Polish researchers build the first scientific scale for post-game depression

SWPS University / Current Psychology

Fifty-three percent of people aged 6 to 64 play video games regularly, making gaming the third most popular leisure activity after television and social media. The industry has spent decades studying what keeps people playing. It has spent almost no time studying what happens when they stop.

On Reddit threads, Discord servers, and gaming forums, a phenomenon has been discussed for years under various names: the emptiness, sadness, or emotional flatness that follows finishing a long, deeply engaging game. Players describe it as a kind of grief — a sense that something meaningful has ended, with nothing equivalent to replace it. The gaming community calls it post-game depression.

Until now, no one had tried to measure it scientifically. Psychologists Kamil Janowicz of SWPS University and Piotr Klimczyk of the Stefan Batory Academy of Applied Sciences in Skierniewice, Poland, have created the first validated tool for doing so: the Post-Game Depression Scale (P-GDS). Their work, published in Current Psychology, treats a widely reported experience as a quantifiable psychological phenomenon for the first time.

Four dimensions of the post-game void

The researchers conducted two studies with a combined 373 participants, recruited through social media, Reddit, mailing lists, and Discord. Most played daily (28.1%) or almost daily (41.4%). The most common play style was solo (30.6%) or cooperating with teammates against other players (19.0%).

Through factor analysis, the team identified four distinct components of post-game depression:

• Game-related ruminations — intrusive, recurring thoughts about the game's plot, characters, or world that persist after the player has stopped
• Challenging end of experience — difficulty accepting that the game is over, a sense of loss similar to the end of an important life phase
• Necessity of replaying — a compulsive pull to restart the game, not for new content but to re-inhabit the experience
• Media anhedonia — a temporary loss of interest in other entertainment, where movies, books, or other games feel flat by comparison

Of these four dimensions, game-related ruminations were the most intensely experienced. Media anhedonia was the least intense but perhaps the most distinctive — the idea that one experience can temporarily devalue all others.

RPG fans feel it most

Role-playing games (RPGs) produced the strongest post-game depression scores, a finding that aligns with the genre's defining features. RPGs typically involve dozens or hundreds of hours of play, deep character customization, narrative choices that shape the story, and relationships with fictional characters that develop over time.

"It is in these games that players have the greatest influence on character development through their decisions, and build the strongest bonds with their characters," Janowicz said. "And the more engaging the game world and the closer the relationship with the character, the more difficult it is to return to reality once the game is over."

The finding makes intuitive sense. A player who has spent 100 hours guiding a character through moral dilemmas, forming alliances, and shaping a narrative has invested something emotionally real. When the credits roll, that investment doesn't simply evaporate.

Connected to broader mental health — but which direction?

Both studies found that higher post-game depression scores correlated with stronger general depressive symptoms and lower well-being. But the researchers are careful to note that the causal direction is unclear.

One interpretation: finishing an immersive game triggers genuinely distressing emotions — rumination, anhedonia, a sense of loss — that temporarily lower mental health. The game ending acts as a stressor.

The alternative: people who already experience depression are more vulnerable to the emotional crash of a game ending. Their existing difficulty regulating emotions amplifies the post-game response. Pre-existing tendencies toward rumination — dwelling on events pessimistically — emerged as a risk factor for intense P-GD, supporting this second interpretation.

The truth is probably some of both. The researchers describe P-GD as a "specific type of grief after loss," comparable to the end of an important relationship or life stage. For people already prone to rumination, that grief hits harder and lasts longer.

What this means for game design and players

The study raises questions that extend beyond psychology into ethics and design. Modern games are engineered to be immersive — that's their selling point. But if deep immersion reliably produces a measurable emotional crash in a subset of players, designers face a tension between engagement and well-being.

Some games have already experimented with softer endings — epilogues, post-game content, or new game modes that ease the transition rather than cutting the experience off abruptly. The P-GDS could give designers and researchers a way to measure whether such approaches actually help.

For players, the practical takeaway is recognition. The emotional flatness after finishing a beloved game isn't weakness or silliness — it's a measurable psychological response with identifiable components. Knowing that it correlates with general tendencies toward rumination might help some players recognize when they need to actively manage the transition back to everyday life.

The scale itself is preliminary. The sample was self-selected (people who respond to research calls on gaming forums are not representative of all gamers), and the cross-sectional design can't establish causation. Longitudinal studies tracking players before, during, and after completing specific games would strengthen the evidence considerably. But as a first instrument for capturing an experience that millions of people report but science had never formalized, the P-GDS fills a real gap.