Toxic Positivity (and How to Avoid It) in Games for Emotional Well-Being

The world can be a scary, exhausting, and upsetting place to navigate. Too often, when we seek out games and apps that are meant to help us gather strength and moments of peace to support our well-being and mental health, we are faced with toxic positivity — the idea that we should strive towards happiness no matter our circumstances, putting the blame solely on the individual for struggles they may be experiencing with their well-being. As game developers, we can design affirming and supportive digital experiences to support player well-being while not ignoring the harsh realities of the world we live in and its impact on our mental health. 

What is toxic positivity?

Toxic positivity is the idea that we should always strive to be happy and think positively, no matter how stressful, harsh, and upsetting our internal or external circumstances may be. It can include phrases like “just think positive!” or “just smile, you’ll feel better!” Toxic positivity suggests that we should push away and suppress our sadness, anger, jealousy, etc. due to the “negativity” of these emotions, even if the situations causing these emotions are unfathomably rough. While toxic positivity may not seem toxic at all for some people on our planet depending on their circumstances and lived experiences, for others it can be a grim reminder of what is going on in their life that may have brought about painful emotions in the first place. 

Let’s get real 

Our world can be a scary, violent place to live in, particularly for members of global communities who have been intentionally exploited and marginalized. Broader systems such as capitalism and white supremacy mean that some of us navigate the world with more ease and comfort than others, which influences our emotions, our physical and mental health, and the extent to which we can seek experiences that feel truly healing and peaceful. 

Some people find comfort through well-being focused games and apps: These are digital experiences that help the user / player build their emotional well-being through gamification. They can include features such as emotion tracking, goal setting, reminders to drink water, and digital journaling — although this is far from an exhaustive list. While they vary across each game / app based on the intentions of the developer, common benchmarks to gauge if the digital experience is helping player well-being can include: more reported days of “happy” emotions, increased goal setting and achievement, and regular use of features such as journals, often evidenced through streaks.  

When we use well-being focused games and apps that are meant to bring us more support in navigating the world, we may find elements of toxic positivity. The messaging used in the games often leaves out the powerful role that broader societal systems play in defining our mental health. They often place the blame for poor mental health on the individual rather than looking at the external factors that may have influenced why the person downloaded the game / app in the first place! Before discussing examples of these elements of toxic positivity, let’s look at a couple of useful definitions:

Capitalism — “An economic system in which the factors of production are privately owned and individual owners of capital are free to make use of it as they see fit; in particular, for their own profit. In this system the market and the profit mechanism will play a major role in deciding what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, and who owns what is produced” (Oxford Reference, 2024). 

Essentially, under capitalism, our self-worth is largely defined by how much we work, if our job is considered “respectable,” and how much money we make. Capitalism can create environments where difficult emotions (such as rage, sadness, anger, etc.) are seen as inconvenient and things that need to be immediately fixed and steered towards positivity, because they can slow us down and keep us from being productive. 

White supremacy — Jackson and Rao (2022) define white supremacy as the belief that white people are inherently better (physically, mentally, spiritually, etc.) than other races and represent the “default” of how humanity should exist. It is a construct that largely runs most aspects of our modern world, governing our political, economic, cultural, and social systems. White supremacy can be dehumanizing for anyone who doesn’t exist in the world as white, leading to a host of mental health and emotional well-being struggles that are no fault of the individual. 

A personal example

To apply these definitions to speak toward my own identities, I am a person with the following lived experiences: white; nonbinary; bisexual; English-speaking; disabled with an “invisible” disability; and living in a relatively comfortable socioeconomic bracket where my needs for housing, food, and healthcare are consistently met each month. Although parts of my identities, such as being Queer and disabled, can mean that I may experience discrimination in certain spaces, my whiteness and socioeconomic status means that I navigate the world in a society that has largely been designed for people who look like me. Because of this, I unfairly have access to many accommodations and benefits that people from intentionally exploited communities do not. 

Why does this matter? Things that feel inspiring, motivating, and uplifting toward my mental health may be invalidating for people navigating the world with other lived experiences. Put another way, elements of well-being focused games and apps that help me feel supported and inspired may appear as toxic positivity to players with different lived experiences than my own, and can alienate those players away from these platforms.  

Examples of toxic positivity in well-being focused games and apps

Without calling out specific titles, the following are real examples of toxic positivity we have encountered firsthand in well-being focused games and apps:

• Generic affirmations — While many psychologists and mental health professionals believe affirmations can play a positive role in our well-being journeys, many games and apps with a focus on mental health offer generic affirmations that tend to disregard the many realities of living under white supremacy and capitalism. This disregard can feel upsetting and alienating, actually harming the mental health of players who came to the game / app for support in this area. Affirmations that are too generic and don’t acknowledge our lived realities (and the barriers presented by them) can be unhelpful for our mental health. Generic affirmations that can be potentially unhelpful include:
  • “I can do anything I put my mind to.” (What about folks who experience systemic barriers when trying to access housing, education, amenities, healthcare, etc?)
  • “Everywhere I go, I bring love and light.” (What about folks who are navigating painful experiences that make it difficult to always be positive?)
  • “Today, I will just smile.” (What if that person is living through unimaginably difficult circumstances and it feels insulting to hear that they should “just smile?”)
• Categorizing emotions as “good” or bad,” “positive” or “negative” — Emotions are inherently neutral — they are messengers that tell us information about how we are experiencing a given moment during the day. Some well-being focused games and apps aim to reduce the amount of days that players live with “negative” emotions as a way of supporting their mental health journey. However, this can create feelings of shame around feeling more difficult emotions, such as rage, anger, jealousy, and sadness, and can cause us to push away or ignore these feelings due to a pressure to feel happy. When we push these feelings away, we don’t process them, and they can be damaging for both our mental and physical health. 
• Framing mental health and emotional well-being as an individual problem — As explained previously, systems of white supremacy and capitalism create a multitude of external stressors on our life depending on which identities we navigate this world with. These stressors can harm our mental health and emotional well-being. Many well-being focused games and apps put the onus on the individual for the state of their mental health, when the reality is that many of these external stressors are largely out of our control. While they can offer moments of respite and peace, just being more positive and doing gratitude journaling will not fix the devastating impacts that these systems can have on our well-being. 

Design recommendations for avoiding toxic positivity

Does this mean that we shouldn’t bother creating games and apps focused on supporting player well-being, given these overarching structures of capitalism and white supremacy? No! As more people seek out digital experiences to help navigate the stressors of the world, we as game developers can engage in work on the individual, group, and community level to design games that truly support the mental health and emotional well-being of players with a wide range of lived experiences. 

While the goal is to help players feel supported in their emotional well-being journey, we also want to avoid game features that may cause players guilt as they seek to navigate their mental health in a world that makes it hard to be well. Some of the most immediate steps that game developers can take include the following:

• Seek emotion-neutrality in your game / app — Try to avoid framing emotions as good or bad, positive or negative. Meet your players where they are, no matter what emotion they bring to your digital space. It is also important to remember that a portion of your player community may live with alexithymia, a trait that can make it hard to identify, experience, and express emotions. It can be useful to acknowledge alexithymia in your game when using language that discusses emotions, in order to validate the experiences of players living with this trait. In Kinder World, in our Emotional Naming activity we include a “Not Sure” option for players with alexithymia (or any other condition that impacts how well we can identify our emotions, such as brain fog and exhaustion) in order to reduce pressure on these players while still providing them a space to consider their emotions.
  
  In any sort of emotion tracking feature, consider using colors to represent emotions instead of emojis with smiles to represent “happy” emotions and frowns to represent “sad” emotions. We also implement this strategy in Kinder World’s Emotional Naming activity as a way to translate our goals of emotion neutrality into design choices. 
• Offer realistic affirmations — Affirmations can be soothing and empowering, giving us hope in situations where we may otherwise feel hopeless! But how we design in-game affirmations is key. If you are thinking about adding affirmations to your game, you might consider consulting with mental health professionals to see if affirmations make sense for the emotional well-being goals of your game. They will be able to help identify which affirmations may be harmful or have unintended consequences for players. Instead of generic affirmations that push a player towards constant positivity, a mental health professional may guide you to suitable alternative affirmations that offer strength and validation amidst stressors of the world, such as:
  • “I am doing the best I can with the circumstances I have.”
  • “My worth is not defined by how much money I make.”
  • “I deserve to rest even though the world may tell me otherwise.”

Affirmations don’t always help us push through intense feelings of low self-worth and self-doubt, and in those situations seeking help from a mental health professional is highly encouraged. If you are including affirmations in your game, consider including language that encourages your players to seek professional support if they feel they need it in their emotional well-being journey.

• Openly acknowledge external causes of mental health struggles — Don’t be afraid to directly call-out the external stressors that can cause our mental health to suffer. Be honest with your players about what your game / app can do. While it may not fix the broader structural systems that cause harm to emotional well-being in the first place, your game / app can help offer moments of respite and peace that can give the player a sense of purpose and validation. 

What does good look like?

How do you tell if your game is successful in supporting the emotional well-being of players without using toxic positivity? There are benchmarks for success (and warning signs) when looking through the lens of the players themselves as well as in relation to the team designing the digital experience: 

For players

These benchmarks can be useful in helping identify the level in which your digital experience is successful in promoting players’ emotional well-being without the use of toxic positivity. Player interviews, focus groups, and surveys are great starting points toward evaluating if these benchmarks are met. 

Individual level

Success signs: 

• Knowledge increases — Players gain knowledge around the role that systems such as white supremacy and capitalism play in their emotional well-being.
• Emotion neutrality in action — Players use less binary language to describe emotions and instead describe emotions more neutrally.
• Affirmation and validation — Players feel affirmed in their emotional well-being journey, knowing that their mental health struggles are not something that solely comes from within and are influenced by external societal structures.

Warning signs:

• Lack of hope — Players feel less hopeful for their emotional well-being journey after gaining knowledge of how broader systems impact their mental health. Remember, when describing how these systems impact player health, developers should also include language of empowerment toward players, such as “You deserve to thrive despite the negative impacts these systems can have.”
• Binary thinking — Players continue to see emotions as “good” or “bad” and actively try to push away “negative” emotions, signaling that the digital experience is still using toxic positivity messaging.
• Backlash — Players feel a backlash toward the messaging in the game, wanting more positive affirmations and language (what would be considered toxic positivity, but is perhaps not seen as toxic by the individual player). When designing these digital experiences, remember to take the time to educate players on why your game / app is avoiding toxic positivity as well as the harm that toxic positivity can have on player well-being, while also recognizing that some players want a more forced positivity in their life, and have the agency to seek that out. 

Group level

Success signs: 

• Wholesome affinity groups — Players build “affinity” groups in your digital experience (or platforms associated with your product, such as a Discord server) based on shared lived experiences around emotional well-being.
• Cooperative behavior — Players are willing to form groups to cooperatively take part in events and other activities around your digital experience.
• Conflict mediation — At the group level, players are resolving conflicts with other players in a healthy and kind manner.

Warning signs:

• Player disinterest — Players seem uninterested in forming groups of support around your digital experience.
• Lack of cooperation — Players feel uncomfortable or unwilling to collaborate with other players around in-game / app events and activities.
• Increased conflict — Players continue to enter into conflict with other players without meaningful conflict resolution.

Community level

Success signs:

• Community self-moderation — The player community around the game / app takes initiative to recognize toxic positivity among others and tries to educate on moving away from it, acting as a self-moderating community (this is not to say that moderation from the developers is unnecessary, but rather, that self-moderation can be a nice complement to existing moderation structures).
• Collective emotional well-being — The player community collectively rallies around a shared vision of emotional well-being that is not rooted in toxic positivity. This can be reflected through kind and affirming community interactions.
• Player-created content — Players in the community create game / app-related content (such as fan art, fanfiction, etc.) that echoes the values of the digital experience, such as emotion neutrality and being realistic about the external factors influencing our mental health.

Warning signs: 

• Community animosity — The player community appears fractured with a great deal of infighting and animosity. 
• Usage of toxic positivity — Players at large continue to use toxic positivity in their inter-community interactions.
• Player emotional well-being is stagnant — While we cannot expect our digital experiences to completely rid a player of their own mental health struggles, it is a warning sign if the player community at large does not convey improvements in their emotional well-being.

For developers

These are benchmarks that you can use internally within your development team to assess if you are effectively doing the work to uncover how toxic positivity may enter your digital experience. 

Individual level

Success signs:

• Doing the work — You are willing and able to do the work to recognize how your own life experiences, mental health, emotional well-being, etc. are filtered through the lens of how you exist in this world, and how structures of capitalism and white supremacy intersect with your identities. 
• Applying the work — You are able to take this recognition and apply it directly to your work in developing a game / app that supports players who are seeking moments of respite and peace despite the external stressors they may be experiencing in life. 
• Continual reflection — You are willing and able to make this personal reflection a regular and consistent part of the development process. 

Warning signs: 

• Lack of willingness — You are feeling unable or unwilling to analyze what assumptions, privileges, and oversights you may be bringing to the development of your well-being focused game / app. 
• No application — Any knowledge gained through the reflective process is not applied to the development of the digital experience, whether by being unwilling to or not feeling supported in doing so.

Team level

Success signs: 

• Reflection at the team level — The development team as a whole seeks to understand how the game / app supports those with a range of lived experiences and is open to critique on how the game may currently include elements of toxic positivity. 
• Inclusive player research — User research for product development includes those from a wide range of lived experiences to inform the game design. 

Warning signs: 

• Unwillingness for difficult conversations — Team-wide, there is pushback on having the often difficult and honest conversations around toxic positivity and how it may show up not only in the game / app but also in the team culture. 
• Homogenous player research — User research for product development only includes certain lived experiences, particularly from those who may benefit more strongly from systems of capitalism and white supremacy.
• Lack of team support — Members of the team don’t feel supported in making concrete changes to the game to remove toxic positivity.

Industry level

Success signs: 

• Change at large — The broader subgenre of emotional well-being and mental health focused games / apps takes on a more direct approach to understanding how toxic positivity can negatively impact players, and at large decides to support a culture in which development of these kinds of games takes into account the external impacts on player mental health. 

Warning signs: 

• Unwillingness to leave toxic positivity behind — Emotional well-being and mental health-focused games continue to use elements of toxic positivity in their game design and game language, using generic affirmations, categorizations of “positive” and “negative” emotions, and framing mental health struggles as an individual problem rather than a problem that largely exists because of external stressors from systems of capitalism and white supremacy.

Final thoughts

If you experience the world with various layers of privilege and feel defensive and / or upset after reading this article, I encourage you to sit with what you are feeling right now. Don’t push the feelings away. Where do you feel them in your body? Take a deep breath, and know that this article is not a personal attack on any individual. When I first unpacked my own privileges that result from benefiting from white supremacy and my socioeconomic status under capitalism, I felt attacked. I felt like I was being told that I don’t experience struggles in my life because of my privilege. When I truly sat with my feelings, I realized that what I was actually feeling was anger towards these broader systems. 

Many of us are told our whole lives that if we struggle with our mental health, it’s because of our own personal failings. The reality is that systems of capitalism and white supremacy often lead us toward experiencing these mental health struggles in the first place. 

With the rise of emotional well-being focused games and apps, we as developers have a responsibility to ensure we are supporting our players in building purpose and strength without erasing the realities of how capitalism and white supremacy can impact our mental health. We can acknowledge that our work takes place under the umbrella of capitalism while also pushing back on ways that capitalism encourages us to avoid difficult emotions and always steer toward positivity. We all have a role to play in building a more compassionate, just, and equitable world, and for those reading this article, our role can be creating these affirming and refreshingly honest digital spaces for mental health support in a fraught world. We will build a better world together. We must. 

Now what?

If you are making a well-being focused game or app and want to avoid introducing toxic positivity in your digital experience, there are two next steps for you: education and reflection. Specifically, this looks like educating yourself on the different ways toxic positivity shows up, and reflecting on your lived experiences to understand why certain things might not seem like toxic positivity to you, but could be to others who do not hold the same identities and experiences as your own. The level to which you / your team need to engage in education and reflection will depend on the specifics around your own lived experiences that have defined how you navigate the world. A great resource that can help you / your team with this process is:

“Understanding, Recognizing, and Addressing Privilege” by McMaster University Faculty of Social Sciences 

Take intentional time with yourself / your team to invest in this education and reflection, and make a plan for how you will incorporate what you have learned into your digital experience!

References

• Cleveland Clinic. (2021). Do positive affirmations work? What experts say.
• Emanuel, A. S. et al. (2018). Spontaneous self-affirmation is associated with psychological well-being: Evidence from a US national adult survey sample.
• Jackson, R. & Rao, S. (2022). White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better. 
• Oxford University Press. (Accessed July 2, 2024). Capitalism. In Oxford Reference.