- What Is Anhedonia?
- Take our Depression Test
- Find an expert on mood disorders near me.
Key points
- Hobbies form a personal baseline that can reveal subtle shifts in pleasure that standard screeners miss.
- Anhedonia shows up in actions. Dropping a favorite game may signal underlying depression before sadness.
- Gaming can be a valuable clinical tool. Asking about video games builds rapport and tracks cognitive health.
“What fun games have you been playing lately?”
I ask this question at every visit when I have a patient I know likes to play video games.
For someone who regularly plays video games, the answer can offer a surprising amount of information about how much pleasure, interest, and motivation they are capable of experiencing at any given time. A person who normally plays video games on a daily basis may speak about how excited they are for the brand-new role-playing game (RPG) they started last week. On the flip side, they could indicate they have not touched their console in a month, that they bought that RPG and never actually started it, or that they find themselves switching from one game to another without finding anything they like.
In isolation, these changes in behavior may be normal. People come and go from hobbies, and their interests shift over time. However, in the right context, these behaviors can be useful clues indicating a problem is brewing. They may be an indication that anhedonia is present, warranting further evaluation.
What Is Anhedonia?
Anhedonia is the loss or reduction of interest and pleasure in activities that would normally bring enjoyment. It is one of the two core symptoms of depression. Yet, my clinical observations have been that it often gets missed—leading to misdiagnosis or delayed treatment.
Anhedonia is a symptom that can be harder to recognize than people might expect. Sadness is relatively easy to conceptualize. If someone feels miserable every day, they feel it is abnormal and tend to understand that something is wrong. A reduction in enjoyment can be more subtle, particularly when it develops gradually.
Anhedonia becomes problematic because it results in behavioral changes that have negative snowballing effects. Someone with anhedonia might stop meeting up with friends. They may stop exercising. The lack of behavioral activation results in fewer outlets for enjoyment and fewer opportunities for socialization, which ultimately makes the condition worse.
Hobbies as a Baseline
With anhedonia, hobbies create an informal but important baseline. If I know that a patient normally plays video games most evenings, I have some idea of what enjoyment looks like for that particular patient. If, several months later, they tell me they have stopped playing entirely, I would want to know why.
Sometimes there is an obvious explanation. They may have had life changes that resulted in shifting commitments, such as increased work demands or a newborn, or they shifted their focus toward other activities, like training for a marathon. In these scenarios, their interests have simply changed.
If the explanation is ever, “I don’t know. Nothing really sounds good,” that gets my attention. The shift doesn’t even have to involve stopping altogether. Another manifestation could be wanting to enjoy an activity and discovering that you cannot. A patient might sit down to play every day because it’s part of their routine. However, instead of becoming absorbed in a game, they spend half an hour trying to decide what to play, get easily distracted scrolling on their phone, or start playing and eventually turn the system off out of boredom.
It is common for gamers to joke about having hundreds of games in their “backlog” without anything to play in the moment. This scenario is usually more about having too many options and simply indecision. When someone who is normally enthusiastic about games suddenly finds that nothing seems appealing, the behavior becomes far more significant.
- What Is Anhedonia?
- Take our Depression Test
- Find an expert on mood disorders near me.
The same can be said about anticipation. A large part of enjoying a hobby happens before we ever engage in it. Staying attuned to video game news, tracking new releases, and participating in online forums are all part of the hobby. Depression can flatten this anticipatory pleasure and social behavior as well.
I might notice a patient talking about a huge video game release they are excited for, only to realize it has come and gone without them actually playing it. This is particularly relevant right now. One of the biggest video game releases of all time is expected to come out in November of 2026: Grand Theft Auto VI. It is expected to make over $5 billion and sell more than 45 million copies. Without getting into the details of the game, it is safe to say almost every single mental health provider is going to have patients playing it.
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This is one reason I tend to ask patients about the content of their lives rather than relying exclusively on broad symptomatic questions or screeners. The shift in interest and activity is important and worth paying attention to.
The activity itself is not particularly important. I would do the same thing if I noticed a patient who is a tennis fanatic suddenly stopped playing tennis. I mention video games specifically because they tend to have a complicated public perception in the mental health community and are overlooked as a useful tool in our patient evaluations. Video games are a good example of this phenomenon because gaming involves several cognitive and behavioral components that can be impacted by depression: motivation to begin, anticipation of reward, sustained interest, concentration, and the ability to experience pleasure once the activity has started.
For a provider, these changes can become useful warning signs. Whether or not we actually have an interest in video games, asking patients who do enjoy them about their hobby opens up a new avenue for clinical assessment and helps build rapport.
