Gamers' Brains Are Different

[w00tage]

The bad news is that, according to the study, frequent gamers have the same sense of reward as pathological gamblers. The study discovered that when a gamer "loses," the reward centers of their brain activate, dispersing dopamine into the system, encouraging them to disregard the loss and continue playing.

Well, of course!

To someone who's not paying much attention, that sounds like a terrible thing! But when you stop and get down to it, when you are killed in a game, what do you do? RIGHT! You restart and try again. In gambling, however, restarting means spending more money.

So, while the two activities stimulate that same part of the brain, the gamer tries again because he doesn't want the game to win and to progress; the gambler does it to make money/recoup losses. See the two different frames of mind?

But to your brain, it's the same thing. We're talking about primitive reward centers here, the ones that evolved before we developed higher brain functions.

Worse, our brain checks those FIRST, then lets our higher functions operate afterwards, setting us up for a perpetual battle between what we instinctively want and what we intellectually understand is good.

I swear, a major step in human evolution would be for our higher functions to process inputs before the primitive ones.

 

[Continuity]

of course games are addictive, its part of their appeal. Hell I remember back in the 90's some gaming magazines and websites even rated addictiveness as a primary element of their game rating system alongside gameplay and graphics... Its only modern apologists who even bring up the question of games being addictive... of course they are.

 

[LiquidQuartz]

Mine must be gigantic if I can play a game for 14 hours straight