Abstract
In 2020, the Coronavirus Pandemic led the world to shut down and everyone was forced to quarantine within their homes to prevent the disease from spreading. This meant that families, friends, and coworkers could not see each other face to face during this period, which affected millions of people across the planet. Alongside those effects, there has been an interesting increase in internet usage and a correlation between people's emotional state and how likely they were to interact with their family and friends through the internet. This paper aims to investigate the direct connection between the effects of COVID-19 and its impact on gaming culture.
Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, gaming, mental health, social isolation, virtual interaction
Introduction
In December 2019, an unknown respiratory virus broke out in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Months later, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified the virus as a pandemic, shutting down the entire world. Schools, jobs, and attractions were closed for an indefinite amount of time. Individuals found themselves in social isolation. This was the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected millions worldwide in many ways. According to the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 200,000 people died from the coronavirus by September 26, 2020, only 6 months after the start of the pandemic.
Hearing about an increasing number of deaths month after month left people with major levels of anxiety and depression even after the pandemic. It is essential to acknowledge that this event in history was life-changing and impacted the mental health of many people at a time when you couldn’t see anyone face to face without risking infection. One of the ways that individuals during this time were able to combat the decline of their mental health decline was through playing video games.
This paper provides an overview of the COVID-19 pandemic’s influence on gaming during the coronavirus pandemic. First, this paper will examine how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced people's behaviors and emotions through data analysis and mental health symptom reports. Second, this paper will discuss the rise of gaming’s popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, using reports regarding the relationship between mental health and gaming, qualitative data analysis, and interviews that focus on how gaming during the pandemic has influenced the lives of individuals today. Then, this paper will discuss the platform Twitch and the ways its community-building platform grew through Twitch’s data reports, mental illness reports, and an in-depth analysis of parasocial relationships. This research will show how COVID-19 created opportunities for gaming to help people’s mental well-being.
The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Effect on Mental Health
The beginning of the pandemic was a difficult time. People lost jobs, schools were shut down, and people had to be secluded in their homes. At this point, there was a 28% increase in major depressive disorders and a 26% increase in anxiety disorders globally in 2020. These findings indicate a societal shift and an increase in the number of people showing symptoms of loneliness, anxiety, insomnia, and depression. People already experiencing these symptoms faced an overwhelming increase after hearing reports about the pandemic, news outlets talking about the current situation, and social media spreading misinformation. Misinformation was one of the main reasons why people with anxiety had such a difficult time adjusting to their circumstances since people were in a constant state of fear. The WHO didn’t verify a significant amount of the information surrounding COVID-19. This meant people were putting themselves into a state of panic over false claims thrown out by other people who were also afraid of the pandemic.
The vast increase in adverse mental health was not limited to the people who were in their homes, trying to stay safe from the virus, but healthcare workers as well. At this time, a surge of patients infected with COVID-19 came into hospitals and healthcare facilities to get treated. The increased workload that healthcare workers faced, along with the fear of infecting themselves and their families, meant that the mental health of healthcare workers was at risk, too. Healthcare workers were shown to have a prevalence of negative emotion, with 13% of workers having depression, 31% having depressive symptoms, 16% having anxiety, 23% having anxiety symptoms, and ~22% having post-traumatic disorders. The CDC also did a study to measure the national percentage of depression and anxiety symptoms. They found that the number of anxiety symptoms increased by 13% from August to December 2020 and decreased by 26.8% from December 2020 to June 2021. The CDC also found that the number of depressive symptoms increased by 14.8% from August 2020 to December 2020 and then decreased by 24.8% from December 2020 to June 2021 (See Figure 1). These results were directly related to the number of deaths each month due to COVID-19, which has either positively or negatively impacted people’s mental health. This explains the gradual growth and development of mental health disorders among people during this time and the reasons why the constant development advanced to so many people across the world.
Figure 1: Table of Anxiety & Depression Severity Symptoms
Gaming’s Effect on Mental Health during Covid
The pandemic’s abrupt arrival led many to stay in their homes. This created an opportunity for people to incorporate gaming into their schedules. In addition to gaming, adolescents and adults use communication applications such as Discord and Skype. These applications helped them interact with others and overcome the feeling of social isolation that the pandemic brought. In a 2021 study from a Social Science Research Center, a survey was sent out to gauge people’s emotions about being unable to see their friends and family and gaming’s correlation to it. The results showed that while people did miss their friends and family, gaming helped fill their need for connection. Individuals felt a need to prioritize creating symbolic and social meanings with people, forming an environment where people would value friendships more than anything else. Relationship building during this time was crucial for the well-being of some people, but for others, having more free time to play video games simply meant more time to enjoy themselves and take a break from their everyday lives.
Before the pandemic, people would usually set aside a few hours a week to play their favorite video games with their friends and then put the rest of their week towards school, working, hanging out with friends, and sleeping. However, after COVID-19 affected the world, people’s gaming habits suddenly shifted, with many people using it to escape the outside world or embark on new gaming experiences they didn’t have time to go on before. A study was done to determine how big the shift to gaming was. The study found that there was a 50% increase in gaming since the pandemic started, with 30% of people not altering their habits and 10% decreasing their habits. This tremendous growth in gaming habits by 50% resulted from the incentivization to stay home and not get infected. With that being said, the need for self-amusement was also a key reason for the increase in gaming, with people needing something to do when they couldn’t do their usual activities outside. Another study examined why different people viewed gaming as their new pastime; they found various answers. Some people use gaming to have a positive, gratifying experience, with an interviewee saying, “I generally focused on more feel-good games to begin with, like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon. [...] As for well-being, I play games to chill out and relax, hence the feel-good style. That has helped immensely with COVID and other world issues at the moment, so it’s absolutely had a positive influence on my well-being.” This response to gaming has been one of the key motivators others have also had, calming down and using gaming to comfort themselves. Playing games that they find fun, warm, and delightful to play offers a way to decrease stress and create opportunities for themselves significantly. Others reported that gaming helps relieve their stress from hearing the news of the current state of the world, with another interviewee conveying, “I play more ‘relaxing’ games. I guess it’s a way of coping. I don’t recall ever making the conscious decision, like ‘I need to play something more relaxing to calm myself’ or anything like that; I have just found myself gravitating towards low-stakes, simple, relaxing games.” This response is also one that many have given, as they use gaming as a way to distract themselves and disconnect from the news of the pandemic. People feel that through gaming, they can finally have an enjoyable and impactful experience to fulfill their boredom and revive their mental health. People's variety in the selection of games provided by gaming platforms also helped them gain exposure to the types of games they wanted to play.
Gaming platforms such as Steam, Epic Games, and Riot have increased in popularity since COVID-19, providing great multiplayer games and various game experiences. Steam, more importantly, rose to the top because of its massive selection of games, quickly having more than 24 million concurrent users on its site during March of 2020. This helped many individuals find games that they would soon develop a love for and would play every day during the pandemic. A 2021 Danish Study interviewed 35 people aged 16-20 to discuss how the rise of gaming impacted their lives during this time. The interviewers were able to familiarize themselves with the games these people would play, like Hearthstone, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Sims, and more, to create a more comfortable session with the participants. In this study, multiple people reported that the pandemic created an isolated environment, but they used this opportunity to make a healthy space for themselves and their friends. This helped them value the quality time they have when playing video games with each other. Benny, a 19-year-old college student, responded that gaming helped maintain sociability with his friends. He answered: “It’s very nice in the sense that you can connect, you have something to gather around that isn’t just talking together or writing together, but that you can like to do something together.” Benny’s experience with gaming has been beneficial in keeping up with his friends and gave him something different to do every day. The social engagement that people strive for is something that gaming can bring to the table, and it helps a lot of people, like Benny, to have fun with their friends and not be tired of doing it since there are so many games they can play.
On the contrary, Philip, a 17-year-old student, also reported prioritizing gaming so much that he regrets it since he could be doing different things. He shared, “My days pretty much revolved around gaming, and I started to think a lot about the game, also when I didn’t play. However, when gaming becomes the center of attention, it is damaging. It could have been avoided if I’d had other routines and more structure by going to school or other activities in my free time—for example, the gym. That would allow me to break free from the games.” This explains how gaming has affected Philip’s life in a somewhat negative way since the pandemic began. Even though gaming during the pandemic has shown powerful and irrefutable evidence that it’s beneficial in all kinds of ways, there are also ways that it has done more bad than good by causing psychological distress and decreased well-being in daily life. In Philip’s case, his enjoyment of gaming became too excessive, and he developed an addiction to playing video games.
Overall, there has been a positive association between people’s mental state and video games, but it has, at times, made people steer toward the path to video game addiction. Gaming addiction, also known as gaming disorder (GD), has impacted many people, with the main initiator being the free time gained from the pandemic. GD existed before COVID-19, developing from both positive and negative experiences on the internet. A 2013 study on people’s internet addiction states that the internet is “positive in the sense that the individual feels better because he gets the desired social stimulation and negative because he may not go out and make new offline friends.” This describes the effects of COVID-19, with people not being able to go outside to interact normally with their friends. This correlation between internet addiction and gaming addiction shows how gaming hurts people, with the same study explaining that “the motivations of escapism and achievement mediated the relationship between stress and excessive online gaming. This suggests that motivations for play and psychosocial well-being may be usefully explored in conjunction rather than separately.” A big part of gaming during the COVID-19 pandemic was to provide assistance to people’s mental health and to help soften the discomfort caused by COVID. However, it did the opposite to certain people who already had impaired psychological health.
According to another study, fear of COVID-19 is closely associated with the cause of people having anxiety and depression symptoms. If people are more afraid of COVID-19 disrupting daily life activities like studying, sleeping, or working out, then they are more prone to playing video games, which can increase the chance of them getting GD. Though many argue that people are gaining a gaming addiction and increasing stress levels, this isn’t always the case. A study done on college students argued that gaming is causing more harm than good, but results show that gaming endorses healthy stress management for these college students. This is the case not only in college students but in adolescents as well.
For kids, gaming significantly impacts their early habits and how they view the world. Some individuals think gaming is negative and restrict their kids from playing games until they’ve grown up, telling them to focus on more important things. This is a topic highlighted in a study from Saudi Arabia, where the authors report that gaming has sported plenty of adverse effects, with changes in people’s concentration, energy, moods, and relationships with others. Psychologists have theorized that gaming is one of the leading causes of health risks and mental issues. They also theorized that GD increases people’s hostility, risk of sadness, and depression and increases the suffering from psychological issues. Results showed that while there was an increase in children playing video games for more than 6 hours, most results show no change in people’s moods and how they acted. However, some children’s relationships have changed, and they are more prone to sleep disturbances. Though these changes in relationships and sleep have been proven to have adverse effects, on almost every survey, the majority of people answered that gaming has no change in their relationships with others and that there was no change in their quality of sleep. The small amount that has had their relationships changed was likely due to the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic put people through, with some people not being able to have their friends or family keep in touch through gaming.
The Rise of Content Creation & The Issues That Came With It
With the number of people switching to the digital world rising and embracing gaming as their primary source of entertainment, there has also been an increase in content creation on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Twitch is a streaming platform where people can engage in community interaction through streamer chats, and it is a key reason why people supported their mental health and well-being during the pandemic. Twitch started to gain more recognition for being one of the best places for that friendly environment. In 2022, scholars conducted a study to measure Twitch’s growth due to the massive influx of users coming to their platform because of the pandemic. Results showed that since March 2020, the watch time has doubled in the second quarter of 2020, from April to June. Results also show that the number of streams tailored to specific audiences has increased during the second quarter, reaching exclusive communities that want to see more content specified to their interests. This increase in watch time and viewership also goes hand in hand with the significant increase in viewership in the third quarter of 2020, from July to September.
Twitch has specific categories that users can pick from, such as gaming, music, real-life streams, or just chatting. Most people would enjoy watching their streamer play video games all day and showing their enjoyment through the chat, but some would prefer to find ways to ease their anxiety and depression by having real moments with their streamer. The “Just Chatting” category of Twitch has been a place where many have wandered into to get positive motivation and assistance with their struggles. Many streamers at this time would constantly help those who needed it in their Discord servers and Twitch chat, from financial advice to ways to help them with the fear of the virus. But, the audience never thought about the mental health of streamers and how they’re dealing with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before COVID-19, 16% of children and 19% of adults had been diagnosed with mental illnesses. After March 2020, there has been a 634% increase in people seeking help for their anxiety and over an 873% increase in people seeking help for their depression. With more people coming to Twitch to detach from their real lives and search for ways to help boost their mental health, there have been plenty of streamers that have started to use the phrase, “I am not your therapist,” to try to convey that cannot help their audience members in need of support. Streamers are not professionally qualified to help with people’s psychological state, and viewers don’t always realize that the streamer is human, too. They have their own struggles with mental health, with most of them using Twitch streaming as their way of escaping from the troubles COVID-19 has brought, but they are constantly unable to relax and enjoy themselves. This has led most streamers to speak about their problems with the community and their problems with content burnout and parasocial relationships.
A parasocial relationship (PSR) is a semblance of interpersonal exchange whereby members of an audience come to feel that they personally know a performer they have encountered in mass media, according to Britannica. Parasocial relationships can be formed in many ways, but it is mainly formed through minor interactions and acknowledgment from the streamer. Twitch users can donate money to their streamer, and in turn, can get their message read by them. This small parasocial interaction (PSI) can be very important to someone having a hard time, and they can value that, creating a parasocial relationship with the person. A study on streamers’ mental health stated that “PSR feels just as real as other social connections because humans are predisposed to seek social connections with others.” The social connection that viewers feel when having a streamer notice that you are there can leave them attached to the streamer, wanting more or feeling like they know the streamer, but that is not the case. Streamers do not know the viewers on a personal level, and they use that experience as a sort of job that comes with plenty of perks including community involvement and getting donations from their viewers. Recently, a streamer by the name of Jinnytty received donations from a random viewer. The viewer was suggesting spending time with the streamer because of the amount of money they donated, which the streamer would later reject. The donation message says, “That’s why, for your early birthday gift, I give you $10,000 USD. You’re going to take us on a cruise ship of your choice of 2 options. Chinese Yangtze River, or 14 days around NZ?” This explains the danger of parasocial relationships and the deep emotional attachment the viewer has towards the streamer, feeling inclined to spend time with them because their streamer noticed them. Streamers produce content on Twitch to build a fun environment where everyone can hang out, not to meet their viewers, and become friends with them specifically. Popular Twitch streamer and YouTube content creator Ludwig Ahgren addressed this, saying, “I’m not your friend. I will never ever hang out with you, and I don’t care about you, because I don’t know you, I can’t. There are 13,000 people here. I can’t care about all of you because I don’t know any of you.” Here, he addresses the multitude of parasocial relationships that he is aware of and says that he does not, and will not ever, know them on a personal level. He reasons that too many people are coming to his stream daily to interact with every one of them, and it seems highly unrealistic to be friends with over 13,000+ people. Parasocial relationships are unreasonable and do not lead to the mutual enjoyment of each other, since the celebrity, or streamer, in this case, has no real emotional connection with someone in their chat like the viewer does to the streamer. Another quote from Twitch streamer Miles “meleedonb” Dobney states, “I think the relationships that viewers have with streamers aren’t really ever gonna be fulfilling because it’s very much a ‘ghost at a feast’ kind of thing.” This quote is perfect to describe parasocial relationships, as a “ghost at a feast” is like a Twitch viewer in their streamer’s chat. The streamer does not know you specifically are there, and they don’t see you or notice you because you aren’t close with them like their actual friends are.
Conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted individuals' mental health negatively in many ways, predominantly through fear and social isolation. Throughout this pandemic, gaming has helped hundreds of thousands of people keep their well-being up, and it influenced plenty of people to prioritize fun over fear. With the constant growth of gaming during the pandemic, there has been significant growth in platforms like Steam, a variety-gaming platform that has hundreds of games for people to play. This has led many people to find new ways of enjoyment through this platform, helping them cope with their stress using relaxing experiences, and staying social with their friends and family. However, this has also led many to become addicted to gaming, developing a gaming disorder that allows gaming to disrupt their daily lives and ruin mental health on certain occasions. Twitch has also grown in popularity alongside the rise of gaming, with its platform thriving on community engagement, something people lacked in their lives at this time. Parasocial relationships formed, though, with people burdening Twitch streamers with their struggles, seeking answers to their problems as if they were friends. The rise of these platforms will not stop, as they are the faces of gaming currently and allow the opportunity for more enjoyment. As they continue to grow, there will be more issues relating to parasocial interactions and addiction to gaming. The COVID-19 pandemic and gaming have both caused a wide range of problems in today’s society, and more research is needed to determine how the social skills of people became different during the pandemic and the lasting mental health effects COVID has given people.
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