Violence in Games: The Real Problem

In the news, online, and in magazines, we’re constantly reminded how bad video games are, for both our physical and mental health. The violent nature of video games is often used as a scapegoat for countless other violent things – mass shootings, terrorism, making our hair fall out (from pulling it out due to....uh….violence!). Too much gaming causes insomnia, diabetes, obesity, social isolation, depression, aggression, anxiety, psychopathic tendencies – I could go on forever.

Articles like this and this seem to be in the back of many parents' minds.

Even PETA has gotten on this bandwagon, trying to show how pokemon is equal to animal abuse and how even a game as innocent as Cooking Mama has an alternate agenda.

Yep, there's one for Mario, too. 

Gaming can have adverse side effects. Due to some of the addictive properties of games I talked about here, there can be dangers for people with addictive personalities. Just like sitting in front of a computer for hours, there can be damage to the eyes, decrease in physical activity which can lead to weight gain, and a lack of social interaction.

Let me point out that all of these problems linked to gaming is due to an excessive amount of gaming. No, you're not going to get fat because you like to play Destiny every night (although that could help).

However, linking the entire gaming industry to a rise in violence is vastly misguided. 

For starters, not all games are violent and terrible. Games like Legend of Zelda and Yoshi’s Island (along with other Mario games) are essentially puzzle games; Okami teaches about oriental culture and rewards exploration; and Journey has been regarded as a work of art, encouraging cooperation between players.

Sure, you have your Call of Duty-s and Gears of War-s, which are the games these claims are usually talking about. However, these games have good qualities, too – building teamwork, encouraging innovation in players, and increasing communication skills are just a few.

Image courtesy of lifeasadigitalsalad

Yes, I know that's Halo. No, this isn't the kind of teamwork I was talking about.

Although most of the complaints anymore come from misinformed parents or news reporters looking for that perfect hook to land them a front-page article, these articles get attention. Lots of attention. It seems that the general belief of many people who aren't gamers is that video games will ruin your child.

For example, this post emphasizes how violent games cause kids to blur reality and real life. In all seriousness, this should really only be concerning for parents of very young children who shouldn’t be playing these games anyway. 

Let's look at that last sentence again:

"...this should really only be concerning for parents of very young children who shouldn't be playing these games anyway." (Me, October 19th, 2014).

As gamers know, the ESRB labels these games as mature for a reason. We run into problems when parents allow their children to play games they weren’t intended to (or when kids watch their older sibling play, or whatever). Children have a hard time separating reality from fantasy until roughly the age of eight, some having difficulty past this age.

Image courtesy of dubli.com

He should be able to play Saw in about two months. 

Little kids are full to the brim with imagination. Magical thinking is a concept used by psychologists which explains how people make connections between cause-and-effect (causal) relationships and less tangible things, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. 

Children use this way of thinking to explain a lot of things about their world. Generally, the more they experience the world for themselves, and the more sophisticated their reasoning skills get, the less they use this type of reasoning. These skills usually begin to develop around the time they're six, due to a bunch of development in the brain and a lot more life experience on their end.

We see a lot more kids who hold onto some aspects of magical thinking well into their teens. The Slendermen Stabbing from June is being speculated as such. These 12 year old girls seemed to still hold onto magical thinking -- they weren't able to translate their actions into real-life consequences. 

Because of exposure to more adult things than before -- the internet can be a scary place, not to mention themes discussed in the news -- we can see why these young ones have such a hard time differentiating reality from fantasy.

However, that is why the ESRB rating system was invented. The intended audience for violent games like Mass Effect and shooters like Call of Duty is much older -- 17+. People in this age range can usually deduce that they aren't actually killing people in the game, and that doing so in real life would be bad.

A little one who still reasons about their world using magical thinking might not be able to do so.

Image courtesy of latestfunnypics

Too much sad. Let Puppy and Kitty make you happy again.

Yes, games can be violent and inappropriate for children. A lot of tragedies such as school shootings and child murders are falsely pinned on the violent nature of all games. No, Cooking Mama is not teaching kids that killing is okay, and Call of Duty is not the sole reasoning for the Sandy Hook shooting. 

But there can be some pretty crazy stuff in games. 

In the end, the ones who are suffering from violent games are those too young to play. Sure, some young teenagers can probably play COD or Battlefield 4 and be perfectly fine. But I see plenty of 10-year olds with their parents blindly buying these games. 

A little education could go a long way, guys.

Why are mobile games so addicting?

Have you ever wondered what compels you to keep playing mobile games like Candy Crush or Clash of Clans (other than the awesome alliteration in their titles)? What makes you continue to play these games consistently for weeks or months (or even years on end, in my Dad’s case), whereas Triple-A games like Assassin’s Creed, Super Mario and GTA sit on the shelf for months after one or two binge sessions?

Let me introduce you to my main man, B.F. Skinner.

Image courtesy of Reynaldo Flores

You mean B.A.M.F. Skinner, right?

Skinner was a pretty cool dude (in psychology. So he'd probably just be a nerd). He's known for a lot of things in psychology. One device he used a lot which might sound familiar is called the Skinner Box. If you clicked and read any of that article and/or know something about psychology (bonus points), the Skinner Box was used by that guy up there to test his theory of operant conditioning.

Operant conditioning is based off of Pavlov's theory (a different dude -- there's a lot of them in psych, sorry) of classical conditioning; it's the experiment where someone teaches a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. There's no quick way to explain without boring you all to death, so if you're not familiar with the concept, here's a hilarious example of this training technique at work. 

Anyway, operant conditioning is like classical conditioning, but instead of relying on a naturally occurring response (the dog salivating), it's taught through rewards (getting a 1-up) and punishments (losing a life). Skinner liked to call rewards and punishments "reinforcements".

Reinforcement, as put by B.F. Skinner, is “the process of encouraging or establishing a pattern of behavior, especially by encouragement or reward.” The key word here is reward. If I ask my dog to sit and give him a cookie, his sitting is reinforced by the idea that next time, he’ll get a cookie!

--

Let's take a step back for a second and think about mobile games. First thing that might come to mind is this: 

Image courtesy of  bestandroidappsreview

Is this game even still a thing?

That is the #1 app on all mobile markets. Still. Angry Birds is a funny game with decent graphics for a mobile title, and it has good puzzle elements. It also has more people playing it consistently than any other game in the world. This free game is outperforming multi-million dollar titles. 

...Why?

Games like Angry Birds get paid in ad dollars and in-app purchases. They want their players to keep playing their games for a long time. How do they do this?

Developers use this operant conditioning thing to get their players to keep playing. 

I ask my dog to sit and give him a cookie, his sitting is reinforced by the cookie. With games (and people), the process isn’t this simple. 

Game developers want to increase the behavior of you playing the game, so that they can make money. They use a very special reinforcer for your brain to make you subconsciously want to keep playing. The reward they use/manipulate is a chemical is called dopamine.

This bastard.

This little chemical is released in your brain to make you feel pleasure. 

You see, most games have continuous gameplay, allowing you to go through the game at your own pace. As you play, you complete tasks -- like killing enemies, collecting loot, or completing quests -- which results in a release dopamine into your brain to let you know you did something good.

However, as you play, your brain starts to become used to all the dopamine swimming around in there. You essentially start to ‘overdose’ on dopamine. As you continue to play, you get less and less pleasure out of completing the same tasks because your brain becomes habituated to all the dopamine. The game isn't fun anymore. And then it gets thrown behind the TV until you remember months later and wonder "Why didn't I finish beating that game?"

Image courtesy of GameFaqs

Oh yeah, because it sucked. That's why.

Mobile developers were smart. They recognized the burnout that gamers of triple-A titles faced. So they decided to train your brain by manipulating dopamine intake. They use a technique called scheduled reinforcement. It's Skinner's reinforcement but....scheduled.

Usually, a game starts off by allowing you to play the game with relative freedom. Either the levels are very easy, you're allowed a lot of extra lives, or the time penalties are very short. You complete any of these tasks, and BAM! Reinforcement through release of dopamine.

Before your brain becomes habituated with dopamine, they cut you off. Levels become too difficult to complete without multiple attempts, time penalties are longer, or enemies become stronger. Because dopamine is so pleasurable, your brain wants more. But it can no longer achieve those max levels it's used to. The game refuses to allow it.

Your brain is aware of when it's allowed to get that dopamine again. You soon begin to check your game at regular intervals for your reward of sweet, sweet dopamine.You've learned through reinforcement to continue to play the game. You're trapped.

Thankfully, you’re not trapped forever. Many people can stop playing these games, but only after the developers have gotten ad revenue and money from in-app purchases.

It can be extremely addicting. I’ve been playing How To Train Your Dragon on my phone for…oh, six months now? At least I have those Titan Dragons.

Thanks a lot, Skinner.

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.