Video game conditioning spills over into real life
It’s not my headline — it’s from the New Scientist, which reports something that seems obvious — if you condition users to associate certain movements, colors, actions, etc, with particular emotional stimuli, all in a game, the users will react to those things that way even when seeing them in different contexts.
Volunteers who played a simple cycling game learned to favour one team’s jersey and avoid another’s. Days later, most subjects subconsciously avoided the same jersey in a real-world test.
It’s the same logic used as when people use videogames to treat post-traumatic stress. Really, I think the researcher is a little disingenuous when he says
But no-one has shown that video games can train the kind of conditioned responses that underlie much of our behaviour, Fletcher notes.
I think it most certainly had been, and on many levels. I think here of stuff like the Stanford research on how we treat short avatars, for example. But whatever. More studies is good. 🙂
Of course, this will also go into the pot with the studies associated with raised levels of aggression, and someone will try to link the two… sigh.
10 Responses to “Video game conditioning spills over into real life”
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Interesting research, but I wonder if perhaps it has about the same level of significance as the fact that watching Jaws can make some people afraid to go swimming.
Oh absolutely. My friends and I used to think this was hilarious. In A Tale in the Desert, there are maybe 200+ harvestable plants, all with unique appearances and different street values. You’d get so excited when you saw a corkscrew chive in-game (or what have you), that naturally you’d start to freak out in real life too.
Avatar-based games have a unique speed with which they can get you to react to certain stimuli, because unlike most other forms of storytelling, there’s a character in there whose welfare you care deeply about within moments of the story beginning.
Why wouldn’t you link the two? Just asking… people in the game industry seem to have no problem that games can have positive effects, or even neutral effects, but are utterly shocked that they could ever have a negative effect on a person.
Because increased emotional arousal and conditioning are separate phenomena. You could condition increased emotional arousal, but they’re not the same thing.
The big thing about conditioning is that it also means “training.” So simply making the link overlooks the incredible learning potential here.
I spent pages and pages in my book on how games can have negative effects on people, so you don’t need to sell me on the concept.
One thing to keep in mind with regard to this study is that real world rewards and punishments were used to ultimately produce the observed responses in the experimental subjects. It’s basically a Pavlovian response to being fed either juice salty tea when you see a particular color.
I don’t think this particular study lends much credence to any “negative effects” hypotheses, except perhaps for relatively trivial effects.
Also, I notice they’re not observing the persistence of the conditioned response (using “persistence” here in the technical sense).
Granted, that’s definitely followup study material, but still.
Ummm… actually increased emotional arousal makes for a fine reward. The S/R paradigm doesn’t precisely require a context but it helps. Pavlovian rewards are very basic S/R models and that is one critique of behaviorism. Complex social animals respond but there is a situation frame around those responses and increased emotional arousal isn’t always enough. However, set up the situation and the chaining behavior is effective if the inhibitors (negative or blocking stimuli) are reduced or increased.
By example and cliche, there is no such thing as a married man 200 miles from home. When setting up a bar, setup salty popcorn for free. When setting up a brothel next to a dance club, reduce the prices for lap dances and give away more drinks. Keep the prices of the ladies high. If training for combat, try to ensure the noise and feeling of a machine gun firing a few inches about the head are completely absorbed and the bullets are real.
In other words, S/R isn’t monotonic.
Thanks, Raph… that cleared up my misunderstanding quite well.
Of course games can condition you. Remember the old joke: “You know you played too much Descent when you run through subway stations looking for the next laser upgrade”. Now, I didn’t do that, but there was a game – I forgot which one – where the designers gave you a clue about the location of traps by putting them on slightly discolored, darker sections of the floor. I actually caught myself sidestepping a dark tile IRL. That’s when you know you played a particular game too much.
I can’t say recent games have that kind of effect on me, though.
All games tend to wind up in my dreams.
I actually dreamed that I was a chess piece one night.