How video games teach us about mental and emotional energy
I've played many, many video games over the course of my life, but I've spent by far the most of my video game time playing a series called Final Fantasy.
Ironically, the Final Fantasy series includes no fewer than 20 distinct games across its history. Final Fantasy games specialize in - well, fantasy; you typically play as a group of world-saving underdogs who travel the globe to stop some sort of magical, world-ending threat, making friends along the way.
Final Fantasy games fall within the "role playing game" (RPG) gaming genre. Among the many characteristics that define RPG's, most of your characters will have numerical point values that define all their various strengths and weaknesses.
For example, in most games, characters will have a set amount of "points" of damage they can absorb from enemy attackers. This amount of points is usually called "HP" - as in, hit points, or health points. Characters that are bigger or more durable, like a seven-foot tall armored knight, usually have more hit points than, say, a 12-year-old.
Typically, recovering HP is easy. Have your characters sleep or eat.
Some characters will have special abilities, like magic. To regulate the use of their ability, characters will have a separate numerical value, called "MP," for magic points. Casting a spell will cost MP. The more powerful the spell, the higher the cost of MP. Fans of classic versions of Final Fantasy will remember versions of the game where the most powerful spells would cost nearly or all of a character’s available MP. In one version of the game, one character - a very old man whose powers have waned over time - can remember a very powerful spell but lacks the maximum amount of MP available to cast it, symbolizing his age.
In Final Fantasy games, the use of magic has always been regarded as sacred, tiring on its user, or both. This trains the player that characters imbued with magical abilities can't endlessly cast spells all day every day; they'll get tired, and/or upset some deity. To manifest this into the game, a character's maximum amount of MP is usually far less than their maximum amount of HP, sometimes on the order of 10%.
The games offer the player all kinds of different magic casters (also called mages), with specializations in attack spells, defensive/healing spells, and spells that impact the player environment and affect all characters equally. (these are typically called “area of effect”, or AOE, spells.)
Recovery of MP gets more complicated than recovering HP. Most games will allow you to recover MP through the use of special potions, visiting unique healers, or through resting in specific places or durations. The game is trying to tell you to be more careful about how you spend your MP, because getting it back isn't easy.
The most complex Final Fantasy games will have yet another bar, reserved for a character's most special, powerful, and exhausting maneuvers. Usually, such bars are called "SP" - I guess, for special points. SP bars are always the smallest. Players should reserve SP for the most challenging and dangerous situations.
SP is always the most challenging point type to replenish. The only ways to recover SP might be via a unique, hard-to-find item, or one specific healer in the whole world that you only find if you go out of your way. The game is trying to tell you that SP is a precious resource that can only be recovered through great cost and care; use these very sparingly.
(for frame of reference, an average character might have 1,000 HP, 100 MP, and 10 SP.)
As you go about your quest, the management of HP, MP and SP play a critical role in your strategy.
Some players, especially early in the game, lack the resources, connections and world knowledge to easily recover any resources, leading to precarious moments where a player may narrowly escape a dungeon, metaphorically and digitally limping through.
If you know a major battle awaits, you might get stingy with how you manage your MP and SP. Conversely, you might get lackadaisical in managing your MP and SP when you get surprised by a very challenging foe, leaving you unprepared and potentially resulting in an unexpected defeat.
As you progress through the game, you may recruit new teammates to join your team (often called your “party”) that complement your character. For example, early in the game, you'll typically recruit a teammate with massive amounts of HP (but little MP), meant to help you merely stay alive as your character gains strength and resources. Further along, you'll be joined by characters with less HP but massive amounts of MP, inviting you to figure out how to keep these relatively less physically strong characters healthy enough for you to reap the rewards of their powerful skills.
Only later in the game will your characters amass high amounts of both HP and MP, symbolizing the massive amounts of experience and commitment required before your characters can skillfully wield both. (the kids refer to characters with high HP and MP as “S tier” characters. They’re really powerful.)
Why have I written this primer on Final Fantasy characters? Well, I have always found incredible synergy between how Final Fantasy characters use stat points to win battles, and how real, human people use energy to solve problems. That’s because people also have different kinds of energy they can use to solve problems, and the different energy types compare neatly to their Final Fantasy counterparts.
Your hit points resemble your physical strength and endurance. It can literally mean your muscle strength to accomplish physically demanding tasks, staying consistent and accurate before you tire, or how you balance the demands on your schedule to get through the day. For most people who are able, it’s typically easiest to build up your maximum physical hit points: go to the gym every day, or keep practicing the task. As players gain more experience, their available HP usually increases, symbolizing their improved physical strength, endurance and consistency.
Some players get through life accumulating high amounts of HP but developing only modest amounts of other points. This point imbalance makes certain outcomes less likely for players, like access to Universities and certain kinds of jobs, all which ultimately limit resource availability. However, around 1% of players will gain access to the Professional Athlete job class, arguably the best ranking for characters with high HP. This job class requires obscenely high amounts of HP to even be eligible for access, and even then, chances of access will be very low. So, while the Professional Athlete class can provide absurd rewards to players, it’s very difficult to access.
While many players improve their HP naturally over the course of their lives, some will acquire items like Peloton or Gym Membership, or add a Personal Trainer to their party, all of which offer HP multiplying benefits. However, they all cost resources, which (as stated above) can be in shorter supply for some characters that focus solely on HP development.
People usually replenish physical strength by eating and sleeping. Players with higher maximum HP require more food and sleep to recharge. That part translates perfectly into video games.
Next, magic points correspond nicely to mental strength. Mental strength points represent how long and hard you can think about a problem. Like magic points, the more powerful, complex and strategic thinking requires spending more mental points. Therefore, concocting solutions to the most mentally vexing problems can usually only be accessed by more experienced mages; junior employees simply lack the maximum mental points to cast more complex mental spells, but they’ll increase their maximum mental points over time and learn the spells.
It's not often that you find characters with a lot of strength points and a lot of mental points. Typically, people with high strength points get there through a lot of training, and therefore, have less time to gain the experience necessary to increase their maximum mental points. Conversely, the time it takes to increase one’s mental points mean on average, they won’t have the most physical points. Occasionally (and usually not until you’re in your 30’s or 40’s, aka, mid-game) you’ll find a character with high strength points and high mental points. These are “S tier” characters, to be sure; these are usually impressive people with high discipline, another stat category that we won’t get into today.
All that said, developing mental points usually comes with great advantages. High mental points provide characters access to powerful outcomes, like access to Universities and rewarding job classes, both of which improve maximum MP, imbue characters with more spells, and improve resource collection.
Eventually, more advanced characters can cast incredibly complex spells like Hyperfocus, Internal Politics, Team Management, Solving Strategy, Computer Programming, and many more, depending on what kind of magic they study. The most advanced mages will earn job titles like Vice President, Chief Officers and more, denoting their advanced mental point totals. These titles are not permanent and require mages to consistently remain at a high amount of MP.
Like magic, casting mental point spells can be incredibly taxing. Even the most experienced mages can’t simply cast Hyperfocus, Team Management or Computer Programming for hours on end. Sometimes, continually casting certain spells may even be verboten by the rules of their order; for example, when a mage endlessly casts an AOE spell like Internal Politics, it can come with consequences.
Characters can’t recover mental points as easily as they recover physical points. Eating and sleeping helps some, but most players will need to spend limited-use items like Day Off, or its more rare and more powerful version, Vacation, to more fully recover mental points. Over the years, more players have adopted the strategy of adding a Therapist to their party, finding that Therapist teammates have a regenerating effect on mental points and even help increase their maximum mental points over time. However, Day Off, Vacation and Therapists all cost resources, making them not always accessible to all players, particularly early in the game.
Especially for more experienced mages – whose titles depend on their ability to cast increasingly complex spells – there is great risk to letting mental points get too low, or become depleted entirely. If caught in a situation where they lack the mental points to cast a necessary spell, it can result in an unexpected defeat or loss of position. Therefore, while recovery of mental points can be more difficult and resource intensive, the best mages prioritize replenishing mental points as often as possible.
Finally, all players have access to an SP bar of emotional points. Emotional points represent the use of emotional power to accomplish a task.
While emotional point actions can have tremendous benefit, they can have negative side effects to players who don’t cast them properly. For example, casting the emotion spell Frustration can energize a player to take more swift and decisive action, but can also damage a player’s reputation if used incorrectly. On the positive side, you have emotion point spells like Eagerness, Confidence and Intimacy, among others; again, casting these correctly can have incredible effects for characters, but they come with great risk for players with less experience.
It's not a given that more experienced players will increase their emotion point total or learn new emotion point spells naturally/over time. The Therapist party member provides light amounts of SP bonuses, but players can’t rely on Therapist alone to improve emotion points or learn new spells. Most players need to complete difficult optional sidequests and obtain rewards like Introspection, Accountability, Non-Defensiveness, Embodiment, Acceptance, and Grief, among others. Obtaining these rewards both increase emotional point total and allow the player to cast more, and more complex, emotion point spells. Of note, these sidequests are usually the most challenging sidequests of the game.
Recovering emotion points is the hardest kind of point total to recover, and recovery strategies vary from player to player. Some players have access to a special location called Parent’s House that provides mental point and emotion point recovery bonuses. Adding a Romantic Partner, Child or Pet to your party can offer considerable MP and SP bonuses but, like job classes, requires upkeep to players to hold onto these bonuses. Some players have to enable emotion point recovery modes, during which the player is unable to perform most other actions. Such emotion point recovery modes can include “Grief Counseling,” “Eat Shitty Food,” “Get Drunk With Friends,” “Leave Me The Fuck Alone” or “Watch Movies and Play Video Games in a Dark Room,” among others.
While recovery of emotion points is critical to player health, there are obvious drawbacks to leaving characters in a mode of inaction for too long; physical and mental points and their associated skills begin to deteriorate, which can result in a loss of titles and positions.
But crucially, once a player fully depletes their emotion points, they need to quickly enable a recovery mode, or they risk enacting a dangerous mode called Breakdown, during which the player’s physical and mental points take a 30% to 50% reduction and the required recovery time doubles.
Like in Final Fantasy, players are encouraged to recruit team members to join them on their quest. While characters should form a party of complementary skills, many players tend to form parties of similar skill sets. You’ve likely encountered plenty of parties where all players have either high physical points, like a football team, or high mental points, like a group of tech coworkers. Regardless of how players sort, some semblance of complementary skill sets likely emerges, typically through access to different kinds of spells, jobs or skill trees. In the overwhelming amount of cases, players do better when they form strong parties; meanwhile, despite it being a popular strategy, only rare players advance far on their own.
I promise this thoroughly over-explored analogy has benefit beyond simply indulging me in extreme video game nerdiness. Like in Final Fantasy games, I believe the most successful players very carefully consider what skills they use to solve problems in their work and personal life, and the comparison can help people who are more familiar with fantasy game mechanics.
If I were writing a walkthrough guide for a video game of life, instructing players on how to use physical, mental and emotional points to complete the game in the best way, I might provide the following tips:
Developing mental skills takes time and practice. If you want to be good at something, you need to work at it and ally yourself with more experienced people. But developing these skills offer access to incredibly rewarding outcomes.
Becoming a skilled practitioner of emotional energy has exponentially powerful effects on the skills you can deploy to solve problems. Conversely, being less skilled at emotional and spiritual energy usage can result in negative outcomes. Take on the side quests necessary to improve at it.
Recovering your physical strength is usually easiest. Recovering your brain power requires resources and isn’t as easy. And recovering your emotional and spiritual energy is absolutely the hardest, and at times, is all-consuming. But no recovery process can be ignored without dire consequences.
If a problem can be solved with physical points alone, do it. Certainly use mental points to problem solve if needed, taking care to recover. But carefully guard how and when you use emotional energy to solve a problem. Working through too many tasks with emotions will thoroughly exhaust you, and leave you ill prepared for future problems.
Look ahead to future battles. If you see a problem on the horizon that will deplete your brainpower and emotions, take care of yourself before and after.
The most elite players have high physical points and high mental points; they take care of their bodies and their minds. This takes dedication, but it’s worth it, as S-Tier characters are among the most powerful characters in the game.
As soon as you can, invest resources in yourself, like a gym membership and a therapist. These investments have positive multiplying effects.
Your relationships with your family, friends and romantic partners provide access to crucial stat multipliers and recovery processes. Maintain and invest in these relationships.
You will always do better with a community of people around you to complement your skills and to aid your recovery. Few can finish the quest alone; that’s not an indictment of your abilities, that’s a mechanic of the game!