Affect of Playing Videogames

As we move further into the 21st century, the gaming industry yearly expands in size and complexity. From hardcore gamers the reach of this medium is growing to more casual and generally non-game-playing people. Increasing in popularity with each passing day videogames, one could conclude, are becoming the entertainment choice of this, and upcoming, generations.

This is exactly the reason more and more researchers are studying how games affect our brains, behavior, and social relations. There seem to only have been two kinds of researches. On the one hand there are those that tell us games are bad for us (which most of you, I am sure, are familiar with).

On the other side there are the researchers, professors, and psychologists (perhaps more positive) who are interested in how games affect human nature. They're examining games from a more objective standpoint. They often say that videogames are good for us. Videogames, they say, don't promote violence; instead they engage our imaginations and test our hand-eye coordination. They are no worse than playing war games in the street with other kids or playing with Army Men and that videogames might even provide logic puzzles and challenge our intelligence from time to time. These individuals generally say it's fine to play games, and just like with anything, to play them in moderation.

In a recent Discover Magazine article, James Gee, a professor of learning sciences at University of Wisconsin, suggests that gameplaying might be mentally enriching. Gee's research looks at how games bond with the reward circuits of the human brain, and suggests that while gaming is indeed addictive, it builds instead of reducing cognitive skills.

In his studies, Gee found that gamers learn pattern recognition from puzzles and enemies or bosses; not only that, they also learn system thinking, which means that they learn how a game is ordered, or how an enemy is attacking, or how to solve logic or physical puzzles. They even learn tolerance.

Gee's research also suggests that gaming is equivalent to exercise for the mind. It "exercises" the mind like physical workouts exercise the body. Gee's studies also show that successful gamers must have endurance, develop a willingness to delay satisfaction, and prioritize limited resources.

Gee also explains that every videogame is rooted in one of the core principles of learning - similar to the fact that students prosper when the subject matter challenges them right at the edge of their abilities. Make the lessons too tough and the students get frustrated. Make them too simple and they get bored. Cognitive psychologists call this 'the regime of competence principle'. Gee recognizes that this principle is central to videogames also: as players progress, puzzles become more complicated, enemies faster, tougher and more numerous, underlying patterns more clever.

James Gee isn't the only one to publish positive results from his studies on videogames and its effects on people. James Rosser of the Advanced Medical technology Institute of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, learned that laparoscopic surgeons playing videogames more than three hours a week made 37% fewer mistakes then their non-gaming peers, thanks to improved hand-eye coordination and depth perception.

Harvard Business School press also published a book with research among white-collar professionals, hardcore gamers, occasional gamers, and non-gamers. The data disagrees with nearly all of the previous findings on the impact of games. The gaming population, it turns out, is constantly more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively. The report showed no evidence of reduced attention spans compared with non-gamers.

Numerous studies show that when playing games, the neurotransmitter dopamine is produced in the human brain. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University, calls the dopamine system the brain's 'seeking' circuitry, which propels people to search for new opportunities for reward in their surroundings. Naturally, games encourage "risk and reward" behavior with mission objectives, explorable settings, optimization, customization, new weapons and more. While dopamine is also involved in the addictiveness of drugs, "The thing to remember about dopamine is that it's not at all the same thing as pleasure," says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. "Without dopamine, you wouldn't be able to learn properly." As a result of generation of dopamine, games become highly addictive and engrossing.

Researchers also say that games help people learn because of the following