Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

Like books or other forms of media, some video games are more cognitively challenging than others. While the relatively mindless shooter games attract a great deal of negative press, many of the most popular games in recent years offer stimulating mental exercise, even if their narratives sometimes leave a little to be desired. The best are enticing worlds of multi-dimensional complexity that test your cognitive agility by forcing you to make open-ended decisions on the fly. Here are a few current games that will give your brain a strenuous workout.

BLACK & WHITE

Games like The Sims or SimCity are often called god games because the player controls the world from above, shaping the destinies of multiple on-screen characters. Black & White takes that idea literally, inviting you to imagine yourself as a powerful god struggling with various other deities to win the devotion of an island population. As the title suggests, the game has a moral dimension: You can be a wrathful deity or a beneficent one.

Courtesy of Electronic Arts/EA Games

WORLD OF WARCRAFT

Don’t be put off by the folkloric Dungeons & Dragons veneer of the latest massive multiplayer game, in which thousands of players connect to shared virtual environments via the Internet. This is an immensely complicated world, capable of sustaining vast in-game economies and sprawling city developments.
 



Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment

THE SIMS 2

You thought home economics taught you about grown-up life? Try playing The Sims for a few hours—juggling two jobs and starting a kitchen fire while cooking for the kids—and you’ll get an amazing and amazingly addictive simulation of the challenges involved in running a modern household.

Courtesy of Electronic Arts/EA Games

 
KATAMARI DAMACY

This bizarre but captivating Japanese import challenges your visual skills in geometry in three dimensions, with physics added for extra fun: You roll a giant and strangely sticky ball through a cartoon world, collecting objects that you roll over, which in turn alter the ball’s trajectory. It may be the most original video game of the past five years.

Namco Limited







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In the fall of 2003, two media researchers at the University of Southern California set up a study to look at the patterns of brain activity triggered by violent video games. Peter Vorderer and René Weber booked time on an fMRI machine, loaded a popular game called Tactical Ops on an adjoining computer console, and watched one test subject after another pretend to be part of a special forces team trying to prevent a terrorist attack. Each test subject inserted his head three feet into the cavity at the center of the fMRI, where a small mirror positioned directly above his eyes made it possible to view the computer screen. During the course of the game, the scanner tracked the blood flow to different parts of the brain, creating a map of neural activity.

Before Vorderer and Weber even looked at any of the brain scans, they were surprised by the behavior of the dozen or so adults who volunteered for the test. Participating in an fMRI study involves lying for extended periods of time in an extremely confined and loud space. Even a mild claustrophobic will invariably find the experience intolerable, and most people need a break after 20 minutes. But most of the Tactical Ops players happily stayed in the machine for at least an hour, oblivious to the discomfort and noise because they were so entranced by the game.

The blithe reaction of the Tactical Ops players to being entombed in a cacophonous scanner may prompt some people to jump to a predictable conclusion: Video games are dangerously addictive. But if games challenge the mind as much as this new research suggests, why do people in search of escapist entertainment find them so captivating?

The answer may have to do with the neurotransmitter dopamine. A number of studies have revealed that game playing triggers dopamine release in the brain, a finding that makes sense given the instrumental role that dopamine plays in the way the brain handles both reward and exploration. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University, calls the dopamine system the brain’s “seeking” circuitry, which propels us to explore new avenues for reward in our environment. The game world is teeming with objects that deliver clearly articulated rewards: more life, access to new levels, new equipment, new spells. Most of the crucial work in game interface design revolves around keeping players notified of potential rewards available to them and how much those rewards are needed.

In a sense, neuroscience has offered up a prediction, one that games obligingly confirm. If you create a system in which rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It’s likely those Tactical Ops players in the fMRI machine were able to tolerate the physical discomfort of the machine because the game environment so powerfully stimulated the mind’s dopamine system.

Of course, dopamine is also involved in the addictiveness of drugs. “The thing to remember about dopamine is that it’s not at all the same thing as pleasure,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, who looks at dopamine in a cultural context in his forthcoming book, Satisfaction, due out in September. “Dopamine is not the reward; it’s what lets you go out and explore in the first place. Without dopamine, you wouldn’t be able to learn properly.”

The video game cocktail of sleek technology, dopamine-friendly environments, and sensationalist narratives means that some players end up getting too attached to their joysticks. There’s no denying that some games place far too much emphasis on gratuitous violence, and others on absurd watered-down Tolkien fantasy. If there is a health problem associated with gaming, it’s likely to be the lack of physical exertion that comes from sitting in front of a monitor all day. “The biggest problem we run into, especially from the media, is that everyone wants an answer as to whether a game is good or bad for you just as it stands there on the shelf,” says Gee. “For little kids, Pokémon is a great cognitive developer, if it’s being scaffolded by the parents and they’re getting their kids to talk about it. But if it’s just a passive babysitter, then it’s no good for you.”

I ask Gee what kind of cognitive skills we should expect to find in the Pokémon generation. Not surprisingly, he’s got a list. “They’re going to think well about systems; they’re going to be good at exploring; they’re going to be good at re-conceptualizing their goals based on their experience; they’re not going to judge people’s intelligence just by how fast and efficient they are; and they’re going to think nonlaterally. In our current world with its complex systems that are quite dangerous, those are damn good ways to think.”

Gee’s remarks remind me of an experience I had a few years earlier, introducing my 7-year-old nephew to SimCity 2000, the best-selling urban simulator that lets you create a virtual metropolis on your computer, building highways and bridges, zoning areas for development, raising or lowering taxes. Based on the player’s decisions, neighborhoods thrive or decline into ghettos, streets get overrun with traffic or remain wastelands, criminals prosper or disappear. When I walked my nephew through the game, I gave him only the most cursory overview of the rules; I was mostly just giving him a tour of the city I’d built. But he was absorbing the rules nonetheless. At one point, I showed him a block of rusted, crime-ridden factories that lay abandoned and explained that I’d had difficulty getting this part of my city to come back to life. He turned to me and said, “I think you need to lower your industrial tax rates.” He said it as calmly and as confidently as if he were saying, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”

In a 20-minute tour of SimCity, my nephew had learned a fundamental principle of urban economics: Some areas zoned for specific uses can falter if the zone-specific taxes are too high. Of course, if you sat my 7-year-old nephew down in an urban studies classroom, he would be asleep in 10 seconds. But just like those Tactical Ops players happily trapped for an hour in an fMRI, something in the game world had pulled at him. He was learning in spite of himself.