Okay, this is more autobiographical than I wanted to get here, but it affects me, and I just did it again last night. In all fairness: new television! It had to be broken in! And while this YouTube video of a snowy train journey in Norway was pretty great and, surprisingly, was high def enough that it looked frankly amazing at 75 inches and fascinated even the cats, the latest Assassin’s Creed was begging to be enjoyed on something better than the standard-def projector I’ve been using for the last several years.
Anyway, here’s the deal. This is all/mostly from a book called Self-Reg by Dr. Stuart Shankar. I have my criticisms, but a lot of what he says resonates, and this part made a ton of sense.
Video games are dopamine delivery systems. According to the book, and probably some research he cites in the notes that I can’t be bothered to look up, “these games cause dopamine levels to double.” Dopamine is a reward hormone that our brains use to keep us doing things that contribute to our survival, and evolutionarily that means constructive activities like hunting, foraging, sex, solving puzzles like how to weave a shelter that doesn’t fall apart or make a fire. Dopamine feels good.
Dopamine, Shankar says, “is critical to behavior insofar as it creates yearning and desire. But too much of it results in … feelings of dissatisfaction and restlessness.”
I’m curious af about what goes on in my head, and I’ve observed myself playing video games, both big ones like Assassin’s Creed and those little tappy-tappy idle phone games. I’ve watched myself totally ignore work in favor of a phone game, and often in a “real” game, I will start just-five-more-minutes-ing myself at 9pm and finally get up at midnight. I’m sure someone in the industry has studied and discovered the best rate of reward distribution required to keep players engaged, and looking at the last several video games I’ve played — the most recent three Assassin’s Creed, Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2 (an aside, jesus these sound like terrible games that are just boring and violent, but they’re actually pretty great) — they all have elements that have players “winning” to some degree at a near constant rate, with variable “levels” of wins, a thing that brings to mind B. F. Skinner’s concept of intermittent reinforcement. The idea there is that a consistent reward schedule becomes boring and predictable. You put your little rat paw on the switch and you get a pellet. Great! Pellets are great! But 1% of the time you get a grape. Holy fucking shit, how often are you going to hit that switch now?
So in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, there are a hundred different “wins”. There are new areas of the map to explore. New armor and weapons. New towers to climb that open up new features of the map. Even when you’re hunting, the rewards from animals are variable — leather, one of your arrows back, a feather, a full fox skin, a lynx paw — and all of those things, collected in the right amounts, are exchangeable for rewards back in your village. And that’s all outside the central story, where you get praised for completing quests, which in aggregate will complete an entire map region for you. You collect Roman artifacts for this guy at your village, fish for a kid who I guess collects fish, you collect resources in order to upgrade the buildings in your village… that’s probably not even half of it. And because there are so many “little” rewards, it makes it very easy to say, “Just one more of those high-point-bird-map-things,” or “let me find this one treasure chest,” and before you know it, it’s 3am and you have to work in four hours. And you SEE YOURSELF DOING THIS AND IT STILL HAPPENS.
So on the one hand, the games are a dopamine delivery system. And at this point in the text, I’m thinking, well, that’s great, I have ADHD and it’s a disorder in which not enough dopamine is produced, so where’s the problem?
“…at the heart of the matter,” Shankar says, “is a primitive system in the brain burning so much energy that it leaves the [individual] desperately in need of instant energy.” The limbic system responds to video games and stays in a state of heightened arousal that is ultimately enervating. You don’t relax when you’re playing video games or watching high-adrenaline movies. Your lizard brain reacts like you are in danger. It doesn’t know the difference. So you have this thing that’s like a stressful energy vampire, it grabs you and keeps you for as long as the effect lasts, and the whole time it’s sucking well-being and energy out of you. It leaves you “more depleted” (Shankar says) than when you started.
That seems about right, or at least it’s reflective of my experience with video games — utterly consuming in the moment, then you turn off the Playstation and realize how completely drained you feel. I have no conclusion that doesn’t sound twee and pat.
Ada Hardy 