If you feel sadness and unrest when finishing a game, don’t worry: you’re not alone. In fact, there is now a scale that can measure your feelings, thanks to researchers Kamil Janowicz and Piotr Klimczyk, who described their findings in their paper, “Post-game depression scale – a new measure to capture players’ experiences after finishing video games.”
They studied 373 players who played regularly: every day (28.1%) or almost every day (41.4%). The Post-Game Depression Scale (P-GDS) contained four subscales: game-related ruminations (thoughts about the plot), challenging end of experience, necessity of repeating the game, and media anhedonia (a loss of interest in other media).
The authors concluded that game-related ruminations were the most intense aspect of post-game depression, while media anhedonia was the least intense.