Video Game Addiction – Why We Love Video Games

The soldier sat quietly with the young boy, playing yet another game of chess. He ignored the guilt panging in the back of his mind as he hid underground from the clashing of metal and screams that echoed through the room from outside. His armour and shield leant up against the wall beside the door unused.

But the game relaxed his mind. It would allow him to improve his strategic abilities that could one day be used for war, he told himself.

Nobody would find him here. He could stay here until the war was over.

The boy moved his rook two spaces forward. The soldier smirked as he moved his bishop 6 spaces diagonally across the board to take the boy’s rook.

“Don’t worry boy”, the soldier remarked pridefully, “One day you’ll win every game of chess you ever play like I do”

The boy paused thoughtfully for several moments and then seemed to make up his mind. “I never want to be like you” the boy said innocently.

The soldier, accustom to receiving admiration from children was puzzled. “Why not?” he asked curiously.

The boy continued to look down at the chess board and spoke: “If I became as good as you at this game, I could never become a great soldier”.

As the boy spoke, an indescribable, dreadful feeling throbbed inside the the soldier. Like a demon he had been hiding from his entire life had finally found him.

The solider slowly stood up without a word, took a deep breath, collected his armour and shield and ran upstairs to join the fight.

Video games are no longer only for fat nerds living in their mother’s basement. Gaming has gone mainstream.

Teenagers and adults use games to socialise with their mates. Lads will play fps shooters with their circle of friends. Mothers will play mobile games while their child is sleeping or on the way to work. Entire stadiums are filled to watch others play video games at a competitive levels. Gaming creates teenage celebrities and millionaires through prize money. Streamers and content creators make a real income through playing video games.

Video gaming isn’t only escapism. More and more, gaming has become integrated with the real world. Gaming now carriers real financial incentives and creates real celebrities.

But gaming isn’t all positive. Video games create addiction, wasted potential, ruined lives and man-children. Gaming has become a large part of society, and is likely to become more and more widespread and mainstream as we move forward into the future.

So why do we love video games so much? Because it’s a perfect reflection of our evolutionary roots and our tribal past.

Why We Love Video Games

We love video games because they’re a supernormal stimuli of our tribal environment.

For millions of years, we lived in tribes. Our body and brain is evolved for an environment that involved hunting prey over a large terrain and throwing projectiles (usually spears) in order to kill animals. We would bring the dead animal home and share it with the rest of our tribe.

This was typically a job for the men, while the women generally stayed home, took care of the children and foraged for fruit. The most talented hunters in the tribe would be at the top of the male dominance hierarchy, and in turn become highly attractive to the women in the tribe.

For men, going into the unknown and coming back to the tribe with a reward is what our brains and bodies are evolved to do. The reward circuitry in our brain is based around this process.

Video games hijack this circuitry.

Video games are simulated version of the hunting process our ancestors used to undertake. In FPS shooters, players need to navigate terrain, hunt a target with a team, and use projectiles to attack the target. It’s no surprise at all, that FPS shooters appeal predominantly to men considering it matches our evolutionary programming perfectly.

FPS shooters are a supernormal stimuli version of the hunting our ancestors had to do. They take all the aspects of hunting animals across the savannas of Africa and make them more convenient, easier and more enjoyable.

In FPS shooters, the player uses guns that have a direct line of sight between their weapon and the target, often alongside an artificial beam of light or crosshairs. Our ancestors had no such aids, and they also had to deal with the effects that wind resistance and gravity would have on their spear as they threw it through the air.

In FPS shooters, players are often provided with a radar that shows a convenient birds-eye view of their surroundings, while our ancestors had to find their way using just their own vision and the position of the sun in the sky.

Players in FPS shooters don’t need to undertake any physical exertion whatsoever. They’re able to run across difficult terrains, jump, duck, throw grenades and fire weapons while they sit motionless in their chair. They’re able to get the feeling of hunting their prey without having to commit to any of the physical exertion. For our ancestors, who had to run countless miles every single day, this would have been a dream.

Other games require doing various tasks and being given rewards (Like MMORPG’s). Players will collect large numbers of items, just our ancestors would have collected fruits, nuts and other foodstuffs and brought them back to the tribe.

When we complete a task inside a video games, we’re often rewarded generously.

Rewards in video games are obvious, frequent and come with flashy visual graphics and sound effects. Achievements in the real world, on the other hand, come with none of these things.

Achievements in the real world are often quiet affairs. Perhaps it’s you sitting in the library enjoying a quiet moment of satisfaction having finally completed your essay. When you finish your essay, no banner appears at the bottom of your vision saying “Essay completed 300+XP”. Fireworks don’t appear around your body and the achievement doesn’t appear on the highscores table for your friends to see.

We love video games because rewards come more frequently, more easily and more obviously. Unlike reality, inside a video game the path forward is obvious. And when we achieve something inside a video game, it gets recorded on the global highscores table.

(Click a full paper on The Evolutionary Psychology Of Video Games)

How to play video games (And how not to)

The ultimate problem with video games is simple: They aren’t real.

The time, effort and energy you put into a video game doesn’t pay you back in the real world.

When you put time, energy and effort into learning a language, you’re rewarded. You’re able to communicate with larger number of people, the people around you are impressed when you speak in a foreign tongue and the skill of speaking in a foreign language will sticks with you for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, when you complete a video game, the only rewards you receive are digital. You get achievements, XP points, you level your character, fireworks explode on the screen, you beat the final boss, but the world doesn’t care.

The reward mechanisms in your brain, which should be pushing you towards achievements in the real world, are tricked into getting fulfilment in a digital world. Many avid gamers find themselves at 30 years old, suddenly realising that they haven’t achieved a damn thing in their entire lives.

Video games cause people to fall behind.

The dopamine reward system in your brain believes you’re heading towards success, yet your efforts are poured into a digital world and the digital rewards you achieve don’t transfer into the real world.

You live in reality, not inside your screens. Therefore, if you want to make the most of your life, you need to direct your efforts towards goals in reality.

While gamers will claim that they’ve learned many important lessons through playing video games, the truth is those very same lessons could have been learned more effectively and more accurately if learned in reality. A gamer might claim they learned problem solving skills through gaming, yet those problem solving skills could have been learned far more effectively while learning to be an electrician or even working as a waiter at a restaurant.

“I just play games to pass the time”. But why are you “passing time” in the first place? Did you forget that your time is limited? Did you forget about your death? Now that you’ve remembered once again, can you still justify spending another hour on your video games?

None of this is to say that video games can’t be a great experience.

How you should play video games:

• Play games with a storyline, characters and, most importantly, an ending. Video games can be a work of art like a book or a movie. They can include incredible writing, artistic graphics and beautiful music and SFX. They’re an experience arguably more engaging than a movie. Have the experience, complete the game and then move on.

• Play games as a social activity. Get your mates together on a Thursday night and meet up online to play an FPS shooter for a couple of hours. Playing games with your friends can be hilarious, exciting and make memorable experiences.

• Play games if you think you can become a pro-gamer. Gamers who make real money from playing video games are an incredibly small minority. Still, if you truly think you can become a pro-gaming star, then by all means give it your best shot.

• Play games if you’re a content creator. If you think making Youtube videos, streaming on Twitch or writing blogs about video games is a good way to earn a living, then go for it. Even so, you should ask yourself an important question: If you could make a living playing video games, would choose to do so? Do you want to spend the next 10 years paying the bills by streaming yourself playing games on Twitch? For some, making a living through playing video games is a dream. On the surface, it sounds like a great lifestyle, yet is this really what you want to dedicate your life to?

How You Shouldn’t Play Video Games

• Playing games for reasons of pointless completionism. Maxing out your character. Completing every achievement in the game. Doing torturously boring and mundane activities for hours on end just reach 100% on a game.

• Playing to become top of the highscores (with no tangible reward). Players around the world strive to put their username in the top 25 names on the highscores table. They feel as though this will give them some sense of notoriety or fame – it won’t. Nobody cares that you’re rank 1. Especially if the highscores are mostly just a rank of who has spent the most time playing the game.

• Playing as a way to escape real world problems. This, of course, is a recipe for disaster.

• Playing when you don’t enjoy it. Don’t play a game you don’t even enjoy just because of your compltitionist urges. Have high standards for games. If the game sucks, if the missions are repetitive, if training your character is boring, then quit and do something else.

• Playing because of the sunk-cost fallacy. Feeling as though you should keep playing the game simply because you’ve previously put large amounts of time into the game, and quitting would feel a waste.

• Playing when you’re addicted.

How Video Games Affect The Casual Player

Perhaps you deem yourself a casual player of video games. You have a job, a romantic partner, a life and you’re not addicted. Great. Here are some things to seriously consider.

You may have had the following experience: You’re working hard on a particular problem, your business, a creative project or a problem at work. After hours of working hard on this problem you decide to take a walk. Miraculously, while walking around, the solution to your problem appears in a flash of inspiration.

This is your subsconious mind at work. Your subconscious mind is always trying to figure out a way to solve problems and achieve pleasure. When you experience a sudden realisation, or a sudden idea or solution, that’s because your subsconious brain has been considering the problem for a long time.

Video games hijack the subconscious brain. Your brain will decide that because it’s getting so much dopamine from video games, it should spend it’s time figuring out how to get more dopamine from the game rather than real world-successes

Instead of working on creative ideas for the short story you’re writing, or a solution to a problem with your business, your brain will be preoccupied with trying to figure out how to gain the next level in your video game of choice.

As you’re taking a break from the game your mind will continue to wander back to the game: How could I earn more in-game currency in World of Warcraft…what’s a better strategy for beating my opponents in League Of Legends…perhaps I should buy a new outfit for my PubG character…

The problems you need to overcome in modern games are incredibly complex, and as such will require a large amount of your brain capacity to solve.

You become the media you consume. And if you spend time playing games, even just a couple of hours a day, it will creep its way into the rest of your life. While you might consider video games to be something separate from the rest of your life, your brain considers every single thing you do as part of you. Including video games.

Being successful in something requires obsession. You need to be using your brain to its full capacity. If you indulge in video games for 2 hours a day, your attention will be split, and you won’t reach your full potential.

The Stages Of A Video Game Addict

“At first it was fun, then fun with problems, now it’s just problems” – Russell Brand in Recovery

The rewards you get inside a video game create pleasurable spikes of dopamine in your brain that are similar to those produced from cocaine, alcohol and gambling. Your brain is adapted to a tribal environment in which you were required to hunt for food, so your brain rewards you for completing tasks.

However, the dopamine spikes you get from video games are unnatural. They are supernormal stimuli. Video games give us more dopamine surges than our brain is built to handle, hence, video game addiction.

After being bombarded by hits of dopamine through video games, our dopamine receptors become desensitised. The video game addict generally goes through the following 3 stages:

1. During the first stage, the game is actively fun. The brain is getting more dopamine than it’s used to, and the player is having a good time. It’s exciting, you’re learning the game mechanics, you’re making friends. All positive with little downside.

2. During the second stage, after weeks or months of gaming, the brain begins to adapt to the steady release of dopamine. Homeostasis achieves a balanced state using the tolerance mechanism and your dopamine receptors become desensitised. The player is no longer having as much as you used to. While the game no longer gives a high, it can still remove a low. If they’re in a negative mood, playing video games will bring them back to neutral.

3. When you reach the third phase, the games no longer even take away the negative emotions. The game is no longer fun. yet because the player’s dopamine receptors are damaged, nothing else in the world seems fun either. Walking their dog, studying, meeting friends, these things don’t provide as much dopamine as video games, so they feel less enjoyable.

Gamers often report that they want to quit a particular game, but no real world activity feels as fun. They believe that they don’t enjoy studying, learning a language, hanging out with their friends or going to an art museum. Concluding that they don’t like other activities, they return to the video games.

Never understanding that the reason they don’t like the other activities is because they’ve damaged their dopamine receptors through playing video games.

The solution to video game addiction? Stop playing video games. Stop watching videos about video games. Stop reading about video games. And replace it with something better.

When you stop, your dopamine receptors will return to their normal level of sensitivity and everyday activities will begin to feel pleasurable once again. This could take anywhere from 1 week to 1 year. But generally speaking, you will begin to feel the effects of coming off video games rather quickly.

You can play video games if you want, I’m not here to shame you or tell you what to do. Just ask yourself the following questions first:

Are video games stopping you from starting your project? Do you regret the time you’ve spent playing games? If you keep playing video games, realistically where will you be in 5 years? in 10 years? Are video games stopping your creative process? Would your life be better or worse without video games? Are video games stopping you from fulfilling your true potential as a human being?