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Sims 4 Study: How You Play Is Related To Your Mental Health?
Someone should do a study on the connection between the types of scenarios players create in-game and their personal mental health. I think it would be a great read.
Do you think the two could be connected somehow? Could the way you play The Sims be a subtle form of therapy or is it just a game?
Do you think the two could be connected somehow? Could the way you play The Sims be a subtle form of therapy or is it just a game?
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I'm not talking about not the violent themes people create in-game but more so the sad themes, like homeless scenarios or group homes or teens raising younger siblings. These are things that in today's society would be considered tragedies.
Do you think happy people play happy scenarios and sad people play sad ones?
and makes people care what happens to them whether they will make it in life sometimes good vs evil is the conflict sometimes its
being homeless or any other trouble you can think of
I prefer interesting characters that have a varies past, be it a troubled one, an easy one, a strange out of this world one or inbetween and sometimes create a whole household with them to see how they interract.
For instance, I just created a household of emancipated teens I plan on moving into one of the starter home lots; a transgendered character, a funny looking female teen (all ears, nose and eyes) I created just to see how genetics play in future generations and an adolcent alien disguised as a human male teenager.
I also created a little music prodigy teen I will eventually move in with my gay couple to foster.
And I am not above killing off Sims for the sake of the stories or give them a heartbreak.
I have no idea what that says about my mental health.
My sense is that people play these types of scenario for two very different reasons:
1. Simply to see whether they can and what will happen. The player thinks 'I wonder what would happen if I put a sim on a lot with no house and no furniture or appliances? Could they survive? Could I make it work?' or 'I wonder how a family of kids would manage with no parents to care for them?' and then they do it to find out.
2. Because of the dramatic possibilities. I'm not sure that such players always see their scenarios as necessarily tragic, though. I remember as a kid playing scenarios with my dolls where they were orphans and the elder sister had to take care of the younger one. This wasn't because I was a disturbed kid, or anything, and in fact I did not even think of the game as being sad or tragic. I think I saw it as something of an adventure and I think most kids wonder what it would be like to live without adult restraints. The Sims lets us vicariously experience the kind of lives that we are not likely to actually lead - or would even particularly want to lead.
> Someone should do a study on the connection between the types of scenarios players create in-game and their personal mental health. I think it would be a great read.
>
> Do you think the two could be connected somehow? Could the way you play The Sims be a subtle form of therapy or is it just a game?
Everyone is entitled to their opinion of course but I don't personally think The Sims is just a game. It does have it's psychological side to it. I don't think that game play of The Sims is any different to various psychological experiments that have been conducted to see what happens or what people will chose to do when given control or power of others, that's the point of it.
I'm going to keep my argument simple by stating that when we play The Sims we're basically playing god and there are all types of gods with all types of personality traits in world mythology. In my opinion, when people create sims purely for the purpose of torturing and killing them that means that they are a sadistic god. You could argue that the person knows that it's just a game, but the fact that the person chooses to spend their time creating and killing is still noteworthy. I think it's strange that people are happy to make judgements of deities from actual religions but when they are the god of a world suddenly we should ascribe any meaning to their actions. It doesn't make sense if you think about it in an unbiased way.
So interesting! I like to think it's a subtle form of therapy for me, at least. It helps me escape and relax.
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