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Recent neuroscience summed up

March 3rd, 2009 (Visited 1535 times) Tags:

Every once in a while, I get asked about doing an updated version of Theory of Fun. I generally reply that not only do I not have time, but that there’s fairly little that seems to merit updating. Plenty has moved on the political front, but science moves more slowly, and so most of the stuff that the book references as its underpinnings hasn’t seen any radical changes.

Then again, the book doesn’t dive all that deeply into some of it. I think the only reference to dopamine happens in the end notes, even though it’s central to the statement that fun doesn’t equal flow. (Arguably, the better update would be to surface that stuff more in the book…)

Well, the science does move some, and iHobo has a pair of great summary articles on Why You Play Games and The Biology of Compulsion which sum up quite a lot of the recent research on all this. Not only is it a handy reference, but there’s also a pointer towards the forthcoming book Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames, with articles by Bateman, Lazzaro, Bartle, Isbister, and others. My pre-order is in!

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len said on March 3rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm:

Excellent.

And for those who can extrapolate, a good description of why political pundits such as Rush Limbaugh are incredibly successful or have been.

Then a uni-directional no-feedback medium gives way to multi-cast feedback mediated and a new set of media arrive just as the culture decides they are bored with the Girthy One. Who are the experts now?

We are. Pick up your prize.

Peter S. said on March 3rd, 2009 at 3:30 pm:

“Why You Play Games” is a fantastic article, and the other raises some interesting ideas too.

Thanks for linking them up, dude. I had an interesting thought about modeling the negative feedbacks that balance out these reward mechanisms, as alluded to in the article. Unfortunately, I can’t get the table to show up right here, but think of two axis (axes?), Predictability on the horizontal, Control on the vertical. For the four extreme values, we have the following irritants:

Minimal Predictability, Minimal Control: Confusion
Minimal Predictability, Maximum Control: Frustration
Maximum Predictability, Minimal Control: Boredom
Maximum Predictability, Maximum Control: Repetitiveness
(if you want, you can put the tabs back in the following gunk:
Predictability
C Max ———————————
o |Repetitive | Frustrating |
n | | |
t |——————————-|
r | | |
o |Boring | Confusing |
l Min ———————————
Min Max
)
Different people feel more control in different circumstances.
Different people have an easier time predicting different things.
Different people have different tolerances for the different kinds of discomfort, or for the more basic lack of a comfortable level of either predictability or control.

This, to me, would actually explain a lot of the negative-response behavior, and why people have the negative reactions to different things (PvP, too-hard puzzles, “unfair” games) that they do. Assuming I’m on the right track.

Malcolm Ryan said on March 3rd, 2009 at 4:04 pm:

On the dopamine addiction angle, I have been looking in vain for something that demonstrates the presences or absence of a similar dopamine hit in other flow activities.

I have heard the argument that games cause a form of dopamine addiction several times, but nobody can tell me whether playing a musical instrument, for example, doesn’t cause a similar experience, which means that the argument is very one-sided.

Ultimately every human experience, good or bad, is connected to chemicals in the brain, but somehow when games are explained in this way it makes them suspect, like hard drugs.

Chris said on March 3rd, 2009 at 11:50 pm:

Thanks for this Raph, much appreciated!

Did you get the email from me asking if you’d be willing to write the introduction to this book? I never got a reply from you, alas, and I left it too late as I was stretched to my limit on the editing tasks. We had to go without an introduction in the end, which was unfortunate, but there’s always the second edition.

Best wishes, and thanks again!

Morgan Ramsay said on March 4th, 2009 at 6:09 am:

Awhile ago, I saw a presentation by a Harvard professor of medicine that defined music as the equivalent of drugs, so no, the argument isn’t one-sided.

Eolirin said on March 4th, 2009 at 6:59 am:

Playing or listening to Morgan? Or both? I’m curious about that.

And I think that the “argument” is more the implied “and this is a bad thing.”

Raph said on March 4th, 2009 at 8:02 am:

Ack no, I don’t remember getting that email! That’s too bad, I would have been happy to do it.

len said on March 4th, 2009 at 8:06 am:

You may want to substitute the term “persisting behavior” over “addictive”. In the sense that Skinner proved the SR model and the effects of varying reward schedules and the varying strength relationship between onset to reward as a function of learning, yes any repetitive behavior that declines in frequency relative to reward scheduling qualifies.

The semantic of “addiction” has come to mean ‘uncontrolled and harmful’ and opinions and evidence are not conclusive with respect to games. I can certainly list examples of musicians who let the behavior drift into addictive range and cause harm.