Lost in a Good Game: Why we play video games and what they can do for us

Prologue

In your pocket, in your bag, on your desk, there is a window onto the entirety of human knowledge and understanding. For the vast majority of us, screens are now an inseparable part of everyday life. They connect us to our friends and family and bring us together with strangers. They are our work, our play – an inspiration and a source of distraction. And yet, despite their ubiquity, despite their familiarity, for many people screens are something to be wary – even scared – of. There are some scientists and intellectuals who will go so far as to say that screens are changing the way our brains work (which is true), and that this is a bad thing (which is false).

Using screens does change the way our brains work, but this is not an interesting point to make, because everything that you do changes your brain. Reading these words, right now – whether on a screen or on a page – is modifying the way that neurons connect to each other inside your head. That’s what happens every time we learn new things, make new memories, and remember old ones. The interesting question is: how do things change your brain? And, as far as the fledgling science of screens is concerned, the answer is complex, nuanced and woefully incomplete.

Nevertheless, spending lots of time parked in front of a computer or smartphone doesn’t seem to feel right on an almost instinctual level. This dissonance, between what we feel from past experience, and what we know from current scientific research, might go some way towards explaining the culture war that is currently being waged against screens in general, and video games in particular.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If I ask you to think of a stereotypical gamer, who comes to mind? The chances are that you’ll conjure up an image of a lone teenage boy with skin so pale it’s near-translucent, bathed in the blue-white glow of a computer monitor in a darkened bedroom, playing a shooter game – something like Call of Duty, or Fortnite, or Overwatch. And something about that scenario feels unhealthy and unnatural. If you have that image in mind, and someone comes along and announces that we should be encouraging kids to go and play outside more, mere common sense dictates that it would be silly for us to argue against such a position.

What little scientific evidence is available so far seems to suggest that it isn’t a zero-sum game, though – less time spent outdoors doesn’t simply correlate with more time spent playing video games. And on top of that, this is a false dichotomy, balanced precariously on a poor understanding of who actually plays video games. It turns out that the demographics of gamers plays counter to our common (mis)conceptions. According to the Interactive Software Federation of Europe, across all age groups there are approximately equal numbers of men and women playing games. And perhaps more surprisingly, adults aged 45 and up are more likely to play than children aged six to fourteen.

There is an unspoken assumption here, of course: that while playing outdoors is a wholesome and healthy activity, playing video games is at best a meaningless waste of time, and at worst an unprecedented health risk. But the reality of the situation is far more complex. Video games are a creative medium, and they offer us unparalleled opportunities for exploring what it means to be human. Certainly, there is potential for them to be misused and abused. But they also offer us new ways to explore the world around us, our thoughts and feelings, our demons and aspirations. And of course, playing outside isn’t without its own risk, be it from air pollution, traffic on our roads, or ever-increasing concerns about ‘stranger danger’. The rose-tinted view that it is wholesome and healthy often seems to spring from a rather privileged assumption that ‘outside’ means ‘in the countryside’.

There are many different ways to understand video games. One of them is by looking at why we play. What is it that makes some of us want to spend time in those worlds? Different people play different games for different reasons. This is a book that will uncover those reasons and consider the effects that they have on us: as a society, as well as at a personal level.

But I also want to take a grander view of the history of games and look at their relationship with science. Video games were, of course, a product of scientific development; but now they themselves are starting to feed that very development. Science and gaming are locked together in a symbiotic relationship. Through examining that symbiosis I want to uncover a natural history of video games – a sense of where they came from, and how they have changed over the years.

Though I’ll try to maintain objectivity – certainly as far as the scientific research into the effects of gaming on the human brain go – I ought to come clean and say that my own engagement in this field began for personal reasons. As far as my own relationship with video games goes, the story is a complicated one.

And, like many things, it starts with an end.

CHAPTER 1

Dragons and demons

There’s a landscape, not all that far away from here, that over the years I have come to know in intimate detail. It’s a frigid, desolate place where snow-crusted mountaintops give way to ravines scattered with pockets of hardened civilisation. To the east of where I’m camping, the sharp, rocky heads of a mountain range climb towards a purple and stormy sky. Far below, I can just about make out a frozen stretch of water, lined by trees that look, from this distance, like cake decorations dusted with icing sugar. I stare off into the fog. I’m in a dangerous place, but it’s one that I have come to associate with a certain serenity. It’s peaceful here. Quiet.

I’m waiting for dragons.

Back in my room, I pulled my legs up onto the chair, and reached for a mug of coffee as a lightning storm played out in the distance on the screen in front of me. The mug had been empty for several hours now, and I was left with only a drying brown halo of silt at the bottom. It was late, and I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. I was in the first year of my PhD, but it wasn’t work that was bothering me. Today was an anniversary. I blinked as I carefully studied the screen.

No dragons yet.

It wasn’t just any dragon I was looking for. This particular one lived up to its epithet. ‘The Time-Lost Proto Drake’. What a name! In my mind, it evoked an image of an ancient monstrosity with vast wings of torn and mouldering yellow leather. But the name carried a double meaning – it was also one of the hardest things to find in World of Warcraft. You might spend weeks, months – even years, God forbid – tracing a path around the mountains in search of it, and only come across tantalising flecks of evidence reminding you that it’s there, but just out of reach; perhaps the old corpse of an instance of the beast that someone else got to first. Or you might be one of the infuriating ones, the lucky bastards who claim that they just ‘happened across it’ without even trying. A random-number generator masquerading as good fortune, or karma for that rare weapon you didn’t receive after killing that dungeon boss* last week. It was somewhere in this snowy landscape, an area called the Storm Peaks, and I was hoping I would be one of the lucky ones. It didn’t look like it was going to turn out that way though – this time around I’d been sitting there for over an hour, and so far, nothing.

In a way, I didn’t really care whether I actually saw the damn thing or not. This was all about distraction. I was imagining what it would be really like, sheltering on that ledge at the top of this rich fantasy world, watching other players fly by on gryphons, wyverns, and levitating mechanical heads. Trying to imagine what the dramatic storms overhead would actually sound like, feel like. Smell like. Some people get lost in a good book. I get lost in a good game. A message popped up in the chat window in the bottom corner of the screen. It was Dave, the leader of the small guild of which I was a member.

‘Seen it yet?’

‘Not a chance,’ I replied. ‘Not really looking though.’ His response flashed up after a moment. ‘Wanna do a dungeon instead?’ An invite to join a group popped up on my screen, and a few minutes later, we were off on an adventure someplace else to take down a monster and grab some loot. The Time-Lost Proto Drake would have to wait for another day.

World of Warcraft is one of the most – if not the most – successful ‘massively multiplayer online’ games, or MMOs, of all time. To the untrained eye, it’s an archetypal ‘violent video game’ – you create a character, grab a weapon, and jaunt off on various quests to smash things, ranging from fairly innocent low-level boars to terrifying Lovecraftian monstrosities. But the thing that gets lost in the overly-simplistic narratives you might see in the news about World of Warcraft being a violent game is that there’s more than one way to play it. Some people like to create an array of different characters, just for the experience: elf druids, human warriors, dwarven hunters, zombie warlocks. Or, you can play it as a purely competitive team game – two factions, the Alliance and the Horde, square off in anything from strategic ‘capture the flag’ style matches to all-out brawls. Or you can play it in true role-playing style, develop a character with a rich and lengthy history, and spend your time acting out a story on the grandest of scales. Sometimes, you find players who approach the game in a completely pacifist way, levelling their characters up solely by harvesting flowers and mining for ore. Other people devote the majority of their time to collecting riding mounts – animals like the Time-Lost Proto Drake that you can use to travel around the world. There are hundreds of them. I once spent three weeks – three weeks – wandering around a tiny mine in a distant corner of the game, collecting randomly-spawning eggs, just so that I could claim a Netherwing Drake mount. It became an obsession, and was completely worth the effort. The first time I took to the skies on it, it was beautiful – wings of iridescent purple that spanned the entire width of the screen made it difficult to see where I was flying, but I thought that it was a wonder to behold. It still takes pride of place in the ranking of my zoo’s worth of rides. In short, to simply call World of Warcraft a violent game is to miss the innumerable experiences that it has to offer.

This sense of freedom probably explains some of World of Warcraft’s runaway success. Video games like this provide us with the opportunity to experience the world (as well as other worlds) in a way that no other form of media really comes close to, in part because they are an inherently personal experience. In a 2013 radio essay coinciding with the centenary of Albert Camus’ birth, Naomi Alderman, the novelist and games designer, elaborates on why: ‘While all art forms can elicit powerful emotions,’ she says, ‘only games can make their audience feel the emotion of agency. A novel can make you feel sad, but only a game can make you feel guilty for your actions. A play can make you feel joyful, but only a game can make you feel proud of yourself. A movie can make you feel angry with a traitor, but only a game can make you feel personally betrayed.’

Alderman is talking about how games embody the principles of existentialism. Just as philosophers like Camus or Sartre suggested that, in a universe from which God has departed, we define our own meaning in life (that we are nothing but that which we make of ourselves) so too do games force us to define ourselves via a series of choices, to make decisions in order to achieve something; anything. MMOs like World of Warcraft encapsulate this idea beautifully. There is an overarching storyline, but you’re not required to participate in it if you don’t want to. It’s not a linear game. You’re free to do as much or as little as you choose – and from the point of view of the individual player, the possibilities are endless.

There are all sorts of reasons why people play video games, and there are all sorts of people who play them. Over the course of this book, I’ll explore these reasons and the scientific research that’s gone into understanding them. I should say at this point, though, that the scientific research comes with some heavy caveats. Video games research is only a budding area of science, sitting largely within psychology, which is itself still a relatively young discipline when compared to some of the ‘harder’ sciences like physics or chemistry. It’s made all the more complicated by two facts: firstly, technology develops at a faster rate than research can be conducted, which means that the methods used to study video games are often contentious. The second is that people are messy. Running psychological studies that involve human participants doing anything (let alone playing video games) is hard. They do things that you never anticipated: things that can break your experiments. They try to give you the answer they think you want. Some of the more annoying ones try to give you the answer they think you don’t want. And all of this put together means that there are as yet no universal or conclusive truths about what researchers do or do not know about the effects that video games have on us, or why people play them. Sorry to disappoint you so early on, but I promise that digging deeper into this state of affairs will give you a pretty good understanding of where we’re at in terms of the current state of psychological science. And hopefully, along the way, I’ll be able to dispel a few myths about the effects of games – and technology in general – that might make you worry less over some of the more hysterical headlines in the news about society as we know it being destroyed by your smartphone, or by Instagram-saturated millennials, or by whichever video game people are taking exception to this particular week.

Anyway, as I say, there is a plethora of reasons why people get into gaming. Some play purely to interact with other people. Some simply enjoy the level of escapism offered by complex and multifaceted digital worlds. Fundamentally, whatever our reasons for playing them, video games afford us a chance to learn something different, to explore somewhere new, and, potentially, find out something about ourselves. Reinforcing this point, Naomi Alderman suggests that ‘the game is the only form that actually places the audience on that existentialist stage, where we’re all forced to find out who we really are.’ In that sense, video game play is one of the most fundamentally important activities we can take part in.

For me though, there was a simpler reason that I was playing Warcraft that night, looking for that elusive dragon. I was playing to distract myself from the anniversary of my dad’s death.

When I think back to that day, I remember conflicting details. It’s like someone has taken an old jigsaw, removed half of the pieces, and thrown some other bits in from another set. The pieces look similar, the sky is the same shade of blue, and they almost fit – but not quite. That day, both of us ended up in hospital for different reasons. In the afternoon, I’d managed to injure my ankle playing football – gamer clichés aside, I’ve never been a natural athlete. I somehow made it back to my school’s main building, which was some walk (or in this case, hobble) from the football pitch, and one of my teachers tried to phone my dad. Someone came to pick me up and take me to hospital – my mum, I think, though my grandad must have been there too because I remember him looking ashen with worry. I remember thinking it odd that he would be so upset about something as trivial as a sprained ankle.

My mum drove me back home after my ankle had been patched up, and I remember my nan calling me on a black-brick-monstrosity of a mobile phone: ‘Peter, your father’s died.’ Sprawled out on the back seat of the car, I started so much that I kicked the door with my duff foot. As it turned out, I’d misheard, but the real news wasn’t much better. Not dead. Dying. For the past two years, my dad had been slowly succumbing to the tidal onslaught of motor neurone disease. That morning, he’d taken a turn for the worst, and he was on his way to the very hospital I’d just spent the last four hours in. As the phone call ended, I saw an ambulance drive past, and hoped it was a coincidence.

Later, I’m at the hospital. There’s a family room; that’s where my mum, grandparents, my auntie and my uncle are. They’re arguing over silly little things, like who the doctor should be explaining the situation to. My dad’s in the next room over, on a ventilator, with strips of white tape covering his eyes. He’s not responsive. For the most part, neither am I. I’m just sitting there, in a wheelchair, alone in the corridor, looking and feeling a bit pathetic. As the argument starts, I quietly wheel myself out of the room to get away from the noise. Being lost with my own thoughts out here isn’t much better though. Why were they fighting? And what could anyone possibly hope to gain from being told what was going on? It was simple really: my dad’s dying, and he shouldn’t be. He’s only 45. We should be at home, having dinner, or watching a movie, or doing something, anything else. Anywhere but here. At some point, the doctor came and spoke to me, but the words didn’t really penetrate the cocoon of disbelief I’d wrapped myself in. At another point, he wheeled me into my dad’s room, so I could say goodbye.

Death in the virtual reality of a video game is an odd sort of thing. One life might end, but then time rewinds ever so slightly, and another alternative continuity pops up. (Interestingly, some physicists believe that the universe may actually work like this; that for every decision we make, a real alternative history branches away from us, another universe in which we made the opposite decision, or succeeded instead of failed, or got a negative result on that test instead of a positive one.) Each time, a new world opens up: one where you didn’t accidentally fall into a massive hole, or trigger a trap, or get shot by a sniper. I think that’s part of the reason why I like them so much – you get another chance. In a sense, death is robbed of its terrifying power. It’s not the inevitable end that we must all face at some point in our existence; instead, it’s a minor inconvenience. It’s a way of being told that you screwed up, pressed the wrong button. Ultimately, it’s all about failure.

People worry that games are melting our brains, or that they are turning generations of kids into social zombies, incapable of stringing a coherent sentence together in the name of enjoyable conversation. For a time, I wondered, too, if playing games to escape death was a bad thing. I worried that reinforcing this idea – that dying in a video game is, at its core, a commentary on failure – would make it spill over into the real world in some way. That I would start thinking that death is just about some sort of deficiency. Or, that it would somehow interrupt one of the stages of grief. Everyone knows them: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Maybe games override that last one. If you can delude yourself that death doesn’t really happen, that there’s always another chance, then you can never really accept when someone you love has truly gone forever. That’s probably a bad thing, right?

We all know this, deep down, but it doesn’t hurt to say it out loud: all that stuff about five universal stages of grief is a load of bollocks. The original idea came about in the 1960s as the brainchild of a Swiss psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who developed the model after working with a number of terminally-ill patients. If you look at the scientific research literature, there’s not much to back up the idea that people go through some sort of standardised or predictable pattern of dealing with loss. There’s never been a study that’s shown that these rigid stages of grief actually exist. Our emotions just aren’t granular or consistent in that way. Instead, whenever it lurches into our lives, I feel that death has a tendency to throw us into uncertainty: as a way of removing any pretentiousness or psychological veneers with which we might protect ourselves. The heuristics that we use to navigate through day-to-day life fall away, and we must truly and honestly respond to a situation that presents us with what seems like the most terrible of unknowns. In fact, everyone responds to bad news differently. So, rather than vying with the process of grieving for someone lost to the ravages of time, perhaps playing video games instead offers a way to deal with a situation that often seems to escape understanding, that defies any attempt at explanation. They might offer help with other things, too.

‘Do you think it helps? Do they draw people in?’ I ask.

I’m sitting in a stark, cream-coloured conference room somewhere in the heart of the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. On the far side of the room is a table laden with coffee, tea and biscuits, and as I sit on some hastily rearranged blue conference chairs next to Johnny Chiodini, a quiet stream of sleepy passers-by idle past us in search of caffeine.

‘I think it doesn’t so much draw people in, as it’s there for the people who already know’, he explains. ‘People who use games as a support mechanism do it because they’ve already been doing it, maybe without realising.’

Johnny Chiodini is the senior video producer for EuroGamer. net, a website which hosts articles and videos covering all aspects of video games journalism, from reviews through to features about games design, industry issues, and more. We began talking to each other on Twitter a couple of years previously, after he started a series of videos for the website, called Low Batteries, where he delivers a spoken essay set to scenes from various video games. Meeting him for the first time in person, I fully expected him to be a hardened, grizzled broadcast veteran with no time for stupid questions. Instead, he couldn’t have been more welcoming or amiable – someone with a genuine, infectious enthusiasm for video games, who could speak with equal ease about mental health. Which makes sense, really, because Low Batteries looks specifically at how the two interact with each other, with episodes covering topics such as how PTSD is portrayed in games, how the tired old trope of psychiatric units being a hotbed of horror is perpetuated in them, or how games are used by many as a coping mechanism for dealing with anxiety and depression.

‘I was going through a really bad period with depression. I’d been low for a couple of weeks and I was just trying to push through it,’ he explains. At the time, the Eurogamer video team were still very much finding their feet. Whereas nowadays they sit down on a Monday, plan out the entire week and have a clear idea what they’re producing each day, a few years earlier, Johnny explains, they were flying by the seat of their pants. ‘It was about 2pm and I’d done nothing,’ he says, ‘So I went for a shower to try and clear my head a bit, and I thought to myself if I’m feeling so shitty and it’s all I can focus on, I might as well talk about it.’ He came up with the name of the show in the shower, and the script just started falling out of him. The first episode was all done in one draft; it was quickly recorded and edited, and launched online. ‘I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. Luckily, the feedback was just lovely. It really resonated with people.’

Talking about mental health online – never mind talking about your own mental health – has always been a risky business. It’s obviously a sensitive issue and, perhaps because of that, the chances are good that there will always be someone ready to pick a fight with you online, which can hurt even more if you end up getting trolled. So I was surprised to hear that the reception for Low Batteries had apparently been almost universally positive. ‘It was really, really overwhelming. Actually, I think it was characterised by an absence of people telling us to shut the fuck up,’ explains Johnny. For Eurogamer’s videos, it’s not always this way. ‘We could be doing the most innocuous coverage and people will tell us we’re awful and that we should die. But [for Low Batteries] there’s just been a complete lack of people coming out the woodwork to tell me I’m a dick. Which is refreshing.’

Perhaps one of the reasons that Low Batteries has been so well-received is that it bucks the trend, as far as online video or written content that tries to cross the mental health/video game divide goes. A lot of articles consist of experiential accounts about, for example, how playing Doom helped the writer with their depression, or how four weeks of Skyrim got them through a particularly difficult point in their lives. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with this, but individual accounts dwelling on a specific moment in time can only go so far in helping others. Low Batteries instead tries to take the long view. Rather than a reactive, retrospective account, it is instead proactive – each video provides a starting point for a discussion that can be carried on in the comments section, almost like an open forum. What makes Low Batteries special is that it provides a place where people who share an immediate common interest (that is, video games) can get together and discuss the sort of mental health issues that are both featured in the videos, and which they themselves might be affected by (and a lot of other people besides). It’s a nuance that often gets lost in the public narrative about video games, which can end up devolving into an argument about whether or not it’s the games that are causing the mental health issues in the first place. Games can help people to process grief, stress – anything that you’re going through. And yes, sometimes, they can become an all-consuming obsession – although the scientific evidence behind whether, and to what extent, we can become addicted to video games really isn’t all that convincing. I’ll talk about this in more detail later, but for the present purposes, the point is this: the discussion about video games shouldn’t be black or white, all or none. It shouldn’t be a debate where the only two positions we’re able to take is either that they’re perfectly fine and don’t have any effect on us in any way, or that they’re literally melting our brains. There is a vast grey area in between these two positions, and that’s where the true effects of games lie. In embracing that idea, it’s worth considering both the positive and negative experiences that games can afford us. Because in the end, games are imperfect things, made by (and for) imperfect beings. They are able to mirror and amplify both our foibles and virtues in ways that no other entertainment medium can possibly hope to emulate.

In World of Warcraft, in an area called Mulgore, there is a small village inhabited by ‘Tauren’, which are humanoid, cow-like characters. The village is surrounded by a grassy open plain, bordered on three sides by a narrow river. Sometimes, when the sun is setting over the hills in the distance, it’s pleasant just to sit there and watch the world go by. A bridge spans the water, and as you enter the village, you might be greeted by an old rancher called Ahab Wheathoof, pinning a notice to the totemic archway that signals dry land. If you talk to the character, you’ll be greeted with a simple quest – help him to find his beloved dog, Kyle. It doesn’t take long to complete, and it isn’t particularly taxing. When you finish it, nothing momentous happens. Ahab thanks you; you receive a token reward and carry on your way.

There’s more to that story than a simple quest, though. Ahab, along with the mission to find his lost dog, was designed by an eleven-year-old boy called Ezra Phoenix Chatterton. Ezra was an avid World of Warcraft player who had the chance to visit the game developer Blizzard Entertainment’s offices through the Make-A-Wish Foundation in 2007. During the visit, he recorded voiceover material for Ahab, and Kyle the missing pup was named after Ezra’s own dog. He also got to design a new crossbow for the game, and his character became the world’s first rider of a unique phoenix mount – a fitting touch, given his middle name.

Ezra died from a form of brain cancer in October 2008. After he had gone, droves of players made a pilgrimage to Mulgore to complete the quest that he’d designed. It was a simple homage, a way of dealing with a death that didn’t make any sense. Afterwards, Blizzard renamed another character in the game after him – Ezra Wheathoof – a timeless memorial for players to find, talk to, and reflect on. We might have a finite amount of time on this earth, but video games allow us to live multiple lives in a countless number of ways. A decade after he died, this virtual backwater still contains