The psychological effects of video games

This topic is nothing new for who is already used to games (and they are many), but I’d like to share my point of view. When I talk about psychological effects, of course I’m talking about all the achievements system created on several games that keeps players playing for hours. Some of them even pay for a better weapon or less waiting time.. which looking from another perspective is just a bunch of variables being changed on a server. Why people do this?

Fooling the brain

It all comes back to our brain. He is the one telling you to play just a little more. It is telling you need to have that particular aspect of the game, and can keep you trapped on that game.

Your brain works with gratification. Every time it recognizes you accomplished something it will reward you with a good feeling, and this is part of your instinct.

“Instinct? Me? I have 3 degrees in different areas!”, you might say. Part of your instincts still drive your behavior. You still stretch when you wake up, you still want to have sex (at least I hope so), and you still love candies instead of bitter leafs. All these behaviors are instinct based, you stretch to pump more blood to your muscles, you want to have sex to procreate and you want sugar because it’s energy while lots of poisons have bitter tasty. You didn't decided to think like that, maybe you even didn't know why you think and act in such ways. So we can assume that our instinct still influences us.

But, as just as our instinct can help us, it can harm as well. Our current brain still have some instincts that no longer are the best to fit our current life. You don’t need so many sugar as your brain tell you to eat and our species is not threatened to become extinct or something like that.

Our ancestor had shorter life’s than us. On 1850 the average life expectancy for white males was 38 years. Today it has more than doubled this number. And we are talking about a really short time span. The Homo Sapiens exists for about 200.000 years already. And because of this shorter life, your brain is wired to work on things that gives you rewards on the shorter time possible. It had to prioritize what it could accomplish to the given time. Well and thanks to that we were allowed to evolve, since if you consider the time to an individual to grow and develop some skills, it’s a really short time to accomplish long projects and too little would be done by now.

Well compared to our ancestors we have plenty of time, but our brain still is working on what was doing for thousands of years, and this is where games enter. Games are masterpieces when the subject is short term gratifications. It does not only give gratifications, but always give them with a beep sound (like the method used to train dogs), tells you how great you are, and cute little chars cheering about how awesome you are for being able to tap the image of a bubble.

Abuse of gratification systems

Games wasn't always full of achievements, quests and rewards. They were slowly included and reached one point where the game is not even fun, it only catch players by this system often being used just as a money making software. There are entire companies who only creates games like that.

That’s why I believe indie games gained so much focus recently, they are often an artistic media than a designed system to wrap you.

Indie games that turned out to be a big success were created as someone or some group passion, they wanted to share an experience with the player, and not to turn their game in a business with nothing of value but catching the player by paid gratification.