20. Gaming Addiction, 2012
My first article on this taboo subject. It paved the way for GA discussions to become more normalized, though large studios are careful not to discuss it with the public.
Originally posted to the LinkedIn Social Game Developers group:
Yesterday I watched a movie called Addiction Incorporated. It really got me thinking. I used to be a neuroendocrinology researcher at UCLA in 1989, studying the effects of alcoholism, FAS, and abnormalities of general adaptation syndrome. For two years I worked at the Betty Ford Center. I got into gaming (competitive chess) hardcore at the age of five, the same year I started smoking. I had to quit soon after I worked my way up to unfiltered Camels, due to crippling asthma. Now I am back in gaming with a passion, having spent the last seven years developing applied virtual economic theory.
Now when I watch this movie, and I see the rats pushing levers 900 times to get their nicotine/acetaldehyde , and I realize that I was smoking long enough at age five to have permanently altered the dopamine response mechanisms in my own brain, the mad scientist comes out in me. Is it an accident that I went from being the most frail person in my school to becoming an Olympic track coach for two world record holders? Is it an accident that I became a top world class cyberathlete? I suspect I was driven to these activities because they filled my need for dopamine, which is probably extreme. I don’t do drugs or gamble so I intuitively had to find some “healthy” alternative source.
Now if I read articles like this… [broken link, article lost to time…] about the physiological effects of gambling on dopamine mechanisms…. and I combine that with my research into how to make more addictive and fulfilling interactive media products….. little pieces of the jigsaw puzzle start to fall into place. The differences between what we do here in the “social gaming” space and what gambling organizations seek to do is very very similar. Both are going about it in a way that I perceive as a bit unscientific, but that seems to be changing [a bit wishful thinking on my part, the approach is still very unscientific].
Soon we will be seeing gaming in a totally different way, and I would go as far to say that we will literally be changing peoples’ brains with games. I have a friend named Dr. Rene Weber at UCSB, for instance, that is studying the changes in the brain caused by game play. He is not the only one. If I am correct, we are literally changing our brains with games and the easiest way to understand what this might look like is by watching Addiction Incorporated.
Ever wonder why so many people smoke at Casinos? Have you ever tried to help your loved one quit smoking? What do you replace it with? They have to have the dopamine. Making love to them 8 times a day to fill this need is not practical for most of us mere mortals. You are here in this group because you intuitively understand the answer.
[At the time I wrote this, game developers didn’t talk about dopamine. After this article, it became normalized and now we talk about it like dopamine is just a normal part of what we do. Which, it is. I would go on to publish a lot of articles on this theme, culminating in my Game Physiology paper in 2018 and then a short lecture tour. Dopamine is just a very small part of how games affect the bodies of our consumers, and not even the most lucrative element.]