My first book, Lost in a Good Game, (and where the title of this blog comes from) comes out today, and it’s probably not the book that everyone thinks it is.

It’s based on an idea that I’d been bouncing around for a few years: to write a corrective against the seemingly endless scaremongering backlash against games, and digital technology in general, that we see so often in the news. Front and centre then, this is one of the main themes of the book – a more balanced view on the psychological science that underpins some of the more heated debates about the effects that video games can have on us.

But during the course of writing it, it became something a little bit different. The science is in there, but it also became more about my own personal journey through games: not just about why people generally play them, but why I personally play them, and how I used them to help me get through some of the hardest times in my life. When I was 14, my Dad died after the two-year onslaught of a form of motor neurone disease called progressive muscular atrophy. It was a loss that I never really got over – he was a huge part of my life, a wonderful man, encouraging and nurturing. The kind of guy no one ever had a bad word to say about. In the aftermath of his death, I struggled to find a way to make any sense out of the situation. In video games, I found a little bit of an escape. Not in a bad way, but in a way that allowed my brain the time it needed to crunch through the data, process what had happened, and start to heal.

For me at least, playing video games brought a sense of comfort, a way of getting through the grieving process.

World of Warcraft

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It’s difficult, sometimes, not to see repeating patterns in life events. While I was writing about video games and that particular time of my life, loss greeted my door once again. Last year, my wife and I suffered two miscarriages. The first was what’s known as a missed miscarriage – we thought that everything was fine, right up until the point that we went to the antenatal clinic for our 12-week scan. We expected to see the healthy little person-to-be that we had been so longing for, but unfortunately that wasn’t what the sonographer found. We had no idea at what point things had gone wrong. The sonographer apologised profusely, tried vainly to comfort us, then returned the £4 that I had paid for a scan photograph, and asked if we wanted to leave the clinic by a back door.  It’s a moment that will stick with me until the day that I die.

Suffice to say, the past year has been pretty much the hardest one of our lives. I’m not entirely sure how I managed to write a book as we were going through that, so my apologies if you spot any typos or sentences that don’t quite make sense in it. Hopefully this year is going to be a better one though. It’s hard to pinpoint a starting point – we’re still not quite at the 1-year anniversary of the 12-week scan, but today seems like a more positive point to mark the beginning of a good year with the launch of the book.

And we’re currently six months pregnant, with multiple scans showing that all is well.

Everything will be fine.

Dr Pete Etchells is a senior lecturer in biological psychology at Bath Spa University. His research focuses on vision, eye movements and motion perception, as well as science policy and public communication of science. He was the author of the popular Headquarters blog at The Guardian and his first book will be released in early 2019. He is on Twitter at @PeteEtchells

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