Jane McGonigal's World Without Oil has the mantra “Play it—before you live it,” and has more than 1,500 players visualizing and living their lives as if there were a true oil crisis. The result was an eerily plausible collective imagining of such an event, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening. More than mere “raising awareness,” World Without Oil made the issues real, and this in turn led to real engagement and real change in people's lives.67 Visit http://WorldWithoutOil.org to learn more.
Foldit is another game that has intrigued many users. The game requires users to solve puzzles for science by designing proteins. It turns out that humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities are more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks, so the scientists behind Foldit are using players' answers to teach computers to fold proteins faster and predict protein structures. The combined effort of players actually helped solve a problem related to HIV that had puzzled scientists for more than ten years. Check out http://fold.it for more information.
The Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Wii gaming systems are other great examples of positive gaming. Wii has a broader demographic than other gaming consoles and typically involves more exercise and socializing, too. The whole family can play together, but the games are fun enough that teenage guys play by themselves or with each other. I (Nikita) have even seen ninety-year-old grandmas playing Wii Bowling in a nursing home. It's one of those “kid-tested, parent-approved” kind of things that creates a win-win scenario. One-fifth of sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds surveyed said they'd give up their gym membership if they played Wii regularly, and parents believe that social gaming platforms like the Wii are having a positive influence in their home in addition to encouraging kids to do more exercise, reported a recent TNS Technology study.67 In one study where overweight and obese children followed a weight management program, but some of the children were also assigned to play active games on an Xbox Kinect, those who played the video games lost more weight than the children who just followed the weight management program alone.68
For some people, directing attention toward a virtual world may be a very good thing—even therapeutic, which researchers at the University of Washington and Loyola University have found to be the case with burn victims. Patients who played video games were distracted from their pain and reported feeling far less pain than when they were not distracted. This was confirmed by analysis of their MRIs; being in a virtual world actually decreased the amount of pain-related activity in the brain.70 In pediatric dentistry, children are encouraged to watch a favorite television show or play a game on an imaginary screen while their teeth are being drilled. This kind of hypno-therapeutic treatment has been shown to be very effective, especially with patients who cannot receive anesthesia.
Incorporating game-based learning into classroom lesson plans has shown some promise. It has the potential to transform education by getting students excited about learning and allow them to learn at their own pace, but it also has the potential to condition students to rely on external rewards and bypass getting a deeper understanding or context of the concepts they are learning.
It could be argued that fluid intelligence—our capacity to learn new information and solve problems in novel situations—can improve with gaming.71 For example, the military reported that soldiers who were also gamers scored 10 to 20 percent higher in perceptual and cognitive ability than nongamers,71 and surgeons who play video games for at least three hours a week made fewer errors on advanced surgeries and performed faster than a control group.73 However, if the gamer is just doing the same actions or solving the same puzzles over and over, he may not see any benefits. Interestingly, young men that play single-player video games in moderation (between once a month and most days a week but not everyday) perform better in math, reading, science, and problem solving than students who never or hardly ever play, whereas those who play collaborative online games do worse than those who don't play.74
This may be due to the objective in the game—many video games offer more than one way to play. For example, if you're in the static offline version, you're often a hero-in-the-making on a specific mission, but in the multiplayer online version, you're just some random character shooting other players or you're on a team playing against other teams. In the multiplayer version there may be no goal beyond killing the most amount of people.
When it comes to how the brain responds as well as potential cognitive benefits gained, the motivation of the gamer and whether or not they've set a long-term goal with their gameplay may make a difference. South Korean neuropsychiatrist Jaewon Lee says setting a future goal within a video game or using it for training purposes, like a pro gamer would, doesn't interfere with normal brain activity, whereas just playing to get some satisfaction or release tension does.75 More research is needed to determine the kind of impact that specific goal setting within a game can have on the gamer.
Right now the research indicates many are not so mindful. Studies of gamers that play for long periods of time have shown a reduction of gray matter areas of their brains, including parts of the frontal lobe, striatum, and insula—areas that carry out executive functions like planning, prioritizing, organizing, empathy, and impulse control. “Spotty” white matter was also found—suggesting weak communication between hemispheres of the brain, higher (cognitive) and lower (survival) brain centers, signaling between the brain and the rest of the body, reduced cortical thickness, impaired cognitive functioning—especially with increased sensitivity to reward and insensitivity to loss—and impaired dopamine function, which results in drug-like cravings.76
Certainly, the social aspects must be taken into account here. Large amounts of time spent in social isolation isn't good for anybody. Especially since the vast majority of games out there fail to engage or challenge players to develop their emotional intelligence.
When Gaming Goes Wrong
[The current state of the gaming industry is] too dark and derivative for my taste. The console and computer gaming business is too narrowly-defined by the 14 year old male mentality and all his not-so-honorable fantasies. It's being driven by what has worked and afraid of what a 10 million dollar development bust will entail. It has lost its moral compass.
—Bob Whitehead, game designer and programmer77
Few things unite people like a common enemy. In the past, a common enemy might have been a neighboring tribe or country, but a gamer's enemy today is social obligation: responsibilities, time management, dealing with real people, and taking real risks.
Like the Futurama episode, “Billy is in his room” is a common scene. Visiting relatives are welcomed by their aunts and uncles and cousins, whom they have not seen for some time. After the hugs and kisses and gift giving, the teenage son of the host family disappears—and never returns, even to say goodbye. The relatives ask, “Where's Billy?” His mom answers with what has become a familiar family refrain: “in his room.” That is the explanation for the failure to respect minimal social graces, or what used to be accepted as minimal family obligations to come out from seclusion even to say, “See ya, Cuz,” and buzz back to his gaming dungeon. For anyone who values family and its rituals, this is unacceptable behavior not only from Billy but even more so from Mom and Dad, who should know better and not be covering up for their son's lack of civility. In one sense, as such scenes get replicated widely, such behavior becomes part of the negative fallout from excessive, isolated gaming and porn absorption, effectively creating the new form of “cavemen.”
Video games go wrong when people play alone for long periods of time on a regular basis. With gaming experiences that can satisfy so many physical and mental needs, the gaming-life balance can spiral out of control. A couple of grown men loaned their perspectives in our survey—they were prepared to risk burnout and sacrifice sleep and other commitments in order to get their daily gaming fix:
I believe myself to be a member of the first
generation of Internet gamers, and I used to be a hard-core MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) addict spending 12 to 16 hours a day playing games. So I will share some personal thoughts. It started with bulletin board systems online, where you could play simple games and leave messages to other people, and gradually progressed into online chat rooms and then interactive games with chat rooms and now into online societies where you can literally spend all of your daylight hours inside and there will be people there wanting to play and chat with you. This alternative to spending time with people in the physical world around them offers easier access to gratification of social needs. The direct consequence of this is a degeneration of one's ability to socialize in person. Especially when it comes to new people and women. We have nothing of interest to talk about. No one wants to hear about our characters or things that happened during an online battle, or how we have designed our online house. And so we are left behind others who are not as interested in online gaming. Another horrible side effect is poor physical health. Many gamers (when I say gamers, I am referring to ones I know and have met) have underdeveloped upper-body muscles and poor eating habits and health as a direct consequence of the time spent behind a computer. Once you find yourself addicted to the Internet, it feels pointless to change your habits, because you get no gratification for doing so. If you manage to break away from the computer screen, you will not know what to do with the time you normally spend playing. There are no tools available online that I have found to offer a path to freedom from this kind of addiction. I believe the best solution is prevention, and the only way to do that is to inspire children.
I am a physician with a research background in neuroscience, who battled his own addictions with video games. I was an addicted gamer who, at my peak, invested over 20,000 hours of playing games over a period of nine years. My reckless compulsion to play games transformed me into a monster that almost destroyed my family, marriage and career. Without attention to this quickest-growing addiction, our society will suffer from the creation of Generation Vidiot, millions of people devoid of innovation and skills to live in the physical world.
Video games also go wrong when the person playing them is desensitized to reality and real-life interactions with others. After several tragic school shootings in the late 1990s, a videotape of the two Columbine High School shooters surfaced showing them talking about how their acts would be like the popular computer game Doom. Two weeks later a Senate hearing examined the marketing of violence to children. Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Dave Grossman, a former Army Infantryman who taught psychology at West Point and author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, spoke on one of the panels, saying there had to be a bridge between being a healthy citizen and having the ability to “snuff” out someone else's life:
In World War II, we taught our soldiers to fire at bull's-eye targets. They fought bravely. But we realized there was a flaw in our training when they came on the battlefield and they saw no bull's-eyes. And they were not able to transition from training to reality.
Since World War II, we have introduced a wide variety of simulators. The first of those simulators were pop-up human targets. When those targets appeared in front of soldiers, they learned to fire, and fire instinctively. When real human beings popped up in front of them, they could transfer the data from that simulator.
Today we use more advanced simulators. The law enforcement community uses a simulator that is a large-screen television with human beings on it, firing a gun that is identical to what you will see in any video arcade, except in the arcade the safety catch is turned off . . . The industry has to ask how it can market one device to the military, whoever is marketing it, and then turn around and give the same device to your children, and claim that it is harmless.78
Some violent video games that are licensed to the military can be superior devices for teaching soldiers battle tactics. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 proved to be excellent “training-simulation” for the Norwegian mass-murderer who bombed government buildings in Oslo and went on to murder sixty-nine more people, mostly youths, at a summer camp on the island of Utya in 2011. The killer admitted that he played World of Warcraft to relax. Simon Parkin, a video games journalist for the Guardian, argued the video games were a medium for his psychopathy, not the cause: “broken humans will no doubt draw whatever inspiration they are seeking from it to feed their own madness,” and that no creator can ensure that their creation is not misused.79 Others see it as adding gasoline to the fire.
Although the American Psychological Association confirmed the link between playing violent video games and increased aggression in 2015, there was “insufficient evidence . . . about whether that link extends into criminal violence or delinquency.”80
Jaewon Lee says, “The results from [the brain scans of] Internet addicts were very similar to patients with ADHD, and also other forms of addiction—in the way the brain functionality had been depressed.”81 Surprisingly, it takes only a week of playing violent videogames to depress activity in portions of the brain responsible for emotional control.82 The same conclusion was reached by a meta-analysis of research on video games.83
Today, many would agree that violent video games are synonymous with successful video games.84 Children with more propensities to be aggressive are more attracted to violent video media, but violent media, in turn, can also make them more aggressive. This could be related to the fact that most video games reward players for violent acts, often permitting them to move to the next level in a game. Yet recent research suggests a link between violent video games and real-life aggression; given the opportunity, both adults and children will be more aggressive after playing violent games. And people who identify themselves with violent perpetrators in video games are able to take aggressive action while playing that role, reinforcing aggressive behavior85 and a sense of male disposability. Like the Proteus Effect, there is an increasing amount of data that suggests our brains instinctively mimic the states of the other minds we interface with, even if those other minds are imagined.85 The desensitization and mirroring effects combined with the addictive qualities of games can be a recipe for disaster for some players.
One study that measured social rejection's impact on narcissism and any resulting aggression found that when people who were narcissistic were rejected by their peers (or perceived that they were rejected) they were highly aggressive toward others after the rejection—not unlike patterns found in mass shootings.87
After the Virginia Tech shooting, journalist David Von Drehle aptly pointed out that the extreme self-centerdness of these kinds of killers is the “forest in these stories,” and that all the other elements—guns, games, lyrics, pornography—“are just the trees . . . Only a narcissist could decide that his alienation should be underlined in the blood of strangers.”88 The more time a narcissist spends alone in those “trees,” however, the more carried away in his self-absorbed thoughts he will get, and the more justified he will think his acts are.
Speaking at the University of Pittsburgh's Western Psychiatric Institute in 1982, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop warned that video games might be detrimental to the health of young people: “More and more people are beginning to understand [the games'] adverse mental and physical effects . . . There's nothing constructive in the games . . . Everything is eliminate, kill, destroy.”89 That was thirty years ago, when Dig Dug and Ms. Pac-Man—a 2D game in which a player would earn points by eating pellets and avoiding ghosts within a maze—were a couple of the top arcade games.
Steven L. Kent, author of The Ultimate History of Video Games, says pinball machines, the precursor to video games, began to incorporate the idea of “pay-outs”—combining games with gambling—in the 1930s. Politicians were quick to prohibit all forms of pinball; the ban was upheld for decades until pinball enthusiasts were able to demonstrate that the game involved more skill than luck, bringing more legitimacy to the industry. Much like the joystick and buttons o
n a controller, the flipper—the spring-powered levers invented by engineer Harry Mabs in 1947—allowed greater user interaction with the game as well as the opportunity to develop skill.
Three decades later video arcade games were the new trend, and in order to make money locations depended on a player lasting less than two minutes per game. Therefore it was necessary for companies to create games with interesting graphics, original plots, and simple objectives. Something that was easy to learn but difficult to master§ that people would want to play over and over again once they got started. The formula was effective. In the late 1970s so many people were playing Space Invaders in Japan that there was a national coin shortage, and people would huddle around players who could get further along in whatever game was most popular.90 There was also a level of public prestige and personal satisfaction that went along with attaining a high score.
Flash-forward another thirty years to today's video games for which top talent is recruited—from the designers to Grammy-winning composers—and they look just as good, if not better, than big-budget Hollywood films. The most popular themes in movies and games that appeal to young men revolve around driving, sports, and war, except in the video game the user gets to control everything. Even if they don't like the rules of the game they can use cheats (such as secret codes and hacks that give players an unfair advantage) to operate the game beyond their skill level and exert even greater control over the game. Social games like World of Warcraft are designed to be ongoing by rewarding character progression, and as players acquire more weapons and skill levels, they have greater social status and the game becomes more gratifying. There is a certain comfort knowing these infinite worlds exist where accomplishments can be revisited at any time or picked up right where the player left off. When these illusive worlds replace reality, however, comfort can turn into dependence.
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