It’s Time To Admit That Everything We Knew About Gaming Was Wrong.
We are living in unprecedented times.
After all, who would have thought that we would find ourselves in a global quarantine? And who would have thought that gaming, in all its forms, would have been reevaluated like this?
Certainly not me, nor one of my gamer friends.
I’m not a geek anymore.
During the quarantine, it occurred a significant and unexpected boost among the gamers’ ranks. It appears clear in the data collected by Statista. The time spent video gaming during the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide increased by 39%, the sales of consoles by 155%, and the sales of games, whether physical or digital, by 67% on average.
“In terms of streaming, Twitch jumped 58.7% from 121.4 million hours in Q1 to 192.7 million in Q2. Unique channels increased from 63.9% quarter-over-quarter from 6.1 million in Q1 to nearly 10 million in Q2. And average concurrent viewership, meaning the number of viewers watching Twitch at the same time, grew 63.4% over last quarter to reach 2.4 million in Q2.”
Techcrunch.com, “Twitch breaks records again in Q2, topping 5B total hours watched” by Sarah Perez: https://tcrn.ch/3BzG5Os
Due to this sudden growth in usage statistics, the entertainment services experienced even server outages, like never before. This situation brought many video game publishers, for example, to add capacity to their servers to improve the performance of their online titles, and so do virtual tabletops sites or applications, like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds. Even satellite services to the entertainment, such as chat apps like Discord, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom, saw themselves forced to increase capacity worldwide.
In short, in 2020, gaming had rapidly become the most popular form of entertainment. But it wasn’t always like that.
For a long time, gaming past a certain age was considered a childish and silly entertainment, and the narration of gaming made by traditional media used to resemble a football cheer, without any evidence supporting their thesis. But lockdowns and physical distancing forced us to rethink our way of bonding and socializing, to the point that it turns out that, right now, gaming is the only thing left for us to escape the solitude we are facing nowadays.
No big news for me, personally. I’ve been a gamer since I was little. I can’t even remember at what age I started playing video games. If I’m writing this article in English today, I have to thank my gaming experience (Shenmue 2, in particular), which taught me this language even before my English classes began. Way better my English classes did, anyway.
And as every time happens, everything that teaches us something leaves a mark on us.
Our brains are different.
But what kind of mark are we talking about, exactly?
Despite what you may think, studying how video games can change the very structure of our brain is a recent interest for neuroscience. There are not so many reports about it.
One of the most quoted publications is a study conducted in 2016: “Neural Basis of Video Gaming: A Systematic Review” by Marc Palaus, Elena M. Marron, Raquel Viejo-Sobera, and Diego Redolar-Ripoll from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, which thankfully reports the average annual rate of studies conducted on this topic since 1985.
As you can see, we’ve been increasing our researches only in the last 16 years. And if you want to contextualize how late we were about the argument, you may want to know that 16 years ago, we were already in the seventh generation of home video game consoles.
Anyway, what does this study of Palaus, Marron & Co. say?
It says that, finally, we have evidence proving links between gaming and improvements in attention, cognitive control, visuospatial skills, cognitive workload, and reward processing.
And when it all comes to cognitive costs for that big pile our brain is, we, longtime gamers, have the most efficient batteries.
For example, the occipitoparietal regions, associated with the dorsal visual stream, showed a decreased activation in habitual gamers. What does that mean? That we spend less energy in identifying every stimulus that requires a visuomotor task. And this information could be vital if we think that, in the primary visual cortex, the dorsal visual stream is more vulnerable to age-related atrophy and decline.
But do not despair if you don’t usually play video games because you only need a simple video game training period for your visuospatial skills to improve anyway. And with these skills improving, you also get enlargement in the structure volume of your right hippocampus.
Essentially, the bigger the size of the hippocampus is, the more synchronized the communications between other regions of the brain are. Timothy A. Keller and Marcel Adam Just, from CMU’s Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, confirm it in their 2015’s study “Structural and Functional Neuroplasticity in Human Learning of Spatial Routes”.
Thanks to “Playing Super Mario induces structural brain plasticity: gray matter changes resulting from training with a commercial video game”, we can almost directly see the differences after two months of gaming training.
The increased interactions between right hippocampus, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and bilateral cerebellum led to an increase of gray matter in the group actively playing games and a decrease in the passive control group.
And here’s the funny thing.
It turns out that our brain long to play, as it’s learning something new. It has to do with the reward system.
[…] we also observed a positive association between hippocampal growth and reported desire to play the video game. This kind of desire or liking has been associated with the brain’s reward system, and in particular dopaminergic processes.
[…] Dopamine has been suggested to determine the duration of plasticity in HC (hippocampus) […] This neurophysiological link between reward-related dopaminergic neurons and hippocampal plasticity effects may explain the association between the reported desire to play and hippocampal GM (gray matter) increase.
And guess who has problems with neuroplasticity? Mentally ill with neurodegenerative diseases. So this acknowledgment brought the authors to think that gaming training could help people fight those diseases in the future.
But this is not the only area where gaming could be beneficial in these crazy times. Beyond the brain, we also have the mind to consider.
We could be alone, but not lonely.
Gaming could be life-saving under stressful situations. Mostly now, right in the middle of a pandemic.
Many studies have already found out that social and collaborative games facilitate the development of prosocial behavior. Also, this kind of game can teach us how to empathize more easily with others.
Quarantines and social distancing allowed us to notice and analyze which role video games could have in our socialization. Maybe, in the future, we will have more material to examine and discuss. But right now, socializing through gaming is a brand new field to cover and uncover.
Meanwhile, I recommend reading Carolina Knorr’s article on nationalgeographic.com, “How video games can help kids socialize during this isolated time” because it includes many circumstances I’ve personally lived in my adolescence.
Between February and July of this year [2020], Roblox players doubled time spent on the platform, from 1.5 billion to three billion hours. Minecraft, with 132 million players worldwide, saw a 90 percent increase in the number of users playing with others instead of gaming alone.
For what concerns me, I can only say that, in my direct experience of the 2020’s first lockdown in Italy, I was able to see how my absolutely non-technological LARP-lover roommate found a whole new world in gaming online, either through Roll20 or through classic online video games.
We were lucky to remain locked in our home together, for we could experience gaming together and entertain ourselves just like the quarantine were a normal rainy day, the one when you don’t want to go outside.
References.
- Palaus M, Marron EM, Viejo-Sobera R, Redolar-Ripoll D. Neural Basis of Video Gaming: A Systematic Review. Front Hum Neurosci. 2017 May 22;11:248. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00248 PMID: 28588464; PMCID: PMC5438999.
- Timothy A. Keller, Marcel Adam Just, Structural and functional neuroplasticity in human learning of spatial routes,
NeuroImage, Volume 125, 2016, Pages 256–266, ISSN 1053–8119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.10.015 - Kühn, S., Gleich, T., Lorenz, R. et al. Playing Super Mario induces structural brain plasticity: gray matter changes resulting from training with a commercial video game. Mol Psychiatry 19, 265–271 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2013.120
- Zhu, L. The psychology behind video games during COVID-19 pandemic: A case study of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Hum Behav & Emerg Tech. 2021; 3: 157– 159. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.221
- Matthew Gault, TIME, “I’m Gaming My Way Through Quarantine — and That’s Nothing to Feel Guilty About”
- Brian Lufkin, BBC, “How online gaming has become a social lifeline”
- Esther Mollica, WIRED, “Postapocalyptic Video Games Saved Me From Pandemic Despair”
- Barr, M., & Copeland-Stewart, A. (2021). Playing Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Effects on Players’ Well-Being. Games and Culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211017036
- Caroline Knorr, National Geographic, “How video games can help kids socialize during this isolated time”
- Brenda K. Wiederhold.Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.Apr 2021.213–214.http://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2021.29211.editorial
