Gaming Addiction

Part 5 of 6 in the series Boob Tube

There are many pejorative terms for television, including “boob tube” and “chewing gum for the mind”, showing the disdain held by many people for this medium. According to a study published in 2008, conducted by John Robinson and Steven Martin from the University of Maryland, people who are not satisfied with their lives spend 30% more time watching TV than satisfied people do. Based on his study, Robinson commented that the pleasurable effects of television may be likened to an addictive activity, producing “momentary pleasure but long-term misery and regret.” — Wikipedia

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) reports that “psychiatrists are concerned about the wellbeing of children who spend so much time with video games that they fail to develop friendships, get appropriate outdoor exercise or suffer in their schoolwork,… [but that] the APA does not consider ‘video game addiction’ to be a mental disorder at this time. If the science warrants it, this proposed disorder will be considered for inclusion in DSM-V, which is due to be published in 2012.” ¹

The APA has also reported that “players of violent video games have significantly higher feelings of aggression and differences in brain activity during both cognitive motor activity and resting periods.… Researchers led by Gregor R. Szycik, Ph.D., with Hannover Medical School in Hannover, Germany, investigated intensive use of first-person shooter games on the brain function of young male adults, particularly looking at both the possible impact of such games on morphological and functional structure of the brain and its relation to processing cognitive tasks.” ²

“Screen technologies cause high arousal which in turn activates the brain system’s underlying addiction,” neurologist and Oxford Professor Baroness Greenfield said in October 2011, as reported by the Daily Mail website. “This results in the attraction of yet more screen-based activity.” The report continues:

The first genuinely scientific attempt to analyse the emotive subject has thrown up astonishing results that suggest she is right. Differences in brain activity between young men who played violent games and ones who didn’t were visible in a randomly assigned sample in just one week.…

After one week, the ‘gamers’ showed less activity in certain regions of the brain when they were scanned. Dr Yang Wang, assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis said to Medical News Today: “For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home.”

“These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior.” ³

Source: Cracked.com

“Every computer game is designed around the same central element: the player. While the hardware and software for games may change, the psychology underlying how players learn and react to the game is a constant,” expounds John Hopson in “Behavioral Game Design” for Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games:

The study of the mind has actually come up with quite a few findings that can inform game design, but most of these have been published in scientific journals and other esoteric formats inaccessible to designers. Ironically, many of these discoveries used simple computer games as tools to explore how people learn and act under different conditions.… Psychology can offer a framework and a vocabulary for understanding what we are already telling our players.

• Contingencies and Schedules.… A contingency is a rule or set of rules governing when rewards are given out. The anecdote about this discovery (as passed to [Hopson] by one of his students) is that one day B. F. Skinner ran low on the small food pellets he gave the rats in his experiments. Rather than risk running out and having to stop work for the day, he began to provide the pellets every tenth time the rats pressed the lever instead of every time. Experimenting with different regimens of reward, he found that they produced markedly different patterns of response. From this was born a new area of psychology, and one that has some strong implications for game design.

• Ratios and Intervals.… There are essentially two fundamental sorts of contingencies, ratios and intervals. Ratio schedules provide rewards after a certain number of actions have been completed.… Fixed ratio schedules typically produce a very distinct pattern in the participant. First there is a long pause, then a steady burst of activity as fast as possible until a reward is given.… Once participants decide to go for the reward, they act as fast as they can to bring the reward quickly.…

source: education.com

There are also “variable ratio” schedules, in which a specific number of actions are required, but that number changes every time.… Under variable ratio schedules, participants typically respond with a steady flow of activity at a reasonably high rate. While not quite as high a rate as the burst under a fixed ratio schedule, it is more consistent and lacks the pausing that can cause trouble.… In general, variable ratio schedules produce the highest overall rates of activity of all the schedules.

On the other side of the coin there are interval schedules. Instead of providing a reward after a certain number of actions, interval schedules provide a reward after a certain amount of time has passed. In a “fixed interval” schedule, the first response after a set period of time produces a reward.… Participants usually respond to fixed interval contingencies by pausing for a while after a reward and then gradually responding faster and faster until another reward is given.… As in the fixed ratio, there is a pause that can cause problems for a game designer. Unlike the fixed ratio, there is no sharp transition to a high rate of activity. Instead, there is gradual increase as the appropriate time approaches. The pause remains, a period where player motivation is low.

There are also “variable interval” schedules, where the period of time involved changes after each reward. A counterpart to the variable ratio schedules, these also produce a steady, continuous level of activity, although at a slower pace. As in the variable ratio schedule, there is always a reason to be active.… The motivation is evenly spread out over time, so there are no low points where the players’ attention might wander. The activity is lower than in a variable ratio schedule because the appearance is not dependent on activity.

Experiments have shown that [game designers] are very good at determining which consequences are the results of [their] own actions and which are not.… Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity [designers] want from [their] players.⁴

“Notice [the] article does not contain the words ‘fun’ or ‘enjoyment.’… Instead it’s “the pattern of activity you want,” observes David Wong in “5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted” for the Cracked.com website:

His theories are based around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by training subjects with simple stimulus and reward. He invented the “Skinner Box,” a cage containing a small animal that, for instance, presses a lever to get food pellets.…

It used to be that once they sold us a $50 game, they didn’t particularly care how long we played. The big thing was making sure we liked it enough to buy the next one. But the industry is moving toward subscription-based games like MMO’s that need the subject to keep playing – and paying – until the sun goes supernova.

Now, there’s no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner’s techniques.…

Most addiction-based game elements are based on this fact:
Your brain treats items and goods in the video game world as if they are real. Because they are.… That’s why the highest court in South Korea ruled that virtual goods are to be legally treated the same as real goods. And virtual goods are now a $5 billion industry worldwide.

There’s nothing crazy about it. After all, people pay thousands of dollars for diamonds, even though diamonds do nothing but look pretty. A video game suit of armor looks pretty and protects you from video game orcs. In both cases you’re paying for an idea.⁵

Tinfoil Hat – Mind Control and Coercive Psychological Systems

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