Is Ingress good or bad for your mental health?
PkmnTrainerJ
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in General
Thinking on Niantic’s recent post here:
as well as this thread;
and wanted to prompt a discussion here on it.
Tagged:
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PkmnTrainerJ
✭✭✭✭✭
Thinking on Niantic’s recent post here:
as well as this thread;
and wanted to prompt a discussion here on it.
Comments
Depends on the crew you deal with. My box is hyperactive so mental health can get a little hairy without perspective or others to remind that it's ok to miscalculate, ok to want to give someone the business for being antisocial, or give a compliment to someone who is fleeter afoot or solves problems in ways you wouldn't have done.
Depends. Do you enjoy going for walks, hikes, and/or driving? Being pushed to reach new places, have every small town near you transformed into a game world to explore? If so and you stick to those it's great for your mental health. If you turn into a hyper competitive nutter, then not so much.
As with any activity, that entirely depends on what you yourself can extract joy from.
For me, the planning and execution of small/medium/large OPS is what bring me joy and failure is always an option.
For some, failure would be a deterrent from trying again, for me, it's an opportunity to improve.
The good thing about ingress is that it has many different ways to be played and any one of them can bring you joy and try to ignore those ways that don't.
You shouldn't be forcing activities in your life that don't make you happy.
Personally, I worry about the mental health of players who feel compelled to start a forum thread for every stray game-related thought they have. Do they have no one to talk to in their real lives?
It's an app on a phone
Building my local area is cathartic. And I look forward to it's destruction so that I can build it again, since the building is the activity. Recharging is basically a boring maintenance task that I tend to fail to do.
So Ingress is good for my mental health in that respect.
It becomes less so when players use stalking, harassment and intimidation to try and drive other players from the game instead of enjoying the competition.
Ingress changed my life. I'm healthier, happier and smarter because of ingress.
Don’t worry, I’m all good. Just like to generate discussions amongst a wider audience. 😊
I'd be curious to hear from people who have quit playing this game and why. Of course the people who still play this game don't find any issues with it, on a mental health kinda level. With the paranoia and how aggressive people can be with this game, I'd say this game isn't always good for the mental health, at all. Add in peoples obsession and their own paranoia problems and this game is riddled with mental health red flags.
I'm a white man in my 40s who has never had to deal with people following me around neighborhoods, until now. I've never had to deal with people scouring the internet for breadcrumbs of my life and then sharing them with other strangers, until now. I've never been parked on a street playing a phone game and had people approach my car, who I've never met and greet me with my real name, until now.
That stuff sticks with ya and kinda starts to make you wonder about other things. Sure, some folks can shrug that off, but when portals around your house start being capped, regularly at weird hours and not capped anywhere else in the city, it starts to hit a little differently. (thankfully this hasn't happened in awhile) I can only imagine being a woman rolling solo.
I agree there are some people that really shouldn't play the game. I've been followed and intimidated many times and it still happens on a regular basis. When you get chased down and they jump out of the car and stare you down it feels a bit intimidating. And then when you flee they chase you for miles. Happened to me very recently and we are told that it is only going to get worse. Those types of players shouldn't be allowed to play the game. But they do. So be aware. It pushes players away from the game. It's a strategy to reduce the amount of opponents by fear. And it's encouraged and celebrated. It's why I avoid the opposition at all costs. It's not safe to engage with them anymore. So for some the mental aspect of the game is too much and they push their problems onto others. It's a reflection of societal problems. Humans can be terrible at times.
I've mostly quit, only turn on to blow stuff up every now and then. I quit for a couple of reasons, it was no longer fun fielding, I would spend 5 hours a night (played at the weekends when I was on nightshift to keep myself awake), driving for nearly 2 to 3 hours, half an hour roughly hacking portals the the rest walking along the spine throwing to the anchors, but all that work and it would be destroyed and blocked by the time i woke up. It was usually anywhere between 4 to 10 opposition players who would do this, so I started just not enjoying putting in so much work in a 1 to 4 or 1 to 10 disadvantage (not blaming the opponents of course, though I didnt like 2 who had returned to playing as they were thoroughly unpleasant to me when I had only started playing, it's their jobs to destroy and block). I enjoyed the walk g side of the spine as it was a decent way of keeping myself semi fit, but the set up was just too much and not fun.
Then niantic decided to up the hack time, which would have made my 5 hours go up to 6 hours, an extra hour of the less fun bit. At that point I was constantly trying to plan and getting annoyed at how much effort, so when niantic decided to change the hack time back, I decided I was done with the game that no longer felt enjoyable but instead felt like a chore and was going to eb even more of a chore. I don't regret it either, it's meant I can spend those weekends where I'm awake for nightshift playing my switch (stardew valley, highly recommend on any console), watching shows, saving petrol money, and now gling for walks to play pogo. Every now and then blowing stuff up if I happen to turn the game on to make edits on the map or submit something if there's enough light
It really depends. It has helped me to explore and mold out the person I've become to understanding how our areas change throughout the decades.
I don't know if the dopamine also makes us angry when we start to see how the game is no longer new. The struggle to change up gameplay to make exploring a new thing or perhaps a new experience altogether. The gamification is perhaps the hardest thing to apply on a world level.
According to the wonderful messages i get ingame from other people i doubt that this game is good for mental health... :-D
Well said.
I have found Ingress good for de-stressing and taking my mind off issues. Helped me a lot.
But, if you are subject to stalking or harassment I've seen others suffer a lot of stress over it.
On average, very positive.
Considering that I have interacted with bad or toxic characters and bots out there; Ingress is bad for the mental health. It's one of the reasons why I wouldn't endorse this game to friends or family. Walking in a forest without using your mobile phone is good for your mental health, so you can decompress from daily stress and help your brain too.
https://www.sciencealert.com/experiment-reveals-what-1-hour-in-nature-does-to-the-human-brain
When there are piles of critical problems like gaming lag, spoofing, multi-accounting, features that have been promised (fast reporting for C.O.R.E. members) not being solved, addressed, reviewed or not allowed to be widely discussed. Impressive.
This is something I've thought about for a while, particularly since the start of the pandemic. Ingress has been a good reason to get out and walk more, but it can't be healthy to spend 8 hours working in front of a screen only to spend another few hours walking in front of a screen.
The most mentally healthy I feel while playing Ingress is going on a hike where the Portal is the destination, and I can be present and enjoy the walk in between without having my Scanner open.
Good for me in general.
Since I am in a community group that follows the rules of gameplay and has the same level of social common sense.
However, it is a bit frustrating when confronting multi-account or location-disguised players.
From that point of view, certain games are not good for my mental health and I have stopped belonging to community groups.
That's been the reason for Niantic looking at AR glasses.
Playing a mobile video game while walking also reduces situational awareness, which is why some players get into an accident. An example is a 16-year-old who was hit by a bus in Brazil while playing Ingress on his mobile phone. In PoGo, they have this daily incense research encouraging players to walk but keep the game app open and catch pokemon. Sometimes, players get so excited and focused on the game and don't have that situational awareness to protect themselves from danger. It's better to close the game, walk, and enjoy the benefits of nature and mindfulness instead.
Something of note. The original walking method for Ingress did not have people constantly staring at their phones (well they didn't need to). You could tap once, and walk on. Glyphing changed this model because people started to try and glyph while walking. Prior to that there was nothing to do between portals, unless you were dumping your keys (which Prime has fixed at least).