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Games Take Away the Pain
Gamasutra reports on a Wheeling Jesuit University study that indicates gameplaying can allow those with great pain to live more fulfilling lives. From the article: "The Wheeling study compared several different genres of games in their effects on pain. Six types of games were used: action, puzzle, arcade, fighting, sports, and boxing, all varieties that encourage high attention and stimulus. (Games such as RPGs and graphical adventures were likely left out of the survey for their low-impact nature.) The game types most effective in distracting from pain, meted out by cold pressor tests after 10 minutes of each subject playing a particular game type, were the sports and fighting games."
Sitting and Playing an Online RPG for 16 hrs straight gives me more pain than takes away.
Boxing is a separate category from both sports and fighting? RPGs left out because of low-impact, but puzzle games were included? These choices alone lower their credibility in my eyes.
It sounds like adrenalin. The adrenalin rush from playing fighting and sports games serves to deaden pain. This is just what it's supposed to do as part of the built-in "Fight or Flight" response. It keeps us going when were dead tired, but still needing to run from lions.
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I wonder if these games produce an adrenaline response? It's like remembering a situation that really pissed you off and you start getting pissed off again - with the resulting adrenaline.
A lot of athletes will use imaging techniques to perfect their game. Only in this instance, you're placing yourself in the role of the game character. So when he gets hit, so do you - in your head.
Speaking as someone with Fibromyalgia, I've found that getting into a good videogame or novel can really push physical sensation so far into the background that it's not really noticeable. I'm mostly into Strategy and RPG games, I've never thought to compare, but getting intellectually engrossed in a game is quite effective without adrenaline pumping play.
I wonder if videogames are essentially guided meditation? Thinking about pain definitely makes it seem worse, just having something to help get the mind off of it really helps. Intense conversation with another person can have a very similar effect.
Sixty seconds of listening to John Madden's commentary deadens all my sensory inputs. But maybe that's just the result of being an old L.A. Rams fan. :)
Seriously though, arthritis runs in the family, and while I get twinges in my thumbs and wrists (amongst other places), the more I play (PS2), the better my thumbs are. It doesn't do anything for the wrists - perhaps a tennis game with a small virtual racket, ala DDR? . . . Nevermind, that would only work if you had to play using both hands.
My mother, who has advanced RA, enjoys sudoku, so getting absorbed in something that takes concentration does help.
So do you want your kid to grow up with a lot fewer life skills? Why not give him or her a video game-box to spend all those thousands of childhood growth hours on?
Heck, why not plug yourself into a game box as well? Why grow into a skilled and accomplished person with fine-tuned power over your emotional and spiritual being when you can be turning pixels on and off, over and over and over?
I know I'm being hypocritical here. . , I've wasted zillions of hours on video crack in my youth as well, and even learned a few useful skills and tactics doing so. --But I also built my own computer when I was a kid, went to creative lengths to pirate all my games, and most importantly, I didn't start until I was 12 years old. I'd wager that when today's kids are as old as my generation is now, they'll be generally much less socially aware and physically capable as a direct result of too much video crack when their young brains should be sucking up as much real-world experience as possible.
-FL