These games offer us insight into the benefits of appreciating time alone, such as opportunities for self-reflection, self-discovery, and the chance to curate enriching experiences or environments for ourselves. The other games offer their own lens on loneliness and solitary seasons of life. In it, you spend 400 elapsed days waiting for the King to wake up and living at a slow pace. This list was inspired by the experience of playing the unusually solitary (and long) game The Longing and the Twitter thread that followed. “With mindfulness, there are even more benefits to gain from intentional consumption of media,” she says, “games can be tools we use to recover or grow, psychologically, and our time with them isn't wasted if they provide us insights or rest we need.” Garcia’s Screen Therapy project employs Positive Media Psychology research to highlight and interpret meaningful experiences with games and movies. We teamed up with Courtney Garcia’s Screen Therapy channel to curate a list of games that give us a chance to experience being alone in different ways. In a culture that often assumes that the route to happiness is with another person, it can benefit us to acknowledge that being alone is not always a bad thing. It can even be gaining a sense of scale of the universe in a game like Everything. It can be the way different elements combine properties in games like Zelda Breath of the Wild. It can be the embodied understanding of gravity and momentum in real-time physics games like Portal. This can be the simple chemical puzzle-solving of a game like Sokobond. It's true not just about their game that unlocks the wonder of chemistry, but about many other games that often get children doing science without even realising it. That quote from the creators of Happy Atoms inspired this list of games. Knowledge of chemistry or other sciences is necessary to solve many real-world problems, but the way it's taught now often fails to capture students’ imaginations, discouraging experimentation and discovery." "Science is an incredibly important subject that many students never fully grasp. Physics, Chemistry and Biology is something for the nerds, geeks and highly intelligent children at school and not for us or our children. Science can be a subject that many of us see as something for other people. These games all have in common, a complex control system that can be put to use in imaginative and creative ways to get the edge over your opponents. Or it could be learning the complex move lists in a game like Street Fighter. Maybe it’s learning the perfect combination of angles and trajectories in Videoball. Or, perhaps, it’s using the limited running and jumping slightly better than other players to get a win in Fall Guys. This might be understanding how the propulsion of your car lets you take to the air and hit a perfect shot in Rocket League. Whether you rise through the league tables, or just improve compared to your family, the satisfaction or getting to grips with something so monumentally challenging is really satisfying. Rather than offering assistance, these games leave you to it. Rather than relying on the stats of your character or player, you have to execute the moves yourself with timing proficiency and instinct. Whereas many games simplify getting around, these games make the complexity and depth of their movement systems part of the joy of playing them. There are a small group of games that hone this challenge down to the mechanics of moving around the environment. It takes time to understand their systems, mechanics, objectives and worlds. When someone plays a game too much it’s easy to think they are taking an easy route to something entertaining, like junk food. Games offer us challenges on many levels.
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