For the last decade, the wellness sector has been promoting the belief that for calmness to happen, you have to disconnect yourself from the world around you. You must unplug, take a break and not use your phone, TV or other forms of technology. Their message has been consistent and well-intentioned: technology and tranquility do not go together.
However, there are millions of gamers across the world that play Japanese role-playing games (JRPG) and find that JRPGs can promote a restorative experience. When they participate in a JRPG gameplay session, players are positively affected due to how engaged they become. Players feel relaxed rather than stressed, relaxed rather than anxious and connected to others rather than isolated.
The process by which JRPGs create a restorative experience is not complicated. Psychologists refer to it as flow (psychological flow). Flow is described as being so engaged and focused on an activity that you forget about everything else around you and only pay attention to the activity at hand. Flow is characterized by an activity that is both challenging enough to hold your attention, but not challenging enough that it causes frustration.
JRPGs can achieve flow through multiple factors, including the gradual difficulty of the game and the continual reward system built into the game. The pacing of turn-based games also eliminates the pressure often found in competitive games, which can cause mental stress. The game's ongoing narrative keeps players motivated to continue playing the game. The game's progression system also rewards players with a sense of accomplishment, but also keeps them engaged without creating anxiety.
JRPGs have used town themes to promote wellness without meaning to do so; however, town themes found in JRPGs have developed a renewed reputation as wellness tools. For example, shortly after completing hours of dungeon crawling, the music playing in the safe town or village you just entered will change from a tense feel to a warm feel. The tempo of your music will also slow down from what you just heard while dungeon crawling to what you are now hearing in the safe village. Only sound lets you know the game is safe to relax. Players report reduced heart rates in segments, and JRPG town music is used as study accompaniment, meditation, and ambient sound for focusing on tasks.
Entertainment experiences that prioritize sustained engagement rather than quick stimulation align with what neuroscience has shown to be healthy cognitive function and emotional regulation. Services like Kingbet89 and similar services are becoming increasingly popular due to the greater awareness that entertainment can have a deep level of engagement without overwhelming people. JRPGs have represented this for over 40 years without anyone calling it a "wellness philosophy."
The physical comfort of turn-based gameplay is more important than most discussions about gaming and health recognize. In an age when video games are becoming synonymous with carpal tunnel syndrome, eye strain, and muscle tension from playing competitively, JRPGs provide something genuinely revolutionary; a deep gaming experience you can enjoy while holding your tea cup in one hand, taking time between turns to reflect, stretch, or just breathe. The lack of time pressure changes the physical experience from an endurance test into genuine relaxation.
The cognitive benefits provided by narrative engagement in JRPGs cannot be recreated through passive entertainment. The fact that you follow a complex JRPG story over 60 hours requires you to have a continual level of attention, to remember past events and to combine multiple narrative threads into one, and research has found that these types of cognitive skills help maintain mental sharpness. In contrast to passive scrolling through your feeds, JRPGs consolidate your attention to allow you to leave each session having practiced creative concentration in contrast to creative distraction.
The social aspect adds yet another unexpected benefit of creating wellness. JRPG communities are generally more supportive and allow for discussion-oriented interaction and less toxic competition than many gaming communities. Sharing experiences, recommending titles, and discussing the storyline consolidate into shared cultural experiences that create a greater level of social connection for players. For adults who are exhausted by traditional social media, JRPG communities offer an alternative model of online socializing that allows for enriching social experiences rather than depleting them.
The emotional processing supporting JRPGs must not be neglected as an added benefit for wellness. JRPGs contain themes such as loss, growth, friendship, and perseverance that give players a framework for processing their real-life experiences with those same emotions. In fact, many players have said that the narratives from JRPGs help them to explore through their own emotional difficulties by giving them a way to articulate their experiences in an emotional context.
For those of you who may doubt that a video game can serve as an avenue for wellness, try conducting this simple experiment: spend a night with a well-crafted JRPG as opposed to scrolling through social media. You will notice a significant difference, and you don’t need to be a wellness guru to understand it.
Compared to other forms of entertainment such as passive entertainment (e.g., movies or television), JRPGs offer cognitive advantages not found elsewhere. JRPGs require players to pay attention, remember events as they occur over time, synthesise multiple pieces of information into one cohesive narrative, and develop strategies to achieve their goals and complete tasks. These skills have been shown through research to help individuals maintain their mental functioning throughout their lives. By contrast, passive forms of entertainment break your attention down into extremely short intervals as opposed to focusing your attention for long periods of time, as happens when you play JRPGs. You come out of a gaming session practising focused or attentive thought rather than practising being distracted.
The emotional processing that JRPGs can provide players with should not be overlooked as a potential wellness benefit. Players often find that the themes found in many JRPGs (i.e., loss, growth, friendships, and perseverance) can provide them with models to help process similar situations they may face in real life. Many players indicate that the narrative structure of JRPGs provided them with a way to articulate or understand feelings and experiences that they had previously struggled to communicate or understand.
JRPG communities have a unique way of providing unexpected wellness benefits to people who engage with them from a social standpoint. One way is that the majority of the people who frequent these communities do so in a supportive, discussion-based manner as opposed to the highly competitive and toxic atmospheres found in many other online gaming environments. Through sharing experiences with one another, recommending new games, and providing different interpretations of the games' narratives JPRG community members develop a real social bond with one another that improves their emotional reserve rather than exhausting it. For adults who find mainstream social media to be draining, JRPG communities provide them with a viable option for being engaged in an online environment that brings about positive mood improvement.
