Video games have been vilified by our culture over the last decade for taking over the lives of the teens who play them. There are myriad concerns if it is healthy to spend so much time playing games and being isolated socially while placing more importance on achievements in the game than in real life. Is this typical teenage rejection of responsibility or could there be something functional about this behavior?
Colorado State's Jeffrey Snodgrass has investigated the addictive tendencies of heavy gamers and discovered an enhancement in the area of the brain that deals with addiction, the left striatal grey matter. Snodgrass used two scales, those of absorption and immersion, that were said to be in connection with the players' experience of "getting into the game". Getting into the game is something often mentioned by gamers in their discourse on experience levels and game enjoyment. These instances of being "sucked into" the game may have stress reducing effects. This way of disassociating from the real world may be justified, at least biologically, by our needs to reduce the constant stress of daily living. Teenagers transitioning into adulthood feel that stress too only are less equipped to handle it as fully fledged adults are.
Video game addiction is something of a real fear in our nation, to the extent that it was considered, but ultimately rejected, for entry in the DSM as a legitimate psychological disorder, but we may be jumping the gun in saying gaming is unhealthy for kids. The typical life of a teenager is filled with not just the deluge of information their technocratic minds crave but also thousands of nano-calculations a day that take place, layers and layers under the conscious, that equate to the navigation of the real world and the social mastery we eventually come into. Looking back, high school was the busiest my brain had ever been. All lobes were fired, all nuclei engaged in the negotiations and challenges of maturation. This is all a lot of noise our brains like to detract from; a much needed break to reset of the these systems and allow for better functioning.
Snodgrass's peer, University of Alabama's Christopher Lynn, studied similar phenomenons with christian Pentacostals who talk in "tongues" and people watching simulated fires. In both cases, these activities we are known to get lost in, much like video games, measures of stress went down as the absorption in the activity went up.
Despite numerous campaigns to incorporate more activity and face to face socializing into the teenage life, our nation's youth, and some grown ups as well, spent $650 million in less than a week on the much anticipated Call of Duty: Black Ops game last fall. Game production companies have been sued over supposed deaths from exhaustion after prolonged gaming. The games themselves self promote heavy usage from within, giving gamers experience points to purchase capital in the player's life, regardless of winning or losing the game; this is simply reward for playing more. There is even a sub-culture term of "catassing" which describes someone who plays games excessively, to the extent of shucking real life responsibilities however this can be seen as good or bad among gamers, dependent upon the demographic any particular game produces.
Basically, excessive gaming is quite persistent despite media defamation and it is clear that this experience is here to stay, and possibly always existed. In the past it may have been staring into the fire telling stories, carving wood or beating drums however culture to culture, the need to get sucked in is ubiquitous.
Disassociating into the World of War Craft until 3 am can help teenage brains cope with the noise of this transitioning period in our lives. The hypnosis of the first person shooter game could be a way of turning off the noise of transitioning into adulthood in a culturally mediated way.
