Games vs. Grimness (or Play vs. Depression) 

Here's the idea for this month's newsletter:  play and depression, as modes of relating to one's experience, are contradictory.  When you're truly playing (even with depression) you are not depressed. 

The game designer and researcher, Jane McGonigal (you can see her at TED here) has defined games as having these four elements:

1) Goals

2) Rules

3) Feedback

4) Voluntary participation                    

When you're playing a game (whether digital or analog, Halo or football), you have a goal (conquer the dragon);  you have a set of rules to enact this goal (you have a sword, can't fly, and have a certain amount of strength to wield the sword);  you have feedback mechanisms (if you don't follow the rules, your character dies);  and finally, you are choosing to play (unlike, say, seeking food to keep your body going). 

Now, does this sound like depression?  No, in fact, depression is roughly the polar opposite.  Your goals have collapsed:  "I feel lost, and life feels pointless and futile."  The rules have blurred:  "I don't know what to do.  I can't figure out how to move forward."  Feedback fails:  "Everything seems negative, even when I know it should be uplifting.  Nothing seems differentiated;  it's all the same."  And depression does not feel voluntary:  "How did this happen to me?  Why do I have to go through this?"

Depression is grim;  play is not.

Play has a lot to tell us about what a non-depressed life looks like, and what the path out of depression entails and requires.  And play is not simply the structures that allow it to exist (the goals, rules, feedback mechanisms);  rather, play requires an attitude that is implied by the fourth of McGonigal's elements:  it has to be voluntary.  This is where I'm distinguishing a technical definition of a game from an attitude of play:  are you really "opting in"?  Because you can go to a high school football game, which meets the game criteria, but at least at my school, it always seemed pretty grim to me.  I.e., the players did not engage the game with an attitude of play.

Mindfulness practice, which is the base of my work with depression and anxiety (and of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy), is at root an act of play.  It's not grim, even though one of the common confusions of new practitioners it to treat mindfulness as a life-or-death practice (I count myself in here, with most other practioners I've ever met).  A new book by a veteran meditator and teacher, Sally Kempton (Meditation for the Love of It), makes this point, that meditation is essentially an act of voluntary, curious, loving engagement with life.  Not quite a game, but definitely in a similar spirit.. 

So, games are:  not grim (engaged, joyful, voluntary);  have structure (rules);  have goals;  and have feedback mechanisms (in which data is returned to a person to help them improve their behavior towards a goal).  What depression lacks, in other words.

So to come out of depression one's life has to come to look, and feel, closer to games than to, well, "real life."  That's the path, essentially.  One has to build both better structures and better feedback mechanisms at the same time.  The former essentially derive from CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), and the latter from mindfulness practice:  you build structures (patterns of exercise, regular use of medication, social interactions, commitments to work and relationship) and pay attention to what happens (mindfulness practice, as well as CBT exercises, allows you to watch your behavior objectively and learn from that, i.e., get feedback). 

But the base of these is attitude.  You can play a game grimly, but in relation to depression, the problem (in a sense) is grimness:  i.e., all the ways in which a game collapses.  To cultivate a playful attitude, you are closer to life as a game (structured, goal-oriented, rich with learning, and voluntary), and that attitude itself is a contradiction of depression.  We think, generally, of games as secondary to "real life," as distractions.  But really, the nature of games is actually the road map for the dissolution of depression.  There are frivolous and escapist versions of gaming, which have limited use, but the underlying structure is the essence of a life free from grimness.