How Open World Games Helped Me Deal with Grief.

By Sam Coles: 

Hello, it has been a while since I have written anything on this blog. “Where have you been”? I hear you cry, well the last year or so have been emotional and trying within my life from heartbreak with both grief and love as well just my mind having a burnout. I want to just briefly want to talk about how I dealt with it and how video games (Specifically open world games) helped me through grief, with the worlds I escaped to as well the community that helped.  

What transpired these events? Well last year was a year of loss for me, my dog passed away, lost the woman who I thought loved me and then finally and most tragic my mother lost her life. For the first time in my life, I felt lost and scared within a metaphorical tunnel of darkness with no light to guide me. I was on my own, as my mother was the person I talked to the most in my family, as she would happily talk to me about anything even video games as she did like them. She could never get to grips of the 3D realm of games, as should could quite get the concept of three-dimensional movement, however she would always enjoy watching me play the story driven games, she especially loved watching Red Dead Redemption as she was a huge fan of westerns.  

When all of this transpired, I was having a bit of a mental breakdown, I didn’t really want to finish games and all passion for the medium was sucked out of me as if my soul was drained. I became an empty husk of a person, not really talking to anyone I almost completely shut down.  

However, I did find solace in the form of Death Stranding as that game is all about loss and reconnecting with life again. I was sent the game in the height of the Covid lockdown in 2020, when Kojima Productions themselves sent me the game. At first, I didn’t really get the game and its themes, but when the series of unfortunate events began to take place, I started to the relate with the game more. For starters the main protagonist Sam “Porter” Bridges does like to be touched, I was the exact same when everything fell apart, the whole idea of reconnecting wasn’t really an idea I really wanted to do, similar to Sam in the story I was content of being on my own. When eventually that would change, I would venture out in the world establishing connections with people I had not seen in years, similar to how Sam reconnects communities in the game. It opened my eyes, and got my mojo back for games again however the only type of game I can really get through at the moment are open world games. 

Why open world? Well, they are what I like to call virtual holidays these days, as they are very much equal to the real-world counterpart. However, you can explore fantasy realms, from the frost laden mountains of Skyrim to neon lit and rain-soaked streets of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077. Not only that you can live history through a virtual scope from the Dane and Anglo-Saxon conflict of 9th century England in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, to the bamboo of forest in Feudal Japan in Ghost of Tsushima. These types of games helped me forget a lot of the darkness that once plagued my mind, as sometimes I didn’t really do any of the main objectives or quests, I would just turn the heads up display off and explore at my own pace with no goal in mind to see what unfolds within these worlds.   

I got back into finishing games, although some of these games would take me up to 60-70 hours to beat (looking at you Assassin’s Creed Valhalla), but honest I didn’t mind as I could just zone out and explore and enjoy the stories they produced. As much ire Far Cry gets these days, Far Cry 6 was a game that really helped me relax and I know that sounds like an oxymoron with how over the top the game is. However, it’s the moments when you are not engaged in combat, where you are just driving across the Cuban inspired region of Yara as you take in the beautiful jungles, lush beaches and densely populated towns and cities. Far Cry 6 was the first game I finished in a long time, and I took a sigh of relief after with how much I enjoyed the adventure. It’s these sorts of experiences that made me smile again with video games, because they revealed to me how beautiful they can be and I could be wide eyed when I was in awe with their beauty.  

My mother used to love watching these types of games, as she admired the beauty and hard work the developers put in with how much detail there is. Playing through games such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Cyberpunk 2077 and Death Stranding at the moment, I can almost feel my mother’s soul leaning on my shoulders watching the game with me, as she explores these worlds with me, and that she is always with me.