From the sacred rituals of online communities to the moral dilemmas of post-apocalyptic worlds, this section explores how games mirror — and shape — human psychology. Discover how cognition, emotion, identity, and storytelling collide in digital spaces, revealing what play can teach us about ourselves, our culture, and the worlds we build together.
Prove You’re Human and the Horror of Having to Prove You Count
A Gaming Psych analysis of Prove You’re Human, the upcoming game from the creators of 1000xRESIST. Explore CAPTCHA, AI, digital selves, classification systems, and the psychology of being made conditional.
Why Too Much Choice Makes Games Feel Like Work
Choice is central to game design, but too many options can overwhelm players and weaken agency. Here’s how choice overload affects games, decision-making, skill trees, open worlds and player motivation.
Why Good Game Tutorials Feel Invisible: The Psychology of Teaching Players Through Play
Good game tutorial design uses psychology to teach players through action, feedback, memory, and failure. Here’s why the best tutorials feel invisible, and why bad ones feel like homework with button prompts.
The Psychology of GIFT: Why Online Games Bring Out the Worst in Normal People
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or GIFT, began as an internet joke about anonymity and awful online behaviour. Here is the psychology behind why online games can turn ordinary players into lobby goblins, and why anonymity is only part of the story.
When Freedom Starts Feeling Like Paperwork: Decision Fatigue and the Ubisoft Problem
Why Ubisoft games like Far Cry 6, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Star Wars Outlaws can turn freedom into cognitive labour through choice overload, repeated low-value decisions, and open-world fatigue
Promise Mascot Agency and the Psychology of Rebuilding
Promise Mascot Agency turns resilience, coping, and rebuilding into gameplay. Here’s why its strange mascot-management loop works as a quietly powerful psychological experience.
How Life is Strange Reunion Failed Safi
How Life is Strange: Reunion failed Safi by sidelining the Abraxas House mystery, diluting its emotional core, and choosing spectacle over intimacy.
Dispatch and the Moralisation of Ability
Dispatch raises a bigger question than whether its ending works. What happens when narrative games turn ability, performance, and accessibility into a moral test?
Halo and the Halo Effect: Why We Keep Forgiving Cortana
Why do players keep forgiving Cortana, even at her worst? This article explores Halo, the halo effect, and how intelligence, intimacy, beauty, and vulnerability distort moral judgement in games.
The Science of Gaming: Psychological Impact, Benefits, and Myths
Explore the psychological impact of video games, from cognition and flow to social connection, mental health, aggression, and gaming disorder.
Dispatch and the Problem of Conditional Redemption
Why does Dispatch feel almost perfect until the ending? A critical essay on restorative justice, hidden metrics, and moral dissonance in games.
The Value-to-Time Proposition: Duration is Not Value: A Three-Stage Framework for Why Games Feel 'Worth It'
A deep psychological analysis of how players judge value in games through price, playtime, pacing, and endings.
The Architecture of Guilt: A Freudian Dissection of the Psychical Landscape in Silent Hill 2
A Freudian analysis of Silent Hill 2, exploring James Sunderland’s guilt, repression, punishment, and the psychical symbolism of the town and its monsters.
When Family Becomes a Weapon: Criminal Kinship in Like a Dragon
From Kiryu’s orphanage roots to Ichiban’s 'Bond Levels,' this analysis examines the shift from feudal yakuza structures to modern chosen families. Discover how the Like a Dragon series uses attachment theory and 'identity fusion' to explain why we bleed for the group.
When the Company Becomes the Curse: Yuppie Psycho and the Psychology of Institutional Horror
A psychologically rich reading of Yuppie Psycho as institutional horror, exploring status anxiety, learned helplessness, resentment, nepotism, and why the game feels more psychologically convincing than politically stable.
The Horror of Continuity: SOMA, Identity, and the Ship of Theseus
SOMA turns the Ship of Theseus into existential horror, exposing the self as a fragile claim of continuity that can be copied, stranded, and abandoned.
The Affirming Isolation of the Statement Game: Sorry We’re Closed and the Limits of Queer Horror as Declaration
A critical essay on Sorry We’re Closed, queer horror, liberation metaphors, and the risk that statement games can affirm their audience so strongly that they end up persuading only the already persuaded.
Why the Games Industry Keeps Coming Back to Self-Determination Theory
Why does the games industry keep returning to Self-Determination Theory? A Simply Put Psych essay on autonomy, competence, relatedness, and the psychology of player motivation.
When “Unplayable” Is the Point: What an unplayable game?! Gets Right About Accessibility
How an unplayable game?! turns accessibility into a design argument, exposing the myth of the default player and showing why accessibility is part of the work itself.
Why Resident Evil 9 Stops Being Scary Once You Notice the Bottles
A psychology-informed look at how Resident Evil 9 uses selective interactivity, and why Grace’s bottle mechanic weakens immersion, tension, and fear in survival horror.