Want To Know Yourself Better? Try These 7 Games For Self-Awareness!

Psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund have defined Self-awareness as an “ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards.” Self-awareness is the essential understanding of one’s self. We must reflect on all our actions and emotions in order to achieve self-awareness. It is not an easy feat for anyone. Yet it is extremely important for our mental and physical health that we understand own ourselves. 

If we reflect back on our actions and focus on the reasoning behind them, it will bring us more clarity about ourselves. This is extremely beneficial for us. Gaining self-awareness will automatically boost our confidence. It will provide us with more knowledge about our emotional and mental state, which in turn will help us make better and clear decisions about our lives. This will bring us stability in mind. With a stable mind, we will be able to seek knowledge and bring back focus on our lives.  

Often this clarity helps us sort our lives better. We can start balancing work and recreational activities if our mental state is good. You could be attending an NBA playoff in Chicago or spending a fun day at Hourglass Escapes in Seattle, but you will only be having fun if you are feeling stable enough, both emotionally and physically. There, it is important that we try to reflect on ourselves and practice self-awareness to make the quality of our life better. 

7 Games for Self-Awareness 

 In case you are trying to polish your self-awareness skills or trying to develop a habit of bringing self-awareness to your fold, we got you. Here is our list of 7 Games for boosting Self-Awareness. 

  • Escape Room Games

We cannot start this list without including Escape Room Games first. Escape rooms, also known as breakout rooms or puzzle rooms, have become very popular in the last decade. Escape rooms present a real-life escape game scenario. You must solve puzzles and accomplish tasks in order to escape the locked room. This should be achieved within the game’s time limit. In most cases, the time limit is 60 minutes. This game forces us to work under pressure as the game is time-sensitive. It demands us to use our mental strength to crack the code. And nothing brings more self-awareness than reflecting on a puzzle game. 

  • Wordle

Wordle is the newest trending game in town. It is an online word game created by Josh Wardle (now owned by New York Times). In this game, the users have to guess a 5-letter word in six guesses or less. If the words are placed incorrectly, it turns yellow. The letters that do not belong to the final answer will turn grey. If the guess is correct and the word is also in its rightful position, the tile turns green. All the time will turn green once you solve the game. The game is updated every 24 hours, and you cannot play more than once. It could be said that they are trying to promote the digital well-being of the players as well. This is a slow puzzle game where the chances are limited. You must understand yourself and the game well in order to make the correct decision because you only have 6 chances.  

  • Among Us

Among Us had taken over the world by storm during the first two years of the pandemic. This is a team game promoting teamwork but with a twist. You can choose to play with your friends as long as all of you have the same code. But if you do not have someone to play with, you can always match up with random rooms in the different servers. The scenario is a spaceship, and you must accomplish a bunch of tasks related to the game. But the main goal is to identify the suspicious imposter hiding among the team and vote them out. You must be wary of everyone in your group and reflect on each move made by your teammates. This also forces you to decide on a difficult problem, even if it means voting someone out of the game. 

  • Journey

Journey is a popular video game that is recommended for practicing mindfulness, and it helps ease you into understanding yourself better. The game got popular pretty fast, both critically and commercially, thanks to its simple but solid world-building and magnificent visuals. The player is an unnamed wanderer who is journeying towards a distant mountain top and works together with other travelers in accomplishing their tasks. The game has a quest narrative, and it promotes team spirit as well. You get randomly paired with any available player on the same server. This fosters good faith among gamers but with a relaxing and peaceful game instead of the usual action-based games. 

  • Sudoku

Sudoku is a game that needs no introduction. This is a classic game that helps us ease into our consciousness. In any mental exercise, be it a game or meditation. You need to tune yourself well with your mind. But this is especially important when it comes to puzzle games. Sudoku is a pretty difficult game unless you know the tricks and play the game regularly. This game requires great analytical skills and a strong grasp of mathematics. You are supposed to strategically add missing numbers in rows and columns to make a perfect series of 1 – 9 in all directions to solve a set of sudoku puzzles. If you are not a seasoned player, it is almost impossible to achieve this level of success. But practice makes us perfect. A game like Sudoku helps develop self-awareness and makes us reflect on our mental state. 

  • Chess

Chess is another well-known and well-appreciated game. Chess is a form of a board game. There are various board games in different cultures, and this is considered to be a western version of a board game. An eastern counterpart of chess would be Baduk from South Korea or Wei Qi from China. Chess is a challenging game that forces us to concentrate on the board for a long period of time to create appropriate strategies. It demands great cognitive intelligence and an eye for logical reasoning. Visualizing the strategies on a chessboard is extremely hard to achieve, yet that is the road to victory. Playing chess will help bring clarity to your mind and help boost confidence in the players. According to popular beliefs, those who have learned chess from an early age happen to have greater self-awareness than those who do not play mental games at all. 

  • Calm

A key to developing self-awareness skills is to relax your brain. A peaceful mind will help you reflect and realize things that were hidden under the clutter of everyday life. Calm is a mindfulness game application that will help in bringing peace to your mind. Just like the name suggests, it calms you down and instills mindfulness. It is a unique game because it does not have any players or game mechanics but instead provides the user with calming exercises and pictures that will prompt them to calm down and meditate. Meditation will help us in reflecting on ourselves and bring more self-awareness to our minds. 

Summing Up 

It is clear now that self-awareness is an important quality in human beings. Self-awareness is the key to understanding ourselves and improving our way of life. If you are trying to find yourself or you don’t know how to even begin with understanding yourself, don’t panic. We have provided a list of 7 games meant to help you gain self-awareness so that you understand yourself better. Why wait? the game is set, and it is your turn to play now. 


Nicolas Desjardins

Hello everyone, I am the main writer for SIND Canada. I've been writing articles for more than 12 years and I like sharing my knowledge. I'm currently writing for many websites and newspapers. I always keep myself very informed to give you the best information. All my years as a computer scientist made me become an incredible researcher. You can contact me on our forum or by email at [email protected].