3 Video Games That Confront and Combat Loneliness
Beyond fostering social interaction, these games tackle the complex issues of connection
There’s ample evidence suggesting that playing video games may positively affect brain function. Various studies have found that video games improve players’ cognitive abilities including perception, memory, and reaction time. Other studies have linked fluid intelligence and high performing players of multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs), which are “complex, socially interactive and intellectually demanding” games (e.g., League of Legends).
And though the “parent’s instinct” reaction is that prolonged game play is isolating (and there is a strong argument, certainly, that lack of face-to-face interaction can hinder the development of social skills and empathy), research has shown that playing multiplayer online game play does foster social engagement and bonding.
But beyond the group experience and banter of playing in a virtual group, some games can speak more intimately to individual gamers, tackling the complex emotion of loneliness and the bigger issues of self and connection using the particular evocative and immersive capacity of interactive art.
If openness and awareness are among the most powerful tools in addressing loneliness, these games could provide a compelling, and beautiful way to confront the issue, and a vehicle to share it with others.
Sea of Solitude (2019)
In Sea of Solitude, a new adventure game from German developer Jo-Mei, loneliness is an endless sea, and makes monsters out of people. Players assume the role of Kay, a young woman whose loneliness takes physical form, turning her into a creature with glowing eyes. Navigating a submerged world, Kay confronts the demons of disconnection that threaten her as she quests to reclaim her human form.
The game has earned accolades for its striking visuals, and in confronting themes of loneliness and disconnection directly, even bluntly, it provides something more than a virtual journey. The game’s creator, writer, and designer Cornelia Geppert, told an EA press briefing: “In SOS, we try to show how people experience different kinds of loneliness, but also how outsiders, friends and family, see those who struggle.” After she introduced the game at E3 last year, “literally hundreds of people wrote, just because I’d started talking about this,” Geppert told Variety. “They didn’t feel as lonely anymore, because someone was talking about this and putting their name out there.”
In a thoughtful GamesRadar review, Heather Wald wrote: “Sea of Solitude’s representation of loneliness made me feel brave enough to open up about my own struggles with the feeling, and it also offered me a sense of catharsis I’ve never experienced before.”
“By sharing pain,” Geppert told Wald, “one feels less alone.”
Thomas Was Alone (2013)
The billing for puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone, is both comically understated and irresistibly charming: “a minimalist game about jumping and friendship.” The game, created by Mike Bithell, also does the seemingly impossible: it creates a complex narrative and affecting characters out of… rectangles. TWA tells the story of a group of freshly self-aware artificial-intelligence units, who, as they jump through the game’s levels discover things like concepts of self and friendship.
Reviewers praise not only the game’s writing, music, and narration by Danny Wallace, but its astounding knack for wringing connection and emotion from the simplest elements. As one game platform commenter put it: “Most I’ve cried over characters in a video game ever. And they’re rectangles.”
In his VentureBeat review, Louie Castro-Garcia writes that the game served “as a little reminder to me that I am never truly alone and that almost everyone gets lonely and questions their purpose. The trick is to get out there and find someone to share that with. Fears and insecurities don’t seem that daunting when you realize that you are not the only one that has them.”
Journey (2012)
In Journey, from thatgamecompany, players assume the role of a nameless robed figure traveling through a desert with the simple goal of reaching a mountain. There are no instructions and no or text or dialog. The game has earned superlatives for its craft and stunning physical beauty. Played alone, the game has been called meditative, and moving.
But Journey’s most striking element is its quietly powerful multi-player function, which drops people into other players’ games without notice or identification. Without words (players can only communicate in shouts; as Polygon notes, the limitations of inter-player communication make the game “asshole-proof”), the players discover how to help each other in the journey.
“In a way that no other multiplayer game has done, I felt the necessity of companionship in Journey,” Forbes’ game writer Erik Kain writes. “In literally no MMO I’ve ever played have I felt that need, but in Journey that sense of struggle feeds directly into a sense of camaraderie. Walking slowly into the light at the top of the mountain…next to that other player. I was nearly speechless. It was so much more profound than walking alone.”
