Its been a long and difficult day. I woke up still tired and in a bad mood.

The coffee
barely helped and I found myself nodding off in class. Driving home was a terrible
experience as well: traffic traveled at a crawl since everyone seemed to want to see
the guy on the side of a road change a flat tire. Add getting cut off multiple times
and stopping at what felt like every single traffic light on my way home, I felt
extremely frustrated, angry at everything, and ready to punch someone or
something. There was no way I was going to get any work done with this kind of
anger pulsing through me.

So instead, I booted up my computer and started playing the game Metal Gear Solid
V. Suddenly, Im no longer the irate Austin Clay who feels like hes getting buried in
schoolwork. Instead, Im Big Boss, the Legendary Mercenary and master of stealth.
Im not struggling to find a passage in my textbooks that contain some microscopic
piece of information I need; Im lying unseen among tall grass in Afghanistan while I
watch an enemy patrol pass just a few meters ahead. It isnt 2015, the song playing
on the radio in the Soviet outpost is Kim Wildes Kids in America. Its a two year
old song, but still popular in the here and now of 1984.

I allow myself to become someone else in a world that never existed and everything
in the real world goes away for a while. After a time in Big Bosss world, my anger
has dulled and Im able to think and behave much more reasonably. My escape
didnt get any of my schoolwork done, it didnt take away the slow morning or erase
the fact that the drive home had been infuriating. What it did was allow me to be
distracted for a while. It allowed me to calm down rather than think about the day
or attempt difficult assignments and get myself more angry and frustrated than I
already was.

I indulged in escapism, in letting my mind go somewhere else besides the real

world. I traveled within the confines of my brain to a place where I could let go of
my troubles for a little while and allow myself to relax. By using humanitys unique
capacity for imagination, we can release anger and refresh ourselves without
actually having to go anywhere.

In the case of gaming, we can also express sides of ourselves that we dont feel
comfortable showing in the safety of a virtual world. The shy can behave as a bold
hero. The stoic can allow themselves to be emotionally moved and involved in their
interactions with virtual people. Being able to do, say, or be whatever we please in a
setting separated from our daily lives is an incredibly therapeutic activity that can
be an important part of a healthy lifestyle.

Thinking about the effect that spending some time on an imaginary battlefield, in a
past that never happened, I figured that itd be a worthy thing to look into. So, I
started looking around online at some reports of escapism and stress relief studies.

Right off the bat, I was surprised at one of the reports I found. Apparently, there was
a study performed that investigated the effects of one of the most popular stress
relief methods out there. Blowing off steam, or allowing yourself to perform angry
or even violent actions against inanimate objects, exists in tons and tons of different
ways. The study tried having people punching a punching bag. They took three
groups of people and through some clever manipulation, got them angry then had
the groups rate how angry they felt. The control group was brought into a room to
cool off. The second group was made to punch a punching bag, picturing it as
what made them angry. The final group was made to punch the bag as well, but
they were told to picture themselves using it to get physically fit. The people who
pictured the punching bag as what angered them turned out to be just as angry or
even angier than they were before. The group that pictured themselves getting fit
punching the bag rated their anger the lowest out of all three groups.

So, blowing off steam doesnt really help? It just makes the problem worse?
People are wrong when they say blowing off steam helps calm you down? This was
surprising to me and ran completely opposite to what I had thought for all my life.
Then I started to think about the report and started to wonder why I was so
surprised. It makes complete sense if you realize you arent venting the anger away.
By taking out your rage on something, even when no one gets hurt, youre just
reinforcing it. Every time you later go back to the activity youre now doing it with
associations to violent, angry action.

The other punching bag group was doing the same activity, but their thoughts were
about something completely different. They focused on something unrelated to their
anger and found themselves calmer after the workout was over. They distracted
themselves while they let their minds settle down. The study seems to say that
distance, not aggression is what you need to calm down. (B. J. Bushman)

I continued to search and found a German survey study that explores escapism
more explicitly. This study was concerned with exploring connections between
television viewing habits and psychological and social sciences. The report mentions
that there was a huge range in the amount of time people spent watching TV with
the low end of the spectrum being less than 1.5 hours each day all the way to 8 or
more hours daily. They looked at dozens and dozens of factors affecting the lives of
these people. Work life, education, stress, and more were examined and explored.
The conclusion they arrived at concerned how much an individual wants to avoid
thinking. People who wanted to place their thinking on hold and let their minds

blank out tended to watch more TV than those who enjoyed spending their
downtime thinking or doing nothing. (Henning and Vorderer)

Well, this was all well and good, but it wasnt quite what I was looking for. The study
only touched on psychology, spending far more time focusing on social science. So,
I continued to look around.

After some careful searching, I found a report that was much more closely related to
my interests: the purpose of escapism as it relates to video gaming. This study was
more focused on multiplayer gaming specifically, though much of it applies to single
player gaming as well. The study begins by stating that there isnt a single, well
defined definition to apply to the word escapism. However, definitions they found
all seem to center around a separation of the fictional and the real and on
temporarily crossing that barrier between the two.

The research team used a combination of survey study and group discussion with
the subjects in order to explore the idea of escapism. The subjects provided several
reasons why they played the games that they did. Some said that they used the
games to escape in order to allow themselves to relieve stress and shake off the
day. Others said that they enjoyed taking a break from the real world. Still others
mentioned that they enjoyed becoming someone else, in placing themselves into
the role of a powerful or heroic individual so they can exercise more ability to
influence the world around them. (Warmelink, Harteveld and Mayer)

I had myself sit and think about the reasons why I game. Stress relief is definitely
one of the big reasons sure. Very often when Im upset or angry, I turn to a game of
some kind. The particulars of the game dont seem to matter much as long as Im
able to distract myself. I feel like distracting my conscious mind allows my
emotional mind to process what it is feeling and manage it in some way. In those
instances I step away from the game still upset, but I find that it isnt as pressing
and overwhelming as it was before. It allows the rational mind a chance to take over
and deal with the problem.

But that isnt the only reason I play. I find myself disappointed and dissatisfied with
life with depressing regularity. It seems like there is always something that saps
away my energy and what positivity I have. When I am gaming all of this falls away
and, for a time, they dont bother me because they are in the world I have mentally
left behind. In allowing myself to get away from it all in my mind, everything seems
more manageable. Its very therapeutic.

I enjoy being able to place myself in the role of someone stronger than myself. In
the real world Im just one person among billions. Just another ant in the hill. There
are many more like me and I have very little impact one way or another. In these
imaginary worlds I go to though, Im someone much greater. Whether Im Big Boss,
or Im commanding vast armies in great wars, or trying to rescue the princess from
the bad guy doesnt matter. Im someone more forceful, more significant, and I have
greater impact than I do in the real world. Being able to occasionally feel like
someone of great importance in some way feels good.

Something else I found though, when paired with several other academic papers I
came across, proved that I was wrong in one of my beliefs about gaming. It turns
out that there actually is a relationship between some violent behaviors and violent
video games. The particular study I was looking at examined how long aggressive
behaviors last after spending time playing a violent video game. The study had 138
college age adults with an equal number of subjects from each sex play a violent
video game for 20 minutes. Afterwards, subjects were asked to express how they
felt about the game with a series of 1 to 10 questions. Once finished, they were
asked to think about the game over the next 24 hours and how they might improve
their performance in the game for next time. The next day, the subjects reported
how much they had thought about the game and the violent actions in it. They also
were put into a competitive 1 on 1 match with a person of the same sex and the
winner was allowed to punish the loser with a painfully loud blast of noise. These
and other factors were analyzed and compared to the same activities and questions
in non-violent games. The results were that the people who played the violent
games were displaying signs of more aggressive behavior than their counterparts
playing the non-violent games. (Bushman and Gibson)

Still, even with the potential shortcomings in using videogames to escape, do I

benefit from playing them? I think so. By being able to occasionally escape, Im able
to bring some kind of respite into my life. Even if it wasnt through gaming, another
method of escapism would come up as it is essential. We all need it and we all
pursue it.

Bibliography
Bushman, Brad J and Bryan Gibson. "Violent Video Games Cause an Increase in
Aggression Long After the Game Has Been Turned Off." 2011. ResearchGate.
2 December 2015.
Bushman, Brad J. "Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis,
Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding." 2002.
University of Washington Official Web Site. 2 December 2015.
Henning, Bernd and Peter Vorderer. "Psychological Escapism: Predicting the Amount
of Television Viewing by Need for Cognition." 2001. Berndhenning.de. 2
December 2015.
Warmelink, Harald, Casper Harteveld and Igor Mayer. "http://www.digra.org/wpcontent/uploads/digital-library/09287.04129.pdf." 2009. http://www.digra.org.
2 December 2015.