We’re all aware of how video games are negatively perceived sometimes: as a bunch of meaningless pixels which do nothing but encourage violence and addiction. But for every politician, media outlet and parent declaring them the root of all evil, there are just as many academic studies indicating that gaming has many psychological, social and even physical benefits.

This was discussed by the talented Athena from AmbiGaming last year in a post on the subject of how games can be used for coping with difficult situations. After receiving personal stories sent to her anonymously, she wrote: “Everyone used games as a way to step out of their world and into a world that they knew would be orderly, follow its own rules, and ‘make sense’ in all the ways they needed their lives to make sense at the time.”

Unfortunately, life is never as simple as a video game…