The Psychology of Gaming

[Note: this blog post contains gamer terminology. If some terminology is unknown to you, hopefully I have linked it to an explanatory website, since I don't want to have to make everything explicit to noobs. (See, that's a link to the Oxford Dictionary. Legit!)]

I don't like to think of myself as a "gamer," a word which invariably is associated with teenage boys secluded in basements and poor life choices. But, I play a lot of games and always have, so I guess the term fits. Whether an involved story-driven RPG or adventure game, a Strategy game, an FPS on my brother's console, or Minesweeper and Solitaire, they all have their place. They've all suited some purpose at some point in my life, both healing and destructive.

I've even gone to the dark side and paid monthly to play an MMO! Paid real money! This is the genre that World of Warcraft made popular - think Leeroy Jenkins and anecdotes about people playing so much they forget to eat. While I am proud to say I've never played WoW - the game I played was based on LOTR, and I enjoyed coming up with cool and grammatically correct Elvish names for my weapons (NERD!) - it's still not the sort of thing you brag about to your scientist colleagues and non-gamer friends. I don't necessarily regret the countless hours I spent wandering around Middle-Earth, but even at the time I knew I was using it as a coping strategy for depression.

Lorien is a good place to be sad.

Why do people play games? More specifically, why do some people get totally swept up in gaming, and not others? What needs or desires do games fulfill in the human psyche?

I didn't exactly ask myself these questions right away. While some part of me knew that I was playing too much, that not going into work (in so far as grad school counts as "work") was a real sign that things were not okay in my life, those types of thoughts were exactly what I was avoiding by gaming instead. Then at some point I came across The Guild and everything made sense: the first episode starts with the main character breaking up with her therapist in the middle of a raid.

I think the comedic value of breaking up with your therapist is obvious regardless of whether you've been to therapy, but I don't actually remember if I had a therapist at that point. I do remember, later, attempting to explain to my therapist the insights I had on the Psychology of Gaming that surely came from The Guild: there are clear goals and rewards, a continuous sense of advancement, an adjustable difficulty setting, all while acting like the perfect version of yourself and wearing immaculate armor. When your real life (RL) demons become too much, you can always conquer dragons in the gaming world and collect your well earned loot.

Loot. It's also a verb.

The Guild is worth watching, obvi, but I watched it again for you and picked off these quotes:

"at the end of the night you can always just log off"

"cartoon characters who let me feel a sense of achievement in an imaginary world"

"I've never really felt like I had any control over my life. I think that's why I like video games. It is so much easier to measure life in experience points."

"BAM! Rent Check! Die! Meter Maid!"

"If I get rejected, what's the down side? I'll cry a lot. I'll probably do that anyway."

"I can't wait until I'm the one picking someone instead of someone picking me. This way there's no way that I can be rejected!"

"I've never gotten into Real Time Strategy games.... How is that fun? I have a hard enough time coping with real life in real time!"

Suffice it to say I completely empathized with the main character. There is a fine line, I found, between a helpful coping strategy and a destructive one, but it didn't take cutting down on gaming to feel better. Quite the reverse. Once I was able to actively address my depression, I was able to appreciate the positive aspects of gaming instead of feeling guilty about it, before, during, and after. The playing itself wasn't nearly so destructive as the guilt.

Plus, it's so pretty!

The Guild is ultimately about people who play an immersive, social role playing game, which is why so many people get completely drawn into MMOs; but there are other psychological needs that different types of games meet. Many types, but especially RPG and adventure games, provide a sense of escapism to an alternate reality, in which you act out specific roles. Adventure games in particular (for example, Myst) involve puzzle-solving, but instead of a static crossword or sudoku you are solving puzzles in an immersive world to advance a story. First-person shooter (FPS) games (for example, Halo) are sometimes also set in other (alien) worlds and thus provide escapism, but often they attempt to be realistic war games. I'm not generally drawn to these, but I find a gross satisfaction in pulling off a head shot - a test of hand/eye coordination and BOOM! another enemy is down. FPS games make me afraid for humanity, and of myself.

Strategy games are a different type of puzzle solving, but long-term; they are often about managing resources and as such involve taking a character out into the world to explore. The game I played most in middle-school to high-school, and even college, was a fantasy strategy game called Heroes of Might and Magic. Explore the map to gather resources, build an army, find and defeat your foes. It was a turn-based strategy, so I had plenty of time to decide my next move. (I tend to take a long time deciding....) Real-time strategy games can offer more of an adrenalin rush, but I personally think they depend too much on clicking speed. Starcraft is a popular example of these.

"Gil-galad was an Elven-king...."

Then there are the social aspects of games. You can play with people or against people, whether strangers or friends, for most of the game types I mentioned. Humans are social creatures, so the benefits of gaming with other humans are self-evident. I tend to prefer solo games, but occasionally in my MMO life I would group up with 6, 12, or 24 people to defeat monsters for epic rewards. After a few times I could tell why people get addicted. It was an incredibly focused and intense experience. If only I could find such focus in my research!

And then there was HabitRPG. One day I told facebook, "I wish real life were more like games," and magically a friend told me about Habit. It was exactly what I needed. Send a work email, gain experience and gold. Use that gold for whatever rewards you like: health potions (so you won't die), a fancy new sword, or real-life cake. Perform bad habits, which you set for yourself, and you lose health. Good habits, and checking off To Do items, gain you experience and gold. Level up to increase your stats! All of a sudden, the "Submit that proposal and DING! Level up!" scenario was a real (fake) possibility!

Habit is now my To Do list, and my Dailies list (in MMOs, these are quests you can do every day), and occasionally I grow a baby dragon into a big dragon for my character to ride. I have long since bought the top level weapons and armor, but I don't want to pay real money to start anew at level 1. Maybe this means everything will be easy once I reach RL level 50, but meanwhile in my Habit game/life, I make things as difficult as needed, because if a game/life is too easy, what's the point?

Perhaps that's good advice from gaming that I can bring to my real life character. (By that I mean myself....) If things seem difficult, that is a sign that they are worth going for; epic loot could be gained, after all. And if they really are too difficult, I can always take a break to play a game and kill a dragon.

There is more on the subject of the Psychology of Gaming to talk about, like for example why the hell Candy Crush and FarmVille are so popular, why unlocking levels and achievements is so satisfying, etc. These can probably be explained by various psychological studies into the benefits of seemingly mindless tasks, or focused attention, but I will leave it to you... there are plenty of TED talks for the interested. As to why some people get drawn into games and some don't, that could be a mixture of personality and susceptibility to addiction. It really is interesting how much of a stark contrast there is between people who play games and people who don't get the appeal at all!

I was also going to talk about the experience of losing my ability to play games, but that is too traumatic... I may have a permanent fear that my mouse will start to move by itself, but I have a virus-free computer now and everything is right with the world. EVERYTHING IS OKAY. I AM SAFE.

Excuse me while I go kill some dragons....

Noro lim!