Playing horror games may make you more desensitized to the fear of playing horror games.
Playing horror games will probably not help too much with broader experiences like generalized or social anxiety, or any kind of specific fears or reactivity. Those would be better addressed through therapy, self-help programs, meditation, exercise, and/or maybe medication if appropriate.
If you want to look into some self-study therapy books, you could try books like “The Happiness Trap,” “No Bad Parts,” or “Getting Past your Past.”
“The Happiness Trap” is an acceptance and commitment therapy book, which is structured around using mindfulness and acceptance skills to work with your internal experiences, instead of fighting against yourself (which typically makes us more anxious and fearful).
“No Bad Parts” is an introduction to internal family systems, which is kind of like the idea in the Inside Out movies.
“Getting Past your Past” is a self-study book based on the information processing model used in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. This kind of approach may be more useful if some of the fear and anxiety is related to specific painful or traumatic experiences.
Also, if the anxiety or fear is about intrusive or unwanted thoughts or images, you could take a look at “The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD.”
Mindfulness and meditation practice is helpful for any of us, for all kinds of topics. There’s plenty of ways to build a meditation habit, such as starting with 5 minutes per day, and there are lots of videos and apps that can help. The Calm App and the Insight Timer are both free to try, however I might try the Calm App first, since they recently changed the sign-up steps for the free version of the Insight Timer.
Exercise can also be really helpful for anxiety, depression, and just general well-being. Rhythmic movement helps to regulate the nervous system, and a 20 or 30 minute walk can be a great way to burn off excess energy before starting your day or going to a big event.
If you do want to play horror games for their own sake, I really like the Resident Evil series. They’re kind of medium horror/ action split. The RE2 Remake is a fantastic zombie game. RE4 remake is more action/ less horror. RE7 is more horror and some gore.
There’s a lot of information that we don’t know about this, but I bet that there are a couple of pieces of information that you are overlooking here.
My guess is that someone who believes that another person is a trapped astronaut is probably not just “stupid,” as in it’s not just that they didn’t go to enough schooling or they weren’t paying attention to their surroundings, but they are more likely to be someone with an intellectual or cognitive impairment.
Cognitive decline and dementia are common parts of aging, and frequently affect people in their 80’s, as this woman is reported to be.
Scams also frequently target people who are vulnerable, with one theory being that misspellings and grammar mistakes in written correspondence may be deliberate ways of screening out more savvy individuals.
Vulnerable people are often targeted, not just through romance scams which prey on our desires for connection and understanding, but also towards people with intellectual disabilities and impairments, or more pronounced mental health conditions.
Adding to this, many of these vulnerable people also have extremely limited financial resources; as individuals with cognitive decline, intellectual disabilities, and mental health conditions often live in poverty or are reliant on meager social service programs.
I can only imagine what portion of this woman’s savings $6700 was, and what she may have been sacrificing to try to help someone who she believed was in danger.
As magnetosphere mentions above, it is possible to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, while still holding empathy and compassion for the real person who was hurt here.