202B. How Microscopic Receptors Can Make or Break Your Game

Here I attempt to explain the Dopamine-Oxytocin Heterocomplex to game development lay people so they can understand why their Dopamine driven games aren't working like they used to.

In the previous paper I explained how you can make games that are so engaging that you have to force your players to stop playing them. I don’t have a problem with engagement in my designs. I DO have a problem with people playing them too much. In 2017 I had a player of one of my games die while streaming, and this upset me enough that I wrote a paper explaining how that can happen.

A lot has changed since 2017. Then I was warning of the risks of renal failure from prolonged gameplay. Just in the last year there has been an explosion of research on what is being called the Dual Dopamine-Oxytocin Receptor Heterocomplex (D2-OTR). This is what I referred to in the last paper. It occurred to me that the information I supplied in paper 201A is not likely to be useful unless you understand what a receptor is, what it does, and how incredibly complex dopamine receptors are.

Here I will try to reduce that complexity as much as possible.

What is a Receptor?

Both dopamine and oxytocin are neurotransmitters. That means they are released as chemicals in the blood (outside the brain) or into the cerebrospinal fluid (in the brain) and then attach to a spot on target neurons that exactly fit the neurotransmitter. This “spot” is the receptor. Only the appropriate chemical can naturally fit there.

Neurotoxins, the stuff you read about in spy thrillers or whenever real Russian spies want to show off, are man-made chemicals that can attach to various receptors and block them from working. Carbon Monoxide and cyanide work similarly to bind to red blood cells to prevent oxygen from docking with the red blood cell. Anything that interferes with the normal functioning of receptors can cause major illness or death.

To prevent this from happening naturally, receptors tend to have negative feedback loops to lower their functioning if they are overloaded with chemical stimuli. Type 2 diabetes (the common variety) works this way to desensitize fat cells if you bombard them with insulin. Sugar and even artificial sweeteners trigger a strong insulin release and as our food has gotten sweeter, we have gotten sicker. This variety of Diabetes causes your fat cells to ignore insulin. Insulin normally instructs fat cells to grab glucose and remove it from the blood. When fat cells ignore insulin, glucose (sugar) builds up in the blood stream and makes your blood too “salty”. This destroys cells in your arteries and veins, and you kind of need those to function in an alive state.

How Did We Disrupt Our Dopamine Receptors?

When food processors discovered that humans would eat more of the food they made if they added more sugar, they added more sugar. WAY more sugar. By the time I was a kid, children’s breakfast “cereals” were more than 50% sugar. This led to an explosion of diabetes and obesity in the USA. Medical and insurance costs also went way up because diabetes takes a while to finish you off. This means a lot of medical treatment that gets increasingly expensive as your smaller arteries die, and you start to lose your extremities.

When game developers discovered that humans would play games longer if they were designed to trigger dopamine release, they started trying to get their games to generate as much dopamine as possible. This really started in earnest about the time I published Game Dosing in 2013. I figured if they were going to do it, they may as well do it properly.

In both cases, greedy and uneducated industrialists decided that if they could just play God with their human customers, they could get rich. There was no concern for repercussions. In the case of game developers, they likely had no idea there were repercussions. Food processors have known about the mechanisms of diabetes for at least half a century. But the research on dopamine is just starting to flood in, in the last few years.

I’ve tried to warn developers that trying to disrupt human physiology for profit will turn out badly, but I didn’t have the research papers yet to show them how. The reason for that is that this sort of research is unethical to perform on humans. As scientists we aren’t allowed to knowingly harm people while testing them. Military scientists are a separate species with their own rules.

Fortunately (sarcasm) we have billions of human volunteers now who are being flooded with dopamine in their games and social media. Every app on your phone is trying to ping you multiple times an hour to compete for your attention. Each one is hoping to give you more dopamine than the competitor app, so the race to the bottom has been going on a long time. We know with certainty that having a modern interactive phone, especially if you are a child, reduces your lifespan.

So just like with diabetes (insulin insensitivity) we are developing dopamine insensitivity. This is a problem because dopamine isn’t just a pleasure chemical, it’s a neurotransmitter responsible for healthy brain function. The skyrocketing rates of mental illness and self-deletion since the introduction of cell phones show that we are disrupting that function. Social media platforms have done internal research, and then kept it secret, because the results were grim. Profits were more important.

Game developers likely haven’t even bothered to do any internal research. As an industry, we just aren’t good at research. I’ve tried very hard to get research programs going but they always encounter resistance.

What Exactly is the Dopamine Receptor Disruption?

I did my original laboratory neuroscience work on the adaptability of cortisol receptors at the UCLA Brain Research Institute, so I wasn’t surprised that this recent research indicates that dopamine receptors are adaptive.

For a while we assumed that dopamine receptors were as simple as insulin receptors. But insulin doesn’t significantly affect the brain, other than make you more hungry. That’s how sugar free foods make you eat more and gain weight.

Dopamine absolutely does affect the brain. This means the mechanisms involved are a thousand times more complex. To explain what is going on here, let me take you back in time 200,000 years. By this time humans had already become the apex predators on Earth. Our complex dopamine systems rewarded us for fighting and winning. We model this in most of our modern games, because we instinctively know this is one way to get dopamine flowing.

But if our bodies rewarded us for fighting, couldn’t that be a problem if we fought each other? The reason we didn’t go extinct from this is because we have oxytocin receptors that make it almost impossible under natural conditions for humans to harm family members. 200k years ago in tribes, everyone in the tribe was a family member.

Inside our brains, we had a fail safe for this. The most important dopamine receptors, the ones in your brain, required oxytocin to be present also, as a cofactor. You get oxytocin from social interaction. If a person “went rogue”, they would stop getting oxytocin. This in turn would disable the dopamine receptors, so the fighter would stop getting pleasure from fighting. This also encouraged early humans to hunt and gather in groups, which was a huge advantage. As we developed language, those groups could get even larger.

Our games are providing the “fight” that generates dopamine, but not the “social” that generates oxytocin. The result is that our dopamine receptors are shutting down. Similarly to how insulin receptors shut down in diabetes, but here humans have this very clever dual receptor fail-safe for dopamine.

If you’ve been paying attention to social media, the algorithms have been promoting “woman hating” and “man hating” content. This provides dopamine, but not oxytocin. Without both, you can’t generate both the excitement and trust necessary for relationships. So we are in this weird place where we don’t do relationships anymore. We don’t know why, we just don’t. We make hundreds of excuses, but the answer is in our physiology and how it is adapting to a maximum-dopamine, minimum-oxytocin, environment.

Solutions

In diabetes, you fix it by removing all sweetness from the diet, losing fat weight, and essentially undoing all the bad things you did. This “resensitizes” your insulin receptors. Or, a doctor will give you MORE insulin and try to force your insulin receptors to respond. This is a short term fix that ultimately accelerates the disease.

In gaming, players are increasingly becoming less motivated to buy/play the very high intensity fighting games that they have been sold over the last 12 years. This is frustrating for game developers because it could be argued that these games are better than what gamers had 12 years ago, but gamers are losing interest. Thus devs don’t know what is going on and don’t know what to do. They do what modern doctors do, and try to MAXIMIZE the dosage to force an effect.

Wrong direction, wrong result.

Indie game developers are accidently stumbling on a partial solution. They found out that people will buy “friendslop” games. They don’t know why, but if there are buyers, devs will make this. The problem with making something that you don’t understand is that it is hard to improve it. As more devs enter that space, competition will reduce the results for everyone and pretty soon the games they are selling won’t do as well. That won’t get the bigger developers to try to spend more money on the genre.

The solution is what I described in the previous paper. Developers need to reduce the intensity and duration of dopamine stimulation, and mix in oxytocin stimulation. There is no other way, because this is human biology. Abusing humans until they got sick is what we did, and there is no path forward until we learn how to properly treat our consumers.

Instead of focusing on “kills” in games, focus on cooperation. In war, we’ve learned to “shoot to maim” not “shoot to kill”. That’s because soldiers form close bonds with their fellows and will stop fighting and act to save their comrade if they are critically injured. This causes a lot of soldiers to stop fighting. We don’t simulate this in games, because we don’t really die in games. We just reset and keep fighting.

The easiest way to fix your revenues is to design games where the well being of your teammate is more important than the value of a “kill”. This will be difficult for games without persistent teams. It’s also a bit difficult to train developers on how to make social games, because they don’t have a lot of social experience. That’s part of why they are gamers, since it’s a great “solo hobby”.

I’ve been working on really elaborate models for how to recreate these natural interactions for a long time, going all the way back to my meta design of Civilization Online in 2012 and 2013 for Sid Meier. I would really like to set the standard for others to copy. But that’s not something you can just slap together.