Video Games Will Destroy Your Dreams
And Your Mind, Body, and Soul
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A Virtual Journey
Hugh Howey, the science fiction author, when asked in a podcast what were the behaviours that transformed him from the man who never completed anything, to the man who had sold millions of books, answered simply: “I quit video games”.
I heard him say this about five years ago, and it was an authority I needed to help me follow my intuition, and do the same. While in the years following there has been an occasion or two where I returned to the world of the virtual, for the most part, video games, that had dominated my identity since a young child, were dispensed with: I no longer thought of myself as a ‘gamer’.
A few years before that I had dispensed with other problem addictions, drugs and alcohol; now with a clearer mind, I saw video gaming for what it was: A system designed primarily to keep the male mind engaged by simulating glory and achievement. Video game companies manipulated our mammalian brain into believing we were successful heroes when in fact inside of us, the hero every child dreamed to be, was dying. Video games maintained adolescence: They were the beautiful and wonderful worlds of never-never land, and us gamers were Peter Pan.
Hearing Howey claim that simply quitting video games was the key that unlocked his productivity was hard to believe, until I did it myself. It was astonishing how much more I did with my time. I became fitter and stronger, learnt how to make music, played more sport, read more, got more sleep, became happier and less angry, and thought of myself as no longer a child but a man - because men do not play video games.
Here, I may receive pushback from friends and people I know: “Many successful people play video games”. Sure but they are the 1%: 99% of other successful people don’t. Which category are you?
Do you really believe you are in the special category, that can play hours upon hours of video games a week, and still achieve everything he or she needs? Or, are you like me, and have a weakness for addiction, struggle in environments that are overstimulating, and love fantastical stories and worlds? Are you like me - the perfect consumer that video gaming companies are after? The perfect addict?
Because if you play more than two hours a day, you’re an addict. Imagine what you could do with that time. Write. Read. Run. Fight. Play an instrument.
Do what you were born to do. Two hours every day. Over an entire year. Over an entire decade.
You could achieve your dreams.
Ah, screw the Delinquent Academic though, right?
What does the research say? Well I’ve collected it for you. Playing video games is not correlated with many good outcomes at all; they will destroy your mind, body, and soul.
The Physical
Weight
Although gaming itself does not make people fat, the time sink decreases in adults the amount they exercise, and interestingly, gamers, when compared to non-gamers, reported consuming more unhealthy and sugar-sweetened foods and drinks.
Sleep
Gaming itself, arguably more so than any other screen activity, harms one’s sleep when used before bed. Combined with the cognitive arousal of immersive and high-intensity games, the blue light emitted from screens suppresses melatonin production and delays sleep onset, pushing back one’s circadian rhythm (meaning people feel like going to sleep and waking later). Sleep quality is also impaired, which is how much one feels rested after sleeping, how long it takes one to fall to sleep, and how many times one wakes up in the night. Finally, the late-night hours gaming reduces the time available for sleep especially in adults who are required to wake early.
(For myself, while I’ve always been relatively fit and strong and never had issues with my weight, my sleep was atrocious when I was a gamer. Since quitting, along with other helpful techniques, my sleep quality and quantity has improved dramatically.)
The Cognitive
Attentional Problems
It appears, even when controlling for previous attention problems (and other things like socioeconomic status, sex, age, and race), that youth “who spend more time playing video games subsequently have more attention problems.”1 Interestingly, once suffering from attentional problems, youth play more overall, suggesting a bi-directional effect.
An experimental study on young adults, compared playing 20 hours of a first-person shooter (Unreal Tournament) over 8 weeks, with those who played a puzzle game (Portal 2) and those who did not play anything. While playing the first-person shooter increased Visuo-Spatial Processing (like generating spatial environments in one’s head, and reacting to things on one’s periphery vision), it impaired sustained attention, and the ability to maintain task-driven behaviour in pursuit of a goal - that every successful person needs.
This study in particular is damning, because while heavy use contributed to even worse attentional problems, twenty total hours over 8 weeks is not that much. High-intensity games which require cognitive switching are likely leading individuals to struggle to maintain attention and goal-driven behaviour toward a task, especially when the activities are less stimulating than video games, like academic and office work. As a result, they think they have ADHD when in fact they need to stop gaming.
If after six months to a year of no gaming and other methods to improve attention (also controlling for IQ) and a person still cannot focus, then they may indeed have ADHD. But DO NOT seek a diagnosis and the potential for amphetamine addiction when you still are a heavy gamer.
(For myself, after quitting gaming for about six months [and also not giving myself excuses to stop focussing], I noticed substantial increases in my sustained attention.)
The Emotional
Depression
Video game use is linked with negative affect, ability to cope with negative emotions, and poor self-esteem. Interestingly, the same linked study revealed that those who played to ‘escape reality’ had worse symptoms than those who played to make connections/hang out with friends. However, on this second motivation, the positive affect from hanging out with friends was associated with increased use, worse academic performance, and less friends in the real world. Here’s a quote:
“These findings suggest that … independent of one’s psychological conditions, enjoying oneself during gaming (i.e., experiencing positive affect, connecting with online friends) may go along with potentially problematic use of video games.”
While gaming with friends can be incredibly fun, it may be restricting you from more meaningful IRL social connections, and, the thrust of this article, becoming the person you want to be.
Anxiety
Authors of a longitudinal study showed how video game use was associated with various negative mental health outcomes, with one of them being that higher levels of gaming measured at three different points of time (2012, 2013, 2015), predicted increased anxiety symptoms one year later.
Gaming, as discussed above, is used as an escape, and while it can alleviate negative emotions in the short term and provide comfort, it reinforces avoidance behaviours - which, overtime, will increase the amount of anxiety a person experiences. Social anxiety, in particular, can develop in gamers as a result. Here, you can imagine the archetypical gamer, who stays at home gaming instead of going to parties and catching up with family and friends. Additionally, with the aid of online deliveries, they do not even need to go outside and interact with humanity to get … I was going to say food, but literally anything these days can be ordered online.
Is Heavy Gaming A Psychopathology?
Addiction
The ICD-11 recognises excessive video gaming as a disorder2, whereas, while mentioning it and having diagnosable criteria (and “requiring further research”), the DSM-V technically does not. For criterion, they both focus on excessive use (over 2-3 hours a day), continued use despite negative outcomes, lying about how much one plays (especially to themselves), using gaming as an avoidance strategy as described earlier, and desensitisation - the need to play more to experience the same level of dopaminergic satiation.
Although there are obvious differences between gaming addiction and something like drug addiction (e.g., gamers do not experience the same physiological withdrawal symptoms, though they still ‘crave gaming’), in many ways, the brain of a gaming addict looks the same as the brain of a gambling or drug addict.
Brain regions in charge of attentional processes, cognitive control, and in particular, reward processing and emotional regulation, are impaired in gamers when compared with controls. Gamers also respond to reward cues within game (like loot boxes), like addicts respond to drug cues. Finally, gaming reduces dopamine availability and thus sensitivity to natural rewards (just like gambling and drug addiction), meaning the satisfaction they experience from success in other areas of life, interacting with family and friends, and so on, is diminished. In fact, youth who game excessively show diminished brain activation - love - when shown pictures of their parents!
Video Gaming Will Destroy Your Dreams
I have many friends who play video games, and have myself played close to 10,000 hours of Halo 3 when I was an adolescent, and if the E-Sports scene in New Zealand in the mid-to-late 2000s was the same as it is today, I would have considered going pro (my family have seen many a broken controller!)
The nostalgia I feel for those virtual worlds is almost painful: The hierarchies of the real world were turned upside down - here was a place where parents and teachers and the normal rules and laws of both society and physics did not apply; it was a place dominated by terrorising and chaotic youth; all of us came together and organised ourselves - entirely virtually - into warlike tribes inspired by our deep history. … But, like a dream, it was all fiction, nothing but a fairy-tale, and the clock of nature progressed as it inevitably does, aging our bodies while our minds were stuck in never-never land. We pleaded, we prayed, that this world was real - because we were kings, lords, masters of it all! But it was not to be - and still some people are stuck in never-never land, NEVER to escape.
Is that you? Are you lying to yourself? Allowing yourself to be ruled by a place that does not exist? Constructed by enormous companies that employ manipulators of the highest order to maintain your subservience?
Of course, as with most things, moderation is the word (it also appears what genre of game is important too, with puzzle and turn-based games having less of a negative influence); but, the question is - if you substituted your gaming habit for another hobby, how would your life change?
Are you pretending that gaming does not affect you? Your mind? Maybe you are not quite aware? Or do you know deep down that you are betraying yourself with every click of that mouse button, every flick of that joystick?
If you are unsure, I implore you to give up gaming for a month, for three months, see how it goes. See if replacing your gaming hours with reading, writing, playing music - whatever it is that you were born to do - alters your future in the way you desire.
Because at 40, at 50, if you’re still gaming and you still haven’t come closer to achieving your dreams, you will be resentful indeed. And it will be entirely your fault.
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There are many friends I have (five I can count) that either report struggles with sustained attention, believe they have ADHD, or have actually been diagnosed with it. In all cases, they are currently or have been at some point in their lives, heavy gamers. In all cases.
I am one who is highly critical of the over-medicalisation of our world, from the complicity of Doctors and Psychiatrists in encouraging addiction to medications with damning side-effects that maintain rather than alleviate problem behaviours, to the propaganda of the Therapy Industrial Complex (the media, schooling and universities, and the government) that has made it ‘cool’ and even necessary to be diagnosed with psychological disorder, however, as one who knows first-hand the deleterious effects of excessive gaming, it is definitely an ‘addiction’.
I kind of agree. it's funny, you know, because I stopped playing games almost entirely myself, mostly because I don't have time for them now, yet at the same time I work as a writer in the industry, making rudimentary knowledge about what games are out and which ones people are playing somewhat important.
I'm also struck by how most others in the industry were themselves, perhaps unironically, gaming addicts like I was in my youth. But for many of them, they're still going; they don't have children, they don't have social lives outside of their gaming circles, and they cannot conceive of a life where one does not play games incessantly.
A dilemma I actively face here relates to my children: I honestly don't know if I want my sons to be introduced to games. On one level, I absolutely bonded with my father in the best possible ways through games, and on the other, my earlier gaming years stunted my development as a man.
There's also a flipside, too. Most people I know who were big on FPS and games that didn't require the abstracting of ideas were indeed messed up in various ways, but then most people I know who've *never* been into games at all are pretty dull people.
There's also the fact that, living in Hungary, I want to show my sons how important English is. And, unfortunately, one of the ways to do that is to introduce them to games which will motivate them to focus on English more than ever. I want that for them. Hungarian as a language is great and all, but I'm very much an English supremacist, and I don't want my boys neglecting English.
A final point, too. What *isn't* addiction nowadays? The entire way that the attention economy is set up is based on addiction. If you're not gaming -- which absolutely has cognitive advantages -- you're scrolling, or worse.
I suppose we'll see, eh? As of yet, I'm undecided. Since I'll be able to say "I wrote this", to some of the video and board games I'll own, it's hard to imagine not introducing them to games, at least to some extent. Sport will come first, but being boys, I'm not sure they'll entirely avoid video games no matter how hard I try. Since that's the case, it might be better that it is me who introduces them to video games, rather than some dipshit at school who plays Roblox or whatever. There's obviously a lot of nuance and difference between games.
Anyway, nice article. I've always known this data is out there. That's why I only play on rare occasions these days. There's a big, big discussion to be had here, that's for sure.
Generally, I'm in agreement. (I know I have a potentially-addictive personality when it comes to certain types of games). I am curious, however, how you would respond the charge that reading can become just as much of an "escape from reality" as gaming. I knew several kids in my childhood who would devote HOURS to reading fiction. They were, admittedly, seen as a little "weird" in childhood...but as near as I can tell they didn't seem to suffer any long-term harm. Their excessive investment in those imaginary worlds doesn't appear to have impaired their ability to function in the real world.
If someone argued that, "it's no different with immersive gaming" how would you respond?