Gamers' Brains Are Different

[Iron Mal]

Horribly written article. Didn't even list any factor remotely interesting from the source of information. Just heresay bullshit.

So the part where it lists the change in the brain's structure and how that makes our brain chemistry similar to that of gamblers wasn't at all factual?

Given how a lot of games use the 'Skinner Box' technique to keep players invested in them I'm not actually suprised that this has come to light (games are sort of designed this way, just look at World of Warcraft and how that keeps people playing for stupid amounts of time).

I would hardly call it bullshit when is it very possible (based on what I remember from psychologically anyway).

So... we've proven that gamers' brains are, if anything, more susceptible to manipulation via reward -- behavioral programming, basically. This is hardly a "win," but it's also hardly the fault of gaming.

Does gaming cause the brain to develop differently, or does gaming simply attract those with this particular brain structure? I would venture it's a bit of both. And that makes it no different from any other activity in which someone can feel "rewarded" -- sports, gambling, even school work.

That's actually an interesting point, after all, correlation is not causation and what-not.

I personally would argue that, as with most things, the influence video games can possibly have on people are largely based on individual differences (some of us play games healthily, some of us get fixated and spend all our time playing WoW and others turn psychotic and threaten to blow up best buy when our pre-order isn't there), like all media, we all interpret what we see in a game a different way so it could be argued that looking for a universal 'effect' of video games is a pointless endevor (you could sit two people down in front of a scene from Call of Duty and get radically different opinions about what they saw and how they felt about the experience).

 

[Aurora Firestorm]

This reward system takes place in every person. It's not just what happens during addiction. Anytime you're rewarded for doing something, your brain is happy and releases dopamine, and it tells itself that this action is good and you should do it in the future to get more good things. It may be larger in someone who is used to these kinds of conditioned rewards, but in the end, it's not like we don't all experience it. It's certainly not a sign of addiction. There have been scads of studies showing that random but frequent rewards are a way to get *any* human to do what you want them to do, not just compulsive types. We're all pretty easily trained.

 

[Dastardly]

I personally would argue that, as with most things, the influence video games can possibly have on people are largely based on individual differences (some of us play games healthily, some of us get fixated and spend all our time playing WoW and others turn psychotic and threaten to blow up best buy when our pre-order isn't there), like all media, we all interpret what we see in a game a different way so it could be argued that looking for a universal 'effect' of video games is a pointless endevor (you could sit two people down in front of a scene from Call of Duty and get radically different opinions about what they saw and how they felt about the experience).

Absolutely -- the subject of an unhealthy fixation (or even addiction) is often just revealing issues that were there to begin with. It's not the game causing the fixation, but rather a tendency toward fixation happening to latch onto games as its outlet. If games weren't there, something else would have done it.

Now, just like we can tell if someone is genetically more-at-risk for certain conditions, we can identify if someone is psychologically more-at-risk, too. If someone is prone to act out fantasies, we can surmise that gaming would feed that... potentially in dangerous ways. But the game isn't creating problems, so much as revealing them.

We do, however, also have to face the possibility that certain types of games, coupled with certain issues, can reinforce those issues. Not the same as a cause, but definitely a contributing factor.

 

[Scrustle]

Cool. Very interesting stuff. Reminds me of an experiment I studied in college. They found that London taxi drivers had a much larger hippocampus area in their brains that non-taxi drivers. Basically the exact same thing happened as in this study. Their brains changed in reaction to a greater demand of navigation skills.

 

[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