Computer Gaming. Comparing it to most of our human civilization, it is a relatively new phenomenon. It is something that seems so innocent and engaging that it garnered an audience that keeps growing like a wildfire spreading through a dry wheat field. What is the draw of this seemingly uncanny device? Why is it that humans once engaged, find it so difficult to withdraw?
I cannot say I have the answer to all the questions you might have. But I can provide what I’ve learnt over the course of my life, involved with this growing trend. Instead of quoting scientific findings, which are still relatively few and incomparable. I shall instead share a few personal experiences and observations that I have noted while doing research on this topic. I cannot say that it will be substantial because I’ve only started taking down observations from the last six years.
From a scientific point of view, Computer games are no different from any other anti-stress activity. This puts it in the same category as smoking, sports, getting high on drugs and even sex. People often use games to destress, something to make them feel better than they already are. And from this standpoint, you can see why computer gamers are just as susceptible to addiction as they are to all these other activities. You might see people getting addicted to drugs, smoking and sex.
But sports? Well if you consider high thrill activities such as sky diving and bungee jumping as thrill activities that have become professional sports with competitions, then you’d understand that those adrenaline junkies also have an addiction. That’s why the term “adrenaline junkies” was coined in the first place, it was to classify the addiction that these thrill seekers had in their various thrill seeking activities.
I believe that now, you are quite tired of reading about the comparisons of Computer games to the other addiction laden activities. You want more information on Computer gamer’s psychology. I suppose that when you look deep into every players’ heads, you’d find out that everyone is driven to play with a rather wide range of motivation. Not every player who plays computer games, play it for the same reason. Every game has a genre, a genre was supposed to make the game appeal to only a group of players who have a liking to that particular genre of games.
However even within the group of supposedly like-minded genre lovers, the players still play the games for different reasons. Let me state a minor case study. Let’s say this game called “Warcraft 3”. It is in the genre RTS or “Real Time Strategy”. That would mean that it mostly attracts people who play RTS games. But as you know, not everybody can handle this genre of games. Thus the difference between the stronger and weaker players presents itself at a very fast pace. But because this game have the ability to let the players “mod” or create new maps that gives the players so much power as to literally change the genre of the game.
One such “mod” or modification resulted in the hugely popular “DOTA:AllStars” or Defense of the Ancients: All Stars. Or “Run Kitty Run!” Changed the way you play the game to the point where the players who originally cannot play the RTS genre are able to pick it up and even start dominating the other players. This radical transformation was not brought around by the gamers who are simply comfortable with this genre. This change was brought on by players who bought “Warcraft 3” but weren’t very good at it and wanted to play the game in another way. Thus you can see that from a psychological stand point, that computer games genres do little to deter the gamers with other mindsets from buying the game.
To me, this is a really huge finding. Why? This proves that genres are slowly proving redundant. Games have now become platforms for minds of every sort to meet, instead of just players who play the genre. And as you look through the games that have been dominating the gaming scene, you will realize that the games that do well and are still played on a large scale today, are games that are highly customized by the players themselves and the game’s original genre becomes highly irrelevant. I’ve seen Half-Life being converted to “Team Fortress”, “Counter-strike” and “Day of Defeat” Where the genre of sci-fi have been completely converted into something else. These conversions tell us a big clue in gaming psychology. That a gamer’s mind is never truly made up at the point when they buy a game.
What do I mean? A person cannot discern their own true nature. A person may think that he or she might like this game, but as the game evolves, the person would change his or her preferences at an almost unconcious level. In a way, games act like a very powerful personality magnet. It is able to change our inner preferences even without us knowing. Perhaps you can consider the most powerful tool of persuasion known to mankind right now. Games are so effective in influencing our minds that a person who has played the “Microsoft Flight Simulator” enough, can even fly a real plane. I know of military applications that uses games to hone the reflex timing of their soldiers to improve their reactions to hostile environments.
You may think that games are but harmless things that we play. But according to my psychological findings, games have a very real influence on our daily lives. Games have the power to alter your thought pattern either positively or negatively depending on the person who plays it. But so far today, most people cannot see past gaming addiction and miss the far greater implications that gaming has on society and the world.
While I’m not saying that everyone who plays computer games will be adversely affected, I for one was changed to be sharper, smarter and even a little more tackful in my interactions with other people because of computer games. While people will not accept this fact, computer games also have an immense postive potential that’s still waiting for others to discover.
Violent computer games have actually helped me cope with my initially violent nature. It has helped me to lash out at my online opponents and that in turn cools me down so much, that I no longer need to lash out at my family members and friends. Everyone has some amount of violence in their system, sometimes the computer games may have prevented an employee from going on a shooting rampage in his or her office because he imagined that the monsters in the game was his or her boss, colleagues and vents his frustrations there instead of doing it in real life.
In psychology we all know that sometimes reverse psychology is even more effective than regular psychology. In the cases of violent behaviour, violent videogames may prove to be more helpful than forcing them to play games such as Sims 2. Thus I come to the end of this article. I hope that while trying to touch on as much of gaming and it’s psychology, I proved the fact that computer games are a boon to our society. It is an extremely powerful tool that we can use to further improve our increasingly global societies. I hope that you had an informative time reading my take on gaming and everyone involved in it.
