Table 4.

Advantageous and unfavourable aspects of games.

Theme	Subthemes
Aspects of games that are advantageous	•Should be discretely about mental health •Ability to play as and express affirmed gender •Functionality requirements •Importance of characters and storyline •Teaching mental health management skills •Trigger warnings •Sense of achievement •LGBT+ content •Positive messaging •Autonomy •Cathartic violence •Enduring positive aspect of games •Games keep you focused •Broadly applicable games •Escapism •Personalised •Games as artforms •Role-playing games •Finding peers and likeminded individuals •Should be specifically about mental health
Aspects of games that are unfavourable	•Not inclusive of gender and sexual diversity •Issues with game functionality and design •Violence •Inappropriate content •Self-deprecation and inability to do well •Triggering to mental health •Lack of autonomy •LGBT+ stereotypes and ingenuine representation •Addictive nature of games •Domination by intolerant demographic groups •Toxicity and pressure of team massively multiplayer online games •Help information not Australian •Contaminating nature of phobic attitudes

Subthemes are listed in order of prevalence.