Gaming and Psychology: Why it Matters

The modern gaming industry is ENORMOUS. More than a half of a billion people worldwide play games at least an hour a day -- it’s estimated that, worldwide, humans spend 3 billion hours a year gaming. That’s 75 million full-time work weeks spent hacking, slashing, and shooting our enemies (and farming, for you Harvest Moon fans). MAN, what are we DOING with ourselves??

Image courtesy of animalcrossing.com

Or fishing, bug catching, errands-running….OMG, why is this game so much fun?

Game sales have tripled from where they were ten years ago. In addition to consoles, handheld devices and PC games are released every day by the hundreds. As if that weren't enough, most people have a handy little device in their pockets that give them access to LITERALLY ALMOST EVERY GAME EVER -- when you consider emulators and the ridiculous number of mobile apps on the market. 

It’s not really a surprise that the number of gamers is so huge. 

Although, it seems a bit strange to me that we spend so much time playing our games, when there isn’t much of a conversation about why games do the things they do.

 In fact, there isn’t much understanding about gaming at all.

 I’m not talking about how to mod Minecraft, or how to beat level 667 in Candy Crush – I’m talking about the real, research-backed, psychological reasons that explain how we interact with games. How games work. How they interact with our MINDS.

You know, like how reinforcement schedules program our brains to be addicted to mobile games such as Candy Crush and Clash of Clans?

Or, you know, that the average age of gamers is somewhere around 35 years old, not 12, like commonly portrayed. (This fact in particular is important because games often take a lot of crap about being terribly violent for children. The vast number of mature games being released reflects the larger gaming audience, not Little Timmy.)

Or how gaming appears to be more of a coping mechanism for dealing with disorders such as depression, anxiety, and social isolation, rather than being the cause of the disorder in the first place? (Whoo, need a breather.)

Image via Kotaku

He's angry because Kiki asked him to run an errand again. 

Animal Crossing can be really, really stressful.

Games have a real, very visible and well-documented effect on our psychology. It’s important to understand how this happens, and why. There are countless empirical studies published every year about how various aspects of gaming effect our psyche. 

At the same time, it’s also interesting and really cool to know how developers make us play their games, or why something in a game makes us feel the way we do (I’m looking at you Walking Dead. You can’t make me cry like that…..oh Clementine, why do you do this to me?)

There are several people discussing the interaction between psychology and gaming on the interwebs, like MatPat with the Game Theorists on Youtube, and this blog which does a particularly good job looking at how games affect our psychology. But this is pretty much it.

It's clear this conversation is just getting started.

Not nearly enough people are looking at and understanding how these games affect us as people.

Imagine this: you’ve stayed up late playing Tetris or Bejeweled (or any other puzzle game) and realized it’s three in the morning and you have to be to work at eight. You lay down in bed, ready to fall asleep, and…

Image courtesy of cmit.net

I just wanted to sleep, and my brain won't stop playing a 

really crappy round of Tetris!

This is a documented psychological event called the Tetris Effect, and it an effect your everyday functioning, like how you deal with work, and even how you learn. 

The neurons in the part of your brain responsible for processing the stuff we see (called the visual cortex) gets over-stimulated by all of the times you fucked up using the long piece again goddamnit can’t you do anything right. Your brain gets these patterns stuck in a loop (like the time you couldn’t get It’s Raining Men out of your head), even effecting your visual processing while you sleep.

This can happen with any type of random visual pattern. Tetris, Candy Crush, even data entry during a long, 8-hour work day can make your brain run in circles faster than Sonic can get through Green Zone.

You thought that was interesting? Well, that is just one small, well-documented example of how the psychology of video games effects the way we think and how we live our lives. Don’t worry, there’s plenty to go around ;)

So, do you really want to understand what makes sandbox and collectable games so enjoyable, or why games like GTA and Call of Duty are so popular, or why nostalgic video games are so appealing? If so, stick around, and you might learn something.