and shot zombies in the head repeatedly. It does wonders for my social anxiety.

A lot of the time I suspect that I've learned more about dealing with people from playing online games than I ever did from school or professional help. It certainly did far more to explain to me how one does effective teamwork than going to school ever did. Where you were just put in with 3 other people and told 'OK, do teamwork' with no further explanation of the social and work hierarchy, obligations and limits involved in the task. When there's a dragon to slay every week it tends to develop much firmer and clearer rules than 'do teamwork'. Also killing dragons tends to be much more motivating to the learning process than writing three pages, making a graph and providing pictures on why it wasn't fun to be a peasant in the 18th century.

I've certainly learned more from RPG conversation trees - like the different outcomes to quests through different choices in conversation in Bioware and Black Isle games - than I did from having conversations with most real humans. Probably because I could try out the different options thanks to our friends Save and Load. Unlike with humans who just storm off and won't tell you what you did wrong if you can't figure it out yourself. I loved to examine the different outcomes from the different options, watching if there were emotional signs to learn. Like in say Dragon Age where the models are detailed enough that you see the hints that a character is lying in not just what they say but how they say it.

And yeah, it's a great way to unwind and regain some mental equilibrium.

Also, having had more success socializing with people through those games has helped. Getting told over and over again at schools, workplaces, specialists that you're somehow defective and wrong no matter how hard you try or apologize... it's incredible when you find a group of people who not just like you despite your quirks, but consider you of value and actually choose you. I never even considered the clearly absurd notion that I could ever be in charge of anything before I started gaming. No one had ever asked me to be in charge of anything, or even suggested that might be something to try. It was a completely new experience to me and one I learned a great deal from, and would never have gotten the chance to do in the real world based on the previous 28 years.

i think that music makes me feel this way because when i play my guitar it takes all my emotions and plays them in perfect expression so if i`m mad then a mad song it would be and so on.

Gaming, in general, is my therapy. It allows me to get out of my head and focus on something fun.

Which sucks, because I haven't been able to touch my Wii for the last two days(that sounds naughty...), 'cause I've got three assignments breathing down my neck, all due tomorrow. *mutter, mutter*

I need a break! But I don't have time for a break! Who decided Monday should be the due date for assignments on all four of my classes?!