It’s OK to spend hundreds of hours playing ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.’ Here’s why.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been counting down the hours until Nintendo’s Friday release of “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,” the much-anticipated sequel to 2017’s blockbuster game “Breath of the Wild.” I’ve had the game pre-ordered for months, but I was still stopped in my tracks by a “Zelda” commercial in the days leading up to its release.

It shows a grown man, roughly around my age, commuting to work in a suit and tie, bored and stressed out by his daily responsibilities, picking up a Nintendo Switch after a long day at work and decompressing with “Zelda.” It’s a moody commercial, a bit existential, two minutes of dreary adulthood disrupted by the escapist joy of play. I wanted to make fun of it, but then I realized it was a commercial about me.

I’m a 40-something adult with a fulltime job and more responsibilities than I can manage who’s also somehow, according to the tracker on my Nintendo Switch, spent a cumulative 740 hours playing “Breath of the Wild.”

I’ve been playing “Zelda” games for decades, and yet I still felt a sense of guilt and embarrassment seeing that number. Divided into 24-hours days, 740 hours is an entire month of my one wild and precious life. I could have read the complete works of William Shakespeare or Leo Tolstoy – heck, maybe both. I could have written a book of my own. Taken up an instrument. Learned another language.

Over the decades I've been playing, I've internalized that video games are a waste of time, a plaything for children, and that I should be embarrassed by how much time I’ve “wasted” on them. But what if all this time it’s been a form of self-care?

'Tears of the Kingdom' release date is here, and many adults will play the game to manage stress

Sarah Rose Etter, a writer living in Los Angeles, first started playing video games as an adult, after her dad died.

“I was really grief-stricken, and somebody had told me to get a Nintendo Switch,” Etter says. She and her brother both got Switches and found release from their grief playing a Mario Bros. game. “The only times when we weren’t crying was when we both had our Switch out and we were playing Mario.”

Her journey with “Breath of the Wild” began a little more unexpectedly. Etter’s got a novel coming out in July, "Ripe," her first with a major publisher. It's very exciting – but also very stressful in the months leading up to release.

She started asking her writer friends what they do to stay sane in this phase of book publishing. They recommended therapy, of course. But a shocking number of them also recommended “Breath of the Wild,” including Carmen Maria Machado, whose 2017 story collection “Her Body and Other Parties” was a finalist for the National Book Award. “There are very serious people playing ‘Zelda,’” Etter says.

Etter, who says she’s played the game for at least 100 hours, found that it does help manage her pre-publication anxiety. “It’s using this part of my brain that has nothing to do with the book, nothing to do with anything stressful,” Etter says.

Sabra Boyd, a 37-year-old freelance journalist from Seattle, also didn’t start playing video games until she was in her mid-20s and on the verge of a difficult divorce. Looking back on it, Boyd says, “Playing video games was a cathartic way for me to manage the stress of preparing to leave this abusive marriage.”

Boyd has also sunk hundreds of hours into “Breath of the Wild,” often to decompress after long days of work, or else to escape work altogether.

“Some people might be very judgmental about this, but I’ll sometimes use it as a form of vacation because I can’t always afford to go on a real vacation,” Boyd says. “I just need my brain to relax. It definitely helps me manage my anxiety.”

To end the video game stigma, we first need to understand it

Like Etter and Boyd, I’ve felt embarrassed to admit to my video game-playing habits. Also to contend with is the long-held social narrative that there's a correlation between video game violence and real-life violence. When there is a massacre, dating back to Columbine shooting, violent video games often end up a scapegoat; as recently as the 2019 massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Donald Trump pinned the blame on "gruesome and grisly video games."

Not that anyone would be quick to categorize "Zelda" as "gruesome and grisly," but plenty of well-rounded, highly functional adults play those kind of games too.

Maxwell Foxman, an assistant professor of media and games studies at the University of Oregon, says it’s in part because representation of video games in popular media tends to still be “stuck in the past” and that such depictions of happy adults playing video games are still rare, even as lifelong video game players such as myself enter middle age.

“It is very hard to find these kind of representations of casual play in media in general,” Foxman says.

Foxman, who has cowritten a book on the topic with David B. Nieborg called “Mainstreaming and Game Journalism,” which comes out in August, says for decades the gaming industry targeted and marketed to children and young men and that in turn has shaped popular perception.

“Mainstream publications really have found it historically difficult to … take games seriously,” Foxman says. “They tend to start with the notion of games as child's play, or as sad or as escapism, when the fact of the matter is that they’re really embedded in our everyday lives.”

Playing video games is no more a waste of time than settling down at night to watch an hour of television. Say, for instance, and episode of HBO’s “The Last of Us.” It’s a prestige drama, one that merited weekly episode recaps and high-profile interviews with the cast and crew, a level of mainstream attention the game never enjoyed. It can create the impression that video games are lesser, that playing them should be a source of shame.

“Honestly, I’m still embarrassed,” Etter says. “I see it in people’s eyes when I say at work, ‘I’m playing “Zelda” tonight,’ I can see it. I know what they’re thinking.”

Boyd also feels the judgment. “The stigma’s definitely there, but I don’t really believe in guilty pleasures,” she says.

But for both women, the pleasures outweigh any shame. “Anytime I die, I can just come back to life,” Etter says. “You can’t really fail. I think for people who have a lot of high-pressure projects or high-pressure jobs, it’s really nice to do something like this, where you don’t need to be perfect.”

“There are so many stressful things going on in the world,” Boyd says. “Sometimes you just want to be able to take a brain vacation.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' release: Why video games are self-care