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.

No one is reading this now, but someone might be reading it someday, and I want to make it clear right off that bat that if it continues (it may not! Because ADHD!), this little blog thingo is definitely not journalism, well-researched, or anything you should take as more than what some rando might tell you down at the bar. I am not an authority on any of this, and I sure don’t have the patience to make sure it’s ironclad factual. It is just stuff that I found out.

Content note: Racism

When you’re driving through the Los Angeles area, it seems like suburbia never ends. Downtown LA is pretty obvious, but outside of LA and maybe Burbank (you can tell because of all the movie studios), I have a hard time telling which city I’m in at any given moment. Is this Burbank? Pasadena? Baldwin Park? And why is it not all just Los Angeles?

So I’m digging around on this recently and discover: Los Angeles was a much different city back in the 1930s. With the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which provided it enough water allow its population to increase, it had grown from a backwater town to a real city. The nascent motion picture industry had put down roots in the area, thanks to the city’s dependable weather and its proximity to a wide variety of landscapes, but less well-known is the area’s history of aircraft manufacturing.

As near as I can tell from the admittedly limited amount of research I’ve done, Los Angeles was an ideal place for aircraft manufacturing because its weather permitted flying throughout the year. Douglas Aircraft was founded in Santa Monica in 1921, and Jack Northrop, an engineer who worked there, went on to found a number of aircraft manufacturers in the area, including the Northrop Corporation and the Lockheed Corporation.

During WWII, California manufacturers saw a huge influx of federal defense spending. People looking for jobs surged into the Los Angeles area to work at all these plants, but the available housing wasn’t enough to accommodate them. Housing had to be built quickly. At the time, Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley both existed — I believe I read in Cadillac Desert that Los Angeles was competing with the valley for water back in the 1920s — but Los Angeles was not yet the sprawling megalopolis it is today, and most of its population was centered in the area we’d now consider downtown Los Angeles. Surrounding these areas was farmland and chaparral, with smaller population centers in places like Long Beach and Burbank.

Housing had to be built, and quickly. Previously, communities had grown up piecemeal around a central downtown area, but the most efficient way to get all these houses set up was for the companies to oversee the planning and building of entire communities. They manufactured prefab houses and set them up where the plants were, in areas like Downey and Burbank, far from downtown Los Angeles. Instead of being clustered around a downtown, these communities were clustered around shopping centers that were built at the same time, and then all eventually connected in the frankly ridiculous network of freeways and sprawl we have today.

Because LA wasn’t all that built up at the time, these new communities weren’t cities in their own right, but were all unincorporated Los Angeles County, and received services — police, fire, etc. — from the county. I’m a lot hazier on all the reasons a community would want to incorporate, but one of those reasons is to avoid a hostile annexation by a neighboring city, as was about to happen to the manufactured community of Lakewood. Long Beach had been eyeing it, I guess, and Lakewood could either not protest (and become part of Long Beach, subject to Long Beach zoning and laws), could incorporate as a “real” city (which would cost buckets of money), or could incorporate but contract with LA County to provide all its services.

This had never been done before — cities contracted with counties to provide services, yes, but not all the services. Part of the reason, and amazingly, you’ll find this right on Lakewood’s website, was to keep Lakewood white. In 1948, six years earlier, the US Supreme Court had struck down the validity of restrictive deed covenants keeping people of color out of housing developments, but cities and lenders could still restrict who actually lived there. By incorporating under what was later called the Lakewood Plan, Lakewood was able to continue being an exclusionary racist city without interference from Long Beach. I’m sure there were other benefits, too, but that racism was a pretty big selling point at the time.

At this time, the state government was giving cities a percentage of the local sales tax, too, which was another incentive to incorporate. Something like 80% of the cities incorporated in California since this time were incorporated as contract cities under the Lakewood Plan, and I’ve heard that most of the cities in LA County incorporated after 1954 are also contract cities, though I’m having a hard time verifying.

Southern California is also where homeowners’ associations took off, so you have us to thank for that fine you got after you put up the wrong color blinds, too.

What is this, I don’t know how to internet