“It’s ironic that people look at this link between kids and video games and decide the games are what’s causing them to act a certain way,” Dichtl told the Daily Dot. “For me, video games were a way to escape the things that were causing my depression.”
Dichtl is one of many young gamers trying to upend the conventional wisdom about gaming and depression. He recently started a blog to chronicle his story, while developers and other gamers around the world are trying to prove that video games can be a healthy vehicle for dealing with despair.
They are running up against an entrenched narrative. Just two years ago, the New York Times made hay out of two separate studies that tracked the social characteristics of young gamers.
One, published in the journal Pediatrics, tracked more than 3,000 school children in Singapore over several years. The study found that heavy gamers, who played more than 31 hours a week, were more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, or social phobias. That same article cites a Chinese study, published in Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, which found that teenagers who spent excessive amounts of time on the internet in general were more likely to suffer from depression.
Some of the video game industry’s biggest players want games to grow up and begin reflecting the psychological and emotional complexity of other types of media. […]
In addition to gaining legitimacy as an artform, such a shift in the game development could allow users to reap greater emotional and psychological well being. Because at the end of the day, O’Neil, Dichtl, and others say the link between gaming and depression is all about the player’s individual relationship with the games they play.