Some games are designed to give rewards sporadically along the way to the goal. Similar to the bait-and-switch technique, these games reward behavior only some of the time in order to keep a person engaged. Throwing in the occasional punishment—like taking away hard-to-come-by weapons—is another way to effectively control a player's behavior as well as motivate them to improve their skills so they don't make the same mistakes again.
The late Maressa Orzack, who was a clinical psychologist and assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, determined that the process of character development and reward systems within video games are a facet of operant conditioning, and are deliberately being incorporated into the games by their sophisticated designers.4 The problem, say Neils Clark and P. Shavaun Scott, authors of Game Addiction, is that a “person who is initially motivated by their own intrinsic reasons for achieving may become dependent on these outside rewards and actually lose their innate internal motivation to achieve things in life.”5
Further, not all aspects of real life are laid out in a discernable path as is found in video games. As gamification becomes more integrated into everyday life, creatures of habit will look for similar patterns elsewhere, likely becoming lost or losing motivation when the path does not appear before them. This would certainly not be the first instance of directionless youth, but the current generation is conceivably the least prepared generation for real world navigation, decision making, and problem solving.
Exacerbating this problem is the fact that these sources of stimulation and thus, this type of conditioning, are now totally pervasive. The Internet, television, video games, and porn are available twenty-four hours a day on a variety of devices (computers, laptops, phones, TVs, iPads, and so on). One of the reasons why boys default to these seductive worlds more easily than girls is that we are telling boys the natural state of their mental worlds is bad and scary, therefore they have no other outlets for their “normal” impulses. This is all contributing to an overall decrease in motivation to contribute or partake in real-world events and in complex, social relationships that contain multiple layers of verbal and nonverbal code.
One young man we interviewed told us:
With porn and video games' instant gratification, other pursuits such as women, physical activity and school become far less enticing. Young men now yield to the power of pressing play, and subsequently need to go no further than their television or computer screens for endless enjoyment. The variety of stimulation that those two activities provide has the potential to leave little desire to take part in the aforementioned pursuits (I should note that this desire is further diminished by marijuana and other drug usage greatly).
Gabe Deem, a recovering porn addict turned public speaker and counselor for youth in Texas, echoed a similar sentiment:
I always thought video games and porn were amazing. Besides the pleasure they gave me, video games also fulfilled my competitive nature and intrinsic drive to cultivate and produce things as a man. Instead of desiring to get a good job, lead a family, and participate in a community, I wanted to improve my rank online, lead my team of gamers, and spend all my time chatting with guys I have never met.
Besides the pleasure porn provided . . . well . . . I only watched porn because of the pleasure it provided. I never used porn or video games because of issues in my life, I used them because I had access, and enjoyed them. I had no clue they could potentially have a negative physiological impact on me. Growing up I almost constantly had a girlfriend and I did not have a traumatic experience as a kid, never was abused, and had no history of addiction in my family.
I was what some call a “contemporary addict” who just had unlimited access to supernormal stimulation and over years of chronic over-consumption became hooked and numbed. I was not your “classic addict” who turned to a behavior or substance to “ease the pain of life,” I turned to the behavior and substance to “experience the pleasure of life.”
I often hear this myth thrown around, that only guys who get hooked on porn have other issues in their life that they are running from or trying to medicate. This was not the case for me and many other guys I know who watched a lot of porn and played countless hours of video games; in my case the “issues” came after the consumption.6
Our regularly engaged-in habits cycle back to our brains, creating not only behavioral patterns, but also physiological changes in neural circuitry. Nicholas Carr discusses just how malleable our brains are, and how well they adapt to new stimuli in The Shallows. He tells us that:
Virtually all of our neural circuits . . . are subject to change . . . The plasticity diminishes as we get older—brains do get stuck in their ways—but it never goes away. Our neurons are always breaking old connections and forming new ones, and brand-new nerve cells are always being created.7
Essentially the brain is capable of reprogramming itself from moment to moment, modifying the way it functions. This is what neural plasticity means.
Despite its massive plasticity, over time the deeper any brain groove is the more ingrained behaviors become and the harder they are to modify via retraining. Carr references a couple of fascinating examples. In the 1970s biologist Eric Kandel used a large species of sea slug called Aplysia to demonstrate that synaptic connections can change. He found that even if it is lightly touched the sea slug will reflexively recoil, yet, provided it is not being harmed, when exposed to repeated touch it will quickly habituate and its recoiling instinct will disappear. Kandel observed the slug's nervous systems and found that this learned behavior (or lack of it) was mirrored by a gradual weakening of the synaptic connections between the sensory neurons that “felt” the touch and the motor neurons that signal the gill to withdraw. In the beginning of the experiment, about 90 percent of the sensory neurons in a slug's gill had connections to motor neurons, but after the gill was touched forty times, only 10 percent still had links. Kandel won the Nobel Prize for this series of experiments and its theoretical implications.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurology researcher at Harvard Medical School, offered additional clues as to how the way in which we perceive something affects the connections in our brains. He recruited a group of people who had no experience playing a piano, and taught them a basic verse, then he divided the group in two. One group was instructed to practice the music on a keyboard for a couple of hours every day for the following five days. The other group was told to sit in front of a keyboard and just imagine playing the music—and not touch the keys—for an equal amount of time. Pascual-Leone used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to map the participants' brain activity over the duration of the experiment and found that both groups exhibited identical changes in their brains; in other words the brains of the group that just imagined playing the verse had been altered solely because of their thoughts—without taking any overt action. In this case, thinking or imagining made it so. Both Kandel's and Pascual-Leone's research show the remarkable ways in which the brain habituates to repeated familiar experiences after just a short period of conditioning.8
The implications of this kind of conditioning with regard to porn are shocking when you think about the ease of habituating a person to respond to sex that is only a collection of pixels, but it could also provide a silver lining to those wishing to retrain their brain to become more responsive to their real-life sexual partners. The good news appears to be the same as the bad news. Just as synaptic links between neurons become stronger and more abundant due to specific and repeated experiences, releasing higher concentrations of neurotransmitters for example, the brain also becomes less responsive to less familiar experiences.
Many people who watched my (Phil's) TED Talk commented that porn and video games should not be lumped together. Gamers are not necessarily porn users, and vice versa. In many obvious ways, porn and video games are very different entities, but they share many nonobvious characteristics. Both video games and porn are entertaining and have interesting and useful appli
cations, but they can also be a huge waste of time and potentially psychologically and socially damaging to some males.
We are concerned about young men who are excessively using porn and/or video games in social isolation. There has been no established guideline about what constitutes an excessive amount of video games or porn;9 ultimately, if the user is unable to control their gaming or porn habit despite negative social, emotional, interpersonal, academic, or professional consequences, there's a problem.10 The determination of the severity should revolve around the individual's response.
From the outsider's perspective the motivations of the individual gamer are often misunderstood. Many gamers are driven by their ability to compete and succeed within a specific game against others that have also obligated themselves to that game. The quality of their performance is what is relevant to them. The number of hours played is only relevant to the metrics of that performance (i.e., the amount of kills made within a certain period of time, which may give them prestige or a high ranking). The gamer has committed himself to excelling within a given system and its hierarchy. They're not thinking about how long they're playing it; they're thinking about how successful they are at it, because that's what their peers within that game are basing their judgment on. What the gamer acknowledges as relevant are the perspectives of the individuals inside the game, a component that nongamers will not immediately recognize.
A comparison for nongamers might be the drive that someone has in developing their career. Each occupation has different drivers. A salesman, for example, will have different drivers than a dentist, but because there is an economic translation—a financial and societal reward system—each will recognize the purpose of the other's pursuit. There is a financial and societal reward that allows for mutual understanding. A video game has its own “economy” similar to the real one that salesmen and dentists participate in. The difference is that people accept the existence of the real economy everywhere, whereas the virtual “economy” is negated beyond the constructs of its virtual borders, as there are limited exchanges of services with outside observers and therefore no value to those outside observers other than entertainment.
Both video games and online porn are relatively recent forms of digital entertainment that have been added to the social environment. As more people engage in virtual worlds, the more people will see value in those virtual worlds, forcing the definition of “excessive” to evolve.
For now, the gaming and porn industries are increasingly merging and becoming particularly seductive to consumers in physically solitary settings and those wishing to make a few bucks remotely. As Andrew Doan, author of Hooked on Games, points out:
The combination of sex and pornography in a video game has the potential for explosive growth and has already proven to become so. In Second Life, it's reported that there are over 20 million accounts with more than half of those being active gamers . . . There are people making significant amounts of real money by providing a virtual escort service, some are making six-figure incomes. By day, a woman could become a mom, lawyer, or other professional. But by night, she is the voice behind an avatar that charges twenty dollars an hour for a man to have a virtual companion and virtual sex.11
The California-based start-up Sinful Robot was in the process of designing virtual reality sex games for the Oculus Rift, a 3D technology that completely covers a user's field of vision like a ski mask.12 Sinful Robot disintegrated some time in 2013,13 but it's only a matter of time before someone else creates immersive 3D games that incorporate virtual sex, or, like the company Lovense, interactive sex toys that sync up with the speed and movement of porn stars.14
Eroticism and motivation are both fuelled by arousal. If there is lust, arousal veers in a sexual direction, and if there is a need to triumph, arousal sends one down the path of goal setting and long-term success. Real life is competing with digital alternatives for nearly every aspect of existence, since porn and video games are readily accessible, burden-free, pleasurable, and entertaining. The choice for lots of young men is often the digital alternative to the physical, existential-reality version.
Futurama's “I Dated A Robot” episode comes to mind, where Fry, a young man who accidentally ends up in the year 3000, creates a Lucy Liu robot who is programmed to love everything about him. After a short time he becomes disinterested in doing anything other than spend time with her, at which point his friends intervene and show him a propaganda video warning against human–robot romance. In the video, a young man, Billy, becomes infatuated with a Marilyn Monrobot. All Billy wants is to make out with her. Even when his neighbor Mavis, an attractive young woman, asks him if he'd like to come over later and make out with her, he tells her that walking across the street is too far to go for making out. The narrator of the propaganda video somberly asks, “Did you notice what went wrong in that scene?” Before the robots, says the narrator, Billy probably would have worked hard to make money with his paper route, which he'd then use to take Mavis out on a date, thereby earning him the chance to have sex and reproduce. “But in a world where teens can date robots, why should he bother?” Naturally, aliens destroy the planet shortly afterward.15
Though nearly every social need in reality now has a complement in the digital world, it is unclear whether the digital alternatives satisfy those needs in the same way. In Abraham Maslow's “hierarchy of needs”—which depicts the stages of human development often as a pyramid, with the most basic needs at the bottom—the primary two levels of physiological and safety needs must be met in physical reality. Is it possible, however, for the top three needs in Maslow's hierarchy—belongingness, love and esteem, and self-actualization—to be met in digital reality? Could a person be just as, if not more, fulfilled in digital reality? The answer is yes and no. Surely, some needs can be achieved in the digital world, but because these needs are met without risk of consequence, and frequently in social isolation—as if in a dress rehearsal—a person who is, for example, gaming alone may well be able to achieve their esteem needs yet completely bypass a sense of belongingness and fail to address their love needs.
Gamers may think they have “hacked Maslow,” but it does not come without a major side effect: entitlement without the ability to relate to others. As one person from our survey commented, games put “you in fictional MATURE situations, but without any of the consequences. You can feel powerful and ‘experienced’ without all the failure leading up to real-life success in those areas.” So a gamer could be “hot shit” in one world, and develop a sense of superiority, but most people will have no idea who they are or what they have “accomplished.” Furthermore, self-actualization could not be reached without the fulfillment of the other needs, so a lack of intimacy and appreciation for others creates a distorted sense of potential and actualization that is not based in any shared social reality. In other words, the lack of relatable skills, especially social skills, can distort the ability to evaluate social competence and success.
Hacked Maslow: An Unstable Pyramid
A twenty-five-year-old male gamer we spoke with reflected this idea:
The PC gamer mentality is very elitist, though really it's a combination of a superiority and an inferiority complex. Many of them feel inferior to people on the “outside,” so they have to compensate. They have a need to portray a badass online, so they can feel superior to others. A lot of them will berate you if you mess up in a game. People used to say GGWP—good game, well played—now that hardly ever happens. People love to mock others when they fail and call them out on it. Even if it was a close match, your opponent might tell you to uninstall the game or say “easy game, easy win,” just to try and piss you off and get a reaction out of you. They also might gang up on you and put you in a low priority queue, which stalls your game play, not because you are a “troll” but because they blame you for the team's loss, or the other players decide they don't like you. This attitude is common in DotA [Defense of the Ancients] and in other games I've played, and n
ot just in MMOs [massively multiplayer online games].
When we asked him how feeling superior in games translated into the real world, he said that many gamers had below average social skills to begin with, yet felt they were “the LeBron James of their respective game.” He said they still hit a wall, socially, in the real world, and the growing divergence between their online persona and their real-life reputation drove them to play even more to excel in their gaming world since it was easier to achieve their desired status there than in daily life.
Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, and fellow researcher Nick Yee, call the phenomenon of adapting one's real-life behavior to that of their digital persona the “Proteus Effect.”16 On the positive side, the Proteus Effect has been shown to help people change drug and alcohol problems, and meeting up in a virtual space for support in conquering real-life addictions shows promise, especially for those who might have difficulty getting to a physical treatment center.17 On the negative side, it could create or reinforce an inflated ego that clashes with the demands of reality, promote de-individuation or manipulate the way a person thinks.
In real life, when people interact with each other they automatically mimic the other person's speech and posture patterns. In one study, Bailenson, Yee, and Ducheneaut showed that if an avatar in a virtual setting was able to mimic the head movements of the participant during a conversation, the participant was more likely to agree with the avatar's point of view than the real-life participants who were in the playback condition. In another study, in which the avatar was trying to persuade a participant, and the avatar's face was morphed to contain 20 to 40 percent of the participant's features, the facial similarity was such a powerful cue that it could sway the participant's choice of political candidate, even in high-profile elections. The attractiveness and even the color or style of the clothing worn by people's characters in a game can alter how they perceive themselves and affect how they interact with others, both inside and outside the game.18
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