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A recent study published in Current Psychology has found that many video game players experience a specific sense of emptiness and sadness after finishing highly engaging games. The research introduces a new psychological scale to measure this phenomenon, showing that post-game depression is linked to general depressive symptoms and difficulties in processing emotions. These findings offer new insights into how deeply immersive media can impact a person’s emotional well-being.
Video games are the third most popular leisure activity in the world. Modern video games are not solely designed to provide simple entertainment or pleasure. Many of these titles feature complex narratives that evoke deep emotions, existential reflection, and a profound sense of achievement.
As players invest hours into these immersive worlds, they often form strong attachments to the characters and the storylines. When the experience abruptly ends, gamers often report a lingering sense of loss or emptiness.
Psychologist Kamil Janowicz at the Center for Research on Personality Development at SWPS University in Poznań and Piotr Klimczyk, a UX researcher and narrative designer with Orion Belt Games, conducted the study to develop the first quantitative tool to measure post-game depression. They wanted to understand the prevalence of this state and identify which types of games evoke it. They also aimed to see if this experience is associated with broader mental health challenges.
“The idea came from experiences shared by video game players on social media, Discord, and Reddit,” Janowicz said. “Many of them described a feeling of emptiness and a range of various emotions after finishing an engaging video game. First, my colleague, Dr. Piotr Klimczyk, explored it in his qualitative study. Then, based on his findings, we developed a quantitative measure of post-game depression and conducted our research.”
To explore these questions, the researchers conducted two separate studies. The first study aimed to create and test the initial version of the Post-Game Depression Scale. The authors recruited participants through social media announcements, gaming forums like Reddit, and chat platforms like Discord.
The initial sample included adults who actively played video games and had recently finished a game they considered personally important. After filtering out incomplete responses and those who failed attention checks, the final sample consisted of 210 participants. The average age of this group was roughly 28 years old, and most participants reported playing games every day or almost every day.
In this first phase, participants answered a draft version of the new 20-item questionnaire. They also completed several established psychological surveys to measure their baseline mental health, including a nine-item survey to assess symptoms of clinical depression.
Additionally, the scientists used a survey to measure rumination and reflection. Rumination is a psychological term for the habit of repetitively thinking about negative experiences or emotions, while reflection refers to a healthier, more positive contemplation of one’s life. Participants also indicated the specific genre of the game they had recently finished.
Based on the responses, the researchers narrowed their new scale down to 17 questions grouped into four distinct categories. The first category, game-related ruminations, measures how often players experience intrusive thoughts about the game. The second category captures the challenging end of the experience, representing the feeling of sadness or emptiness because the story is over.
The third category measures the necessity of repeating the game, which is the immediate urge to replay the title. The final category is media anhedonia. Anhedonia is a psychological term for the inability to feel pleasure, and here it describes an inability to enjoy other games or media following the recent gaming experience.
“We found empirical confirmation of a range of experiences after finishing the video game, as reported by video game players in recent years,” Janowicz explained. “Thus, post-game depression is real and could be measured in a reliable way with our questionnaire. We found that players spending more time on RPGs are more prone to experience more intense symptoms of post-game depression. As well as those who have a stronger tendency to ruminate and more problems with processing their emotions.”
Role-playing games, or RPGs, often require players to make heavy narrative choices and build deep relationships with virtual characters. While RPGs stood out in the data, Klimczyk expects other genres to show similar effects in future research.
“The fact that the RPGs can be one of the main genres did not surprise me, however, I would put them in the same row as narrative and/or adventure games in the style of old point-and-click games, but that’s just my personal bias,” Klimczyk said. “I hope that in the future, another team or we will be able to conduct such research on a much bigger pool of participants. I believe that these genres will be up there with the RPGs. It is a guess, although an educated one, to quote Mrs. Dana Scully.”
The scientists conducted a second study to confirm the structure of their new scale and further test its relationship to emotional regulation. They recruited a fresh sample of 163 adult gamers using similar online channels. The average age in this second group was nearly 30 years old.
Like the first group, these participants completed the finalized 17-item scale, along with surveys to measure their general depressive symptoms and their tendencies toward rumination. In addition, the second study included an emotional processing scale to see how participants handled difficult feelings in their daily lives.
The authors specifically looked at emotional retention, which is the tendency to hold onto unpleasant emotions and feel overwhelmed by them. They also measured emotional avoidance, which describes how often a person tries to escape or suppress negative feelings.
The second study confirmed that the 17-item scale is a consistent and valid way to measure this phenomenon. Game-related ruminations were the most commonly reported experience, while media anhedonia was the least intense symptom. The second study also confirmed that fans of role-playing games were the most susceptible to these lingering feelings of loss.
“I would add here that our research shows how video games can be a source of very complex and emotional experiences,” Klimczyk noted. “We see our research fitting the overarching theme of eudaimonic experiences in video games, area of study that, we believe, will gain bigger traction in the future. Our study is but a small stepping stone towards that.” A eudaimonic experience refers to media that provides a sense of meaning, personal insight, or emotional growth, as opposed to simple enjoyment.
While the research offers a detailed look at this modern phenomenon, the authors warn against overstating the clinical severity of the condition. “In some cases, people implied that by ‘post-game depression’ we mean a clinical case of depressive episode,” Klimczyk explained. “This is not the case, although, as Dr. Janowicz wrote, the link with lower mental health exists.”
“The term was coined by the gamers. Googling ‘post-game depression’ before our research gained traction, one would find a vast amount of Reddit posts about that specific feeling that they described by using such a term. We decided to keep it that way.”
Because the research relied on cross-sectional surveys, the scientists only captured a single snapshot in time. A cross-sectional design means that the researchers surveyed the participants all at once, which makes it impossible to prove cause and effect.
“Our study was cross-sectional, so it is not possible to determine causal relationships between observed variables,” Janowicz said. “For example, it is possible that players with lower mental health are more prone to experience post-game depression after finishing the game, but it is also possible that post-game depression may lead to a decline in their mental health.”
The researchers plan to conduct longitudinal studies, which track the same individuals over a long period, to solve this puzzle. “Longitudinal research will be a huge step toward overcoming the limitations of our research,” Janowicz said. “It would allow us to determine causal relationships, and assess what are antecedents and consequences of post-game depression. Moreover, comparing players from various countries will be very interesting.”
Despite these limitations, the newly developed scale has already made a significant impact. “We got a lot of interest and attention on our findings around the world,” Janowicz said, noting the positive reaction from the gaming community. “Many people contacted us to discuss our findings. That’s very nice to see this work inspire many people and be interesting to video game players, who found it valid and described their real feelings.”
The authors hope other scientists will build upon their foundational work to better understand how interactive media affects human psychology. “If anyone would like to use our scale or adapt it for their language, we warmly welcome scholars to contact us,” Janowicz added. “We will be happy to help and to develop research on post-game depression worldwide.”
The study, “Post-game depression scale – a new measure to capture players’ experiences after finishing video games,” was authored by Kamil Janowicz and Piotr Klimczyk.
