In January, two Polish psychologists — Kamil Janowicz at SWPS University and Piotr Klimczyk at the Stefan Batory Academy, who also moonlights as a narrative designer at Orion Belt Games — published the first peer-reviewed scale for measuring "post-game depression" in Current Psychology. The 17-item Post-Game Depression Scale has four subscales: intrusive rumination about the plot and characters, difficulty processing the ending, a felt compulsion to replay, and reduced interest in any other media afterward. RPGs trigger it most strongly. The researchers were careful to call it grief, not a clinical disorder. Gaming press picked it up in late March; the conversation hasn't stopped.

1. It's a Real Phenomenon, and It's Grief (Janowicz, Klimczyk)

The Polish researchers behind the new scale say post-game depression is measurable parasocial grief, distinct from clinical depression and worth recognizing.

A 90-hour relationship with a fictional world is a real relationship, and losing it is a real loss. Kamil Janowicz, the SWPS University lead author, frames it as parasocial grief: "P-GD is a specific type of grief after loss, reminiscent of parting with a loved one or the end of an important life stage. Our research shows that for many gamers, the virtual world becomes such a significant source of emotions that returning to everyday life requires time and appropriate psychological tools." The four subscales — rumination, difficulty letting go, compulsion to replay, anhedonia toward other media — map onto a recognizable grief profile.

The label is doing real work, and it isn't "clinical depression." Piotr Klimczyk: "This is not a clinical case of depressive episode, although... the link with lower mental health exists." They also note the direction of causation is unclear — people with worse mental health may simply be more susceptible to PVGD rather than caused by it. The paper also finds that RPGs trigger the strongest reactions, which fits a parasocial-attachment model: more time, more agency, more character development means more bond, means more loss.

2. Stop Pathologizing a Normal Aesthetic Response (Pete Etchells, Andrew Przybylski)

Two of the most credentialed gaming-wellbeing researchers have spent years arguing that giving every emotional response a clinical name does more harm than good.

A great game is supposed to leave you feeling something when it ends. Pete Etchells, a Bath Spa University psychology professor and the author of "Lost in a Good Game," has built a career pushing back on the framing that intense engagement with games is inherently pathological. He co-authored a paper arguing the WHO's gaming disorder classification is built on bad science. The book's whole premise is that games are an emotionally serious medium — which means they should be expected to produce emotionally serious responses, the same way novels and films do.

The data on gaming and wellbeing is less alarming than the headlines. Andrew Przybylski, professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, ran a 2022 study using digital trace data from seven games — including Animal Crossing, Apex Legends, and EVE Online — and found no causal link between play and mental health. His core finding: motivation matters far more than quantity. "If they felt they had to play, they felt worse. If they played because they loved it, then the data did not suggest it affected their mental health." The implication for PVGD: feeling sad at the end of a beloved game is not a syndrome. It's evidence the game worked.

3. The Crash Is Designed (Druckmann, Miyazaki)

The auteur game designers openly say the emotional devastation is the point. The live-service version of the same craft is just the monetized version.

The grief is the product. Neil Druckmann, who directed The Last of Us Part II at Naughty Dog, has said certain sequences are explicitly designed to "make players feel dirty" — and that's the deliverable. "I'd rather have people passionately hate it than just be like, 'Yeah, it was OK.'" Hidetaka Miyazaki, the FromSoftware president behind Dark Souls and Elden Ring, has articulated the same principle in aesthetic terms: "I feel something beautiful needs something ugly — something that's depraved or tragic to heighten and embolden that beauty." The post-game emptiness isn't a side effect — it's the craft working as intended. The fact that RPGs cause the strongest PVGD is consistent with this: RPGs are the genre where designers have the most tools to build attachment, and they use them.

The darker version is when there's no artistic payoff — only retention metrics. Live-service and games-as-a-service products use the same attachment mechanics for very different reasons: dopamine loops, battle passes, and dark patterns engineered to mirror gambling. When the servers go down — MultiVersus (May 30, 2025), XDefiant (June 3, 2025) — players are left with grief they were monetized into, sometimes after paying $99.99 for the Founder's Pack. The Druckmann-Miyazaki version of designed grief at least makes meaning out of the loss. The GaaS version just charges you for it.

Where This Lands

The fight isn't really about whether the feeling is real — everyone agrees something happens after a great game ends. The fight is what to do with it. Janowicz and Klimczyk argue measuring and naming a recurrent grief response gives players and clinicians a language for something that's been lived for years without one. Etchells and Przybylski argue that naming risks medicalizing what's actually just art doing its job. The designers, asked to weigh in, mostly point out that they engineered the attachment on purpose.

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