Can Video Games Be a Path to Self

Key points

• Video games can be passive fantasy or a form of active imagination.
• The characters, roles, and play styles one gravitates toward can be the psyche seeking expression.
• Simple reflective and intentional practices can turn play into a genuine path of self-discovery.

A video game recently began to allow something to open in me. Since I started playing the “World of Warcraft Forever” beta, which I wrote about recently through a Jungian lens, my imagination has been exploding.¹ Ideas arrive faster than I can write them down, and powerful internal images keep surfacing in quiet moments. Something dormant within the unconscious seems to have woken up.

Much of this, I think, has to do with playing a mage. Channeling fire and arcane magics through my character became a kind of conduit for what Jung understood as the autonomous nature of the creative impulse: a force that moves through us rather than from us. Each time I cast a spell, I found myself imagining that something deeper was finding expression through the magic, something that wanted form and had been waiting for a vessel.

Jung said as much in his seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: the creative process “creates in us, through us”.²It struck me, too, that Jung saw the magician as one of the guises of spirit; spirit’s oldest archetypal images are wind and fire. No wonder the mage felt like such a creative conduit.

That experience has me returning to a question some clients ask in different ways: Is gaming just escape, or can it be something more? The honest answer is that it can be either. What makes the difference isn’t the game, but how we show up to play.

Fantasy We Watch vs. Fantasy We Enter

In passive fantasy, images drift past while we watch, and we are entertained but remain psychologically unchanged. Whereas in the Jungian concept of active imagination, we turn toward an image, speak to it, let it respond spontaneously, and we answer back. The conscious “I” steps into the scene and stays there; all sides of us are changed by this creative encounter.

At first glance, video games can look like passive fantasy at its purest: Someone else built the world, and we can sink into it for hours. Yet, games also ask us to act. We make choices and live with the consequences, which is surprisingly close to active imagination. What’s usually missing is the second half: noticing what the encounter stirs in us and allowing something deeper to find expression. When that happens, video games stop being something we consume and become something that creates through us.

When Escape Is Just Escape

It’s worth being honest that sometimes we play to numb out, and that isn’t a moral failure. Rest is real, and so is the need for relief. There can be a kindness to us in taking it easy for a while. Yet if several days vanish without a trace, or if stopping the game brings existential dread, this deserves curiosity and consideration. The escape may be pointing toward something important in your life. If gaming has become compulsive or obsessive and it’s costing your health, relationships, work, sleep, school grades, or a connection to your inner life, it’s likely worth reaching out to a therapist.

The Avatar as a Vessel

If the creative spirit needs a vessel, the avatar is often the first one we build. Consider the moment of character creation. Who do you become when you’re free to become anyone?

Some people always play the healer, keeping everyone else alive. Some reach for the berserker, the trickster, or the lone ranger who never joins a guild. Some play a gender, body, or temperament quite different from the one the world sees in them. These choices are rarely random. In Jungian terms, our characters can embody the shadow, the persona we wish we had, or help us express repressed or emerging identities.

One client of mine, a transgender woman (assigned male at birth), built a character of her authentic gender expression. Inside the game, she could live as herself: be seen, named, heard, and responded to as who she truly is, without the vigilance that daily life demanded. What might look from the outside like fantasy was something closer to sanctuary: a temenos, the protected space in which the Self can begin to take form.³

Rather than continuing to repress and suppress who she is, she had found a vessel through which the Self, the organizing principle of her psyche, could be expressed safely. Her video game sessions gave us a way in to talk about how her authentic inner core was asking to be lived more fully, in the game and beyond it. Sometimes what seeks expression through play is a creative force, and sometimes, as for her, it is the summons of the human soul.⁴

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Joy Prepares Our Minds and Bodies for Learning

Jung in Azeroth: The Psychology of WoW Forever

The point isn’t to diagnose our play style but to get curious about the figures we keep choosing. Video games can be more than an escape and become a genuine doorway into living more creatively and authentically.

Practices for Letting the Creative Spirit Play

• Set an intention before you play. Not a goal like “reach max level,” but a question: What am I looking for tonight? What part of me wants to come out and be expressed?
• Notice what you choose and what you avoid. The quests you skip and the roles you refuse can be as revealing as the ones you seek.
• Journal after a session. A few lines are enough: What moved me, what frustrated me, where did I lose track of myself, and what did I learn?
• Dialogue with your character. Write, draw, and imagine a conversation with your avatar, by hand if you can. Ask what they know that you don’t, and what they want from your life outside the game. Let them answer without editing.
• Let it continue off-screen. Take an image, spell, or landscape from the game and paint, write, or move with it. Let the creative spirit carry it somewhere the game designers never imagined.
• Bring it home. Ask what the game is asking of you in your actual life. The courage you practise in a raid may want somewhere to go on Monday morning.

Jung saw life itself as the test of spirit: a spirit that pulls us away from life, rather than back into it, is a false one. His cautionary example was Nietzsche, seized by a creative spirit so completely that the man himself was depleted and emptied.¹So, to be authentically inspired is to have spirit breathed into us.

I wonder if you will let something deeper play through you?

To find a therapist, visit thePsychology Today Therapy Directory.

1. Shelvock, M. (2026). Jung in Azeroth: The psychology of WoW Forever. Psychology Today.

2. Gitz-Johansen, T. (2020). Jung and the spirit: A review of Jung’s discussions of the phenomenon of spirit. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 65(4), 653–671. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12611

3. Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and religion. In Psychology and religion: West and East (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 11). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1938).

4. Hollis, J. (2018). Living an examined life: Wisdom for the second half of the journey. Sounds True.