Killing Time Online

Killing Time Online
Why are online games so addictive? Science is providing answers

Mars W. Mosqueda Jr

(from www.rdasia.com)

Classes had just begun at the Mapua Institute of Technology in Makati City, Philippines, on a beautiful Tuesday morning in July 2003. While Stanley Vincent Dimaya’s classmates were busy writing answers for a surprise test, the 18-year-old computer science student was having trouble concentrating. He tried to focus on the questions, but he couldn’t stop thinking about warriors doing battle.

Vivid scenes of fire-breathing monsters and cursed ghosts killing humans played repeatedly in his head. Within minutes Dimaya was consumed by an intense desire to play Ragnarok – an online role-playing adventure game based on Norse mythology. His eyes darted between his paper and the door. Abruptly he pushed his chair aside, grabbed his bag, and told his professor that he had a stomachache and needed to leave. Dimaya was soon rushing out the school gate.

By the time he reached the unkempt Internet café he frequented near his school, he had forgotten about exams or classes. Finding a vacant computer station, Dimaya clicked on the Ragnarok icon and in a few quick keystrokes began his journey into the fictional empire. Knowing that he’d lose track of time, Dimaya checked his wallet for cash and realised that the 500 pesos (US$10) his parents had given him to buy a computer textbook would allow him to play for more than ten hours. Dimaya eased back into his chair with a grin – it was going to be a long day.

Dimaya’s experience is alarmingly common in Asia. According to research firm DFC Intelligence, Asia is the leading region for online games. In all, 114 million people worldwide play online games such as EverQuest, StarCraft, and World of Warcraft. The sheer number of Internet cafés – the Philippines alone has an estimated 1500 – that are easily accessible day and night, has created a fertile environment where online gaming has flourished. More worryingly, it has also led to people becoming addicted to online games. South Korea, where 17 million people play online games, has seen the tragic consequences of this addiction – in August 2005, a 28-year-old man collapsed and died after reportedly playing StarCraft at an Internet café in the city of Taegu for 50 hours straight.

Easy accessibility aside, leading addiction researchers say the real problem is that online games can be habit-forming. The captivating games lure and hold people in their grip by playing off powerful psychological processes. For Dimaya, the day he ran out on his computer science test wasn’t the first time warring monsters had beckoned him; he played Ragnarok almost every day.

“Many people feel powerless in society, but in online games they’re in control of armies, of cities, of other people,” says Goh Chee Leong, dean of the Department of Psychology at Kuala Lumpur’s HELP University College. “This power is exhilarating and provides the mental challenge their brain seeks.”

The rapid gratification of winning not only helps a player forget their problems but also becomes a powerful trigger, creating an urge to play in the first place.

Psychologists describe this trigger-response mechanism as “classical conditioning,” a concept developed by pioneering behavioural psychologist Ivan Pavlov. In Dimaya’s case, his mind created an association between the pleasant feeling of winning and Ragnarok’s graphic images. When he wasn’t playing online and experienced negative feelings, such as the stress of an unexpected class test , his mind would seek pleasant thoughts and recall the feeling of victory he enjoyed while playing Ragnarok. The association was so powerful that battle scenes between monsters and warriors would switch on in his mind.

Chemical Reaction
Dr Muni Winslow, director and senior consultant psychiatrist of the Community Addictions Management Program at Singapore’s Institute of Mental Health, says some people may have a greater vulnerability to online games addiction. As a result of their genetic makeup, they suffer disturbances in naturally occurring brain chemicals called neurotransmitters.

These chemicals influence impulsive feelings and behaviours. The main neurotransmitter involved in all addictions is dopamine, says Winslow. People with low levels of dopamine are more prone to anxiety and cravings. Advancing to the next stage of an online game gives them a buzz that causes an increase in dopamine and makes them feel better and more motivated. This winning feeling is so rewarding that its memory takes on a great intensity and becomes more desirable every time it is recalled. For Dimaya, the pleasure he got from playing online games became all he could think about.

Low dopamine combined with low serotonin, another brain chemical that normally causes calm and controlled behaviour, can give irrational urges even greater free rein. “An imbalance of serotonin neurotransmitters has been implicated in aggressive and impulsive behaviour,” says Malaysian biopsychologist Chitra Karthigeyan. This explains how Dimaya could cut class to play an online game without regard for future consequences.

If this chemical chain reaction in the brain makes people vulnerable to the lure of online games, what compels them to plug in at the expense of other important activities? The psychology of game design may hold the secret. “Psychology provides game developers with powerful tools to understand the people they create games for,” says Katherine Isbister, director of the Games Research Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and author of Better Games Characters by Design. “Classical behavioural psychology, which discusses reward schedules, is of value to game designers who want to ensure a person keeps playing a game.”

Dimaya’s marathon online gaming spree in July 2003 lasted until his money ran out at 11 pm, burning up all of the allowance his parents had given him for school expenses. The more his character progressed, the more he was hooked. “I had to always be online to keep my character alive and fight other players to get rewards,” he says. He’d feel sick and uneasy if he missed even a day of Ragnarok.

Dimaya’s anxiety over progressing from one stage of the game to another is common among online gamers. Psychologists say that gamers are being influenced by a complicated conditioning response called “variable ratio of reinforcement” – in effect random reinforcement. Identified in the 1950s by American behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner, it is different than positive reinforcement, where you reward your dog with a biscuit each time he fetches the newspaper, or negative reinforcement, where you whack your dog on the nose each time he pees on the floor.

With random reinforcement the rewards are just that – random and unpredictable. This is how the best games are programmed: to keep the player interested by promising predictable outcomes, but to hook them by randomly allowing them to earn new positions or powers in the game. The gamer may not win very often, and rewards may not come every time they play the game, but they never know when they will win again or get a reward for their character. It could be the next hour, or the next minute, and if they don’t continue playing, they fear they will miss the chance to win or receive rewards.

Social Circle
Psychology professor Mark Griffiths, author of several in-depth studies of online gaming and gambling addiction, explains that the social side of multiplayer online games keep many people playing for long periods of time. “They are the types of games that completely engross the player,” he says. “They are not games that you can play for 20 minutes and stop. If you are going to take it seriously, you have to spend time doing it.”

How media can be this engrossing was first explored in 1990 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in what he called Flow Theory. He coined the now famous idea of “the zone” – that special place between ability and challenge where an activity is not so hard that it causes anxiety and not so easy that it causes boredom. Game developers now use Flow Theory as a basis to make games that pull players in and keep them there.

In a simple game like Pac-Man, for example, the difficulty of the challenge changes with the skill of the player. When few lives are left, signifying a rookie player, the game increases the distance between the coloured enemies and Pac-Man to make avoidance easier. But if the number of lives remains high through several levels – flagging a skilled player – fast-moving enemies get closer to Pac-Man. In both instances, ability and challenge are balanced to keep a person in “the zone”.

Psychological inducements have been a part of online gaming since its emergence in 1969, the year Rick Blomme wrote a two-player game called Spacewar. But online games didn’t really take off until December 1993, when the groundbreaking three-dimensional first-person shooter Doom was launched. In the original version, four players faced off against each other with the aim of making the most kills.

Looking beyond gorgeous graphics and sophisticated storylines, the game industry is now placing greater emphasis on games that involve thousands of players at the emotional level. The potential rewards are enormous: the online game market in Asia is worth $1.39 billion and is set to grow to $3.6 billion by 2010.

None of the online game developers Reader’s Digest contacted would talk about whether or not they are using behavioural psychology to strengthen the emotional appeal of their games, thus making them addictive. But American game researcher Isbister claims that developers must use psychology in designing games. “We must understand how people perceive games in order to design games well,” she says. She also stresses that developers need to factor in how a community will form around a game and what kinds of player dynamics will occur when they design online games. “This makes the social sciences much more relevant to them than to someone designing a single-player game.”

Liz Woolley, founder of On-Line Gamers Anonymous (olganon.org), an organisation dedicated to helping people addicted to online games, strongly believes developers use complex psychology to make the games addictive, for the sole purpose of increasing profit. “Game designers have said that they were hired simply because they have psychology degrees,” says Woolley. She founded the organisation after her son, Shawn, committed suicide in November 2001, allegedly after a fellow EverQuest player spurned his romantic advances.

Stanley Vincent Dimaya compulsively logged on to play Ragnarok for another two years until he suddenly realised that he was no longer living his own life. He had lost contact with friends, fallen behind in his studies and had spent about 100,000 pesos playing online games – more than enough to finance a year of his education.

Looking back, Dimaya is ashamed to acknowledge the financial and social cost of his online game addiction. “I failed to graduate on schedule because I was hooked to playing,” he says. “But the biggest upset was admitting to my parents that the money they gave me for school was wasted on gaming.”

Dimaya hasn’t played online games for a year and now feels positive about his life – without the altered state of mind that comes from playing online games. He believes that he has finally won his personal battle against the creatures and demons that occupied his mind for so many years.

(Reader's Digest Philippines October 2006 issue)