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Video Game Conditioning Spills Over Into Real Life
doug141 writes "Lessons learned in video games may transcend computers, PlayStations and Wiis. New research suggests that virtual worlds sway real-life choices. Twenty-two volunteers who played a cycling game learned to associate one team's jersey with a good flavored drink and another team's jersey with a bad flavored drink. Days later, 3/4 of the subjects avoided the same jersey in a real-world test. Marketers and lawyers will take note."
did one jersey say "coke" and the other "pepsi?"
I can really only conceive of this as somebody trying to drink a cycling team's jersey that has been stuffed into a glass with the subtitle "PIC UNRELATED"
The last thing the videogames industry needs to every game festooned with ads for products the gamers would never buy in the first place.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
It seems very strange to suppose that intentionally creating an association between visual and taste stimuli would magically not work, just because a video game is involved.
I mean, people have been learning things on television screens for decades. And projection screens for decades before that. What on Earth is surprising, or even interesting, about showing that putting a game controller in a person's hand doesn't thwart this method of learning?
-Peter
This has nothing to do with "lessons learned from video games" and says everything about the power of marketing.
The shouldn't come as any surprise. Computer simulations are routinely used for training and conditioning in a variety of situations from flight training to military applications.
I've avoided Jersey all my life. No news there.
Of course we're affected by all media around us. Be it games, movies, advertising, written, spoken, everything. Our brains are wired to pick up as much information as possible in order to make wiser choices.
But behavioral preference and turning people into something is not the same thing. I personally think violent movies are just as bad/harmless as violent games. But surely the think-of-the-children zealots will keep doing their thing, just like they always have...
.: Max Romantschuk
Twenty-two volunteers who played a cycling game
Good to see they're using a nice large group of test subjects.
Even though they were playing a video game they were being given real-life swigs of a drink while they played. So what the subjects were actually doing was building an association between a real-life experience and an image on the screen - which is completely different from building an association from nothing but a video game.
News Flash:
Stimuli we are exposed to repeatedly causes automatic responses, research lead by Pavlov and his salivating dogs, more at 11.
How should we expect video games to be any different?
Most people have trouble distinguishing fantasty from real life until they are in their early teens, and most gaming geeks never really grow up.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Lessons learned in video games may transcend computers, PlayStations and Wiis.
Phew! I'm safe with my xBox360 then?
No more of this marketing research bullshit. Haven't you guys done enough? Can I at least play my video games without being bombarded by more stupid ads and product placements?
I mean, should we not say "parent take notes?", when we here on slashdot keep saying people to pay attention to what kid plays ? Or even why not buyer-beware or "everybody should pay attention" or whatever ? Why the immediate jump to marketing (consumerism) and lawyer (sue-happy) ? Or could you at least add an emoticon if you were sarcastic ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Surely everyone who plays video games has had at least one "Tetris effect" moment in his or her life, where you see something in the real world and think about how to solve it according to the rules of the last game you were playing.
Maybe you played a stunt-based car-racing game and later thought about how sweet a jump would be if you drove your car up a ramp. Or maybe you played an adventure/puzzle game and then looked around a room and wondered if certain items were "important".
It's impossible to claim that that video games are perfectly compartmentalized in the human brain and do not transfer any weight into real-world decision making.
That's still a long way from saying that video games desensitize people, or that violent games promote real-world violence. But the brain definitely connects things that it learns inside a video game to other situations in the real world. That should not be a shock to anyone.
after RTFA i realized that this is nothing new, or exciting ... essentially all the video game is doing is being a medium for delivery of the visual part of the information. you could do the same thing with flash cards.
a better study would be linking in game rewards for in game stimuli to to real life responses to similar real life stimuli
"It's the Law of the Universe, and I'm the sheriff." Slash-cott 2/10-2/17
Right.. so now every time I see someone with their jaw hanging to the floor I know they play a Horde druid. Anyone have a spare thing of polygrip?
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Conditioning Spills Over Into Real Life
There, fixed that for you.
For years, I've been plagued with the overwhelming desire to run motorcycles off of the road a la "Spy Hunter."
"Being right too soon is socially unacceptable." - Robert Heinlein
For years after playing Doom a lot* the sound of a chainsaw starting up would make me flinch a little.
[*: Too much, apparently.]
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Grand Theft Auto taught me that if you shoot the hooker, you can get your money back.
On the other hand, my eye-hand coordination often amazes people. And my locational/directional skills are quite good as well. None of the rest of my family can claim either of those.
In addition, I've learned quite a bit about history, politics, art, language... You name it.
So yeah, experiencing things makes you learn from them. No big surprise there. But don't go forgetting that learning can be both good and bad.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Yeahhhh, and those circuit city billboards worked sooooo well.
Seriously, if you give someone a glass of shit water every time they see a red jersey in a game, or hear a C chord in a piece of music, or read the world "salubrious", they're going to build up a negative response to that. It doesn't say anything about how games, music, or text condition people.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I find that any level of intensive focus on something will eventually bleed over into times when you are not working on it so you still think of it. I know when I studied intensely for tests I would see the formulae every time I closed my eyes to go to sleep for a week after. I drove past a fire station at night and saw the red warning light reflecting against the beige garage doors, strobing on and off, red and then shadowed. "Good light sourcing model," I said to a friend. He agreed and it took us both a minute to realize we'd been playing way too many video games.
When you talk about conditioning for reflexive behavior, that's what you do when you train for any kind of fighting system. You sense a situation and react to it without conscious thought. The army spent big bucks figuring out how to work this kind of conditioning into basic training so that recruits would instinctively shoot at people in battle rather than stopping to second-guess and get shot themselves.
This sort of conditioning is just a part of human nature and video games are just another way of conditioning people, more advanced than long sessions of chanting and ritual but serving the same purpose.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Subconscious tuning is a known phenomenon and has been known about for ages. The fact it's in a video game proves nothing: the same can happen depending on the TV programme a person is watching, the posters on the walls, or the music they're listening to.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
What if I like salty tea?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The article says subjects took the towel with the insignia of the team associate with the juice more often than the subjects took the towel with the insignia associated with the bad tasting tea. What order were the towels placed in when presented to the subjects? When two things are directly in front of me, I usually take the item on the right because I am right handed. If both objects are to my right (but still in front), I will often take the one of the left because it is closest. Did the researchers always place the towel associated with the juice on the right side while placing the towels directly in front of the subject, or did they change the order 50% of the time while placing the towels directly in front of the subject? Or, were the towels off to one side or the other in relation to the subject? The article does not give much information in relation to this, but these things could effect which towel is taken more than a subconscious impulse. I am also curious as to what towel would have been grabbed if the subjects were presented with a towel associated with the juice and a 'neutral towel' with an insignia unassociated with a the juice or bad tea. What towel would be grabbed when presented with the towel associated with the bad tea and a 'neutral towel'? However, I will say that the brain activity in the part of the brain that handles bad taste perception when shown the insignia associated with the bad tea is somewhat interesting. However, I don't really find it any more significant than a bell making Pavlov's dogs to salivate. Also, the article didn't mention anything related to the opposite. What was the brain's response to the insignia associated with the juice? The findings are somewhat interesting, but the article does not really present anything unexpected. Conditioning doesn't have to be blatantly obvious (ie: showing the subject a large card with a picture followed immediately by a very significant event) to occur. Pavlov decided to start experimenting with conditioning because he noticed his dogs had 'psychic salivation.' This salivation occurred because they consistently heard a sound (such as the door opening) as the person that fed them entered the room. This is no more obvious than being shown an event in a game and then drinking a good juice or a bad tea. My 1/50 of a dollar.
TV and the internet are merging very rapidly. Games and advertising will inevitably merge in that combined format. The advertising will be crude at first (like it was at the dawn of TV and radio), but it will become more and more refined with time. The targeting will become way more refined than TV or radio has become because the consumer will be interactively providing the advertiser(s) with huge amounts of data regarding the effectiveness of the advertising.
These games have the potential to be very seductive. They won't cost money because you'll be paying by providing the advertiser with rich marketing data about yourself. You'll be interacting with many others in an engaging environments, because marketing companies will be competing to create the most engaging environments.
It will be oh so much fun. The political parties will just HAVE to get involved in this rich gold mine of data collection. They'll probe for all your hot and cold buttons in a very sophisticated fashion. Then, the politicians will parrot it all back to you.
Sometimes the future doesn't seem so grand.
I remember after HL2 first came out and I'd been playing it a lot. I was walking through my parking lot at work, a helicopter flew nearby. I found myself unconsciously looking for places to hide and estimating when I could get a good firing angle on it.
I'm tired of the "X/Y/Z doesn't affect me" mantra. Everything affects you.
Does reading slashdot 12 times a day affect you? Yes.
Would reading the entire constitution of the US everyday affect you? Yes.
Does skipping a night of sleep affect you? Yes.
Does holding down a full time job affect you? Yes.
Does playing video games affect you? Yes.
Everything you engage in affects you. It's called being human. It's not a question of whether something affects you, it's a question of whether you are mature enough to recognise HOW it effects you and make appropriate adjustments if necessary.
The insistence that you are somehow superior to every aspect of life and can only be affected if you allow it is just immature arrogance.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
i know this isn't quite what the article is getting at, but i found myself conscious of my stance and walking after the first time playing with the wii fit. may not seem like much to many of you, but i was immediately struck at how a seemingly simple piece of technology can have leave a real and lasting impression.
everything about the wii is just clever from an engineering/programming standpoint. it might not seem like it now, but i bet in 10 years, the wii will be cited as one of the great advancements in VR -- mainly because i think it will get us thinking differently about VR than the "lawnmower man" mentality.
of course, the other game is GTAIV, because of it's great simulation. although i do think it's a step backward form san andreas -- what i think would be a great thing to happen is for more cross-pollination in vide games -- eg, GTA has a great city/driving/shooting simulation, but not much else, really. "skate" has a great skateboarding simulation -- civilization has great AI, etc. if producers licensed their core engines, and made them modular, you could buy add-ons. eg, if you wanted skateboarding in GTA, you could buy the "skate" add-on.
ok, enough conjecture, more coffee. . .
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
<sarcasm>Good to see they're using a nice large group of test subjects.</sarcasm>
The article is here: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/29/4/1046.pdf
Could you please point to which of their inferences you think breaks down because of statistical problems caused by the sample size?
If no such problem exists, the sample size was fine.
I recall reading a set of guidelines for writing psych papers (discussing and critiquing an article). They said quite explicitly that complaining about sample size was about the cheapest shot available, so don't do it unless you can really back it up.
To the mods who think my parent is insightful: could you please spell out to me what the insight is? Because I haven't seen any problems with the sample size, only an unsubstantiated claim.
It doesn't even say anything about marketing until they can figure out a way to forcibly deliver good/bad-flavored beverages to your mouth.
Imagine it now. Coke buys ads in a video game. You're playing, and every time you see the Coke logo, it forces some Coke into your mouth. Then you play a little more and the Pepsi logo shows up. It forces vinegar into your mouth. Happy gaming!
Or you're playing, and every time you see the label for Old Milwaukee, it delivers Old Milwaukee to your mouth. Then you go out into the world and see the logo and... well, perhaps Old Milwaukee's marketing team should steer clear of this.
Where have you been? Ads posing as video games are nearly 30 years old.
As for the political stuff, I don't think it's gonna happen. There are a lot better ways to conduct opinion polls than through a game, which has to be ENTERTAINING first and foremost or it will be raked over the coals.
And in most cases, ads aren't the game itself anyway (the linked above is an exception). Usually, they're just branding tacked onto another game. Fender Guitars sponsors Rock Band, so your character can play virtual representations of actual Fender guitars. Snowboarding companies sponsor SSX Tricky and the like. It's not that obtrusive and actually adds to realism if it's done right.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I believe it!
Doom taught me that when an imp throws a fireball at your face, you need to dodge the fireball and then kill the imp or it will keep attacking.
Diving out of your chair still results in your character getting hit with the fireball.
Tricky imps.
1) Someone turned on a buzz-saw outside, and I immediately hunched down and felt a fear of something dangerous above me. I realized after a moment that the sound was reminiscent of the flying buzz-cutting robots in Half Life 2.
2) I started a job at a BioScience company, and there is an area with a whole bunch of machines that make a humming sound, like a refrigerator running. One day one of the fluorescent lights on the walls was flickering on and off and I immediately felt that foreboding caution like walking into a new room in Doom 3. The humming is very much like the machinery in that game, and the flickering light took it to the next level. Now, every time I walk by there, I hear the narrator saying "The molecular fuel storage compactor..." and I imagine a Cacodemon coming around the corner. (It makes me like my job a bit more...)
You and many others are talking about conditioning. How then do violent video games, like GTA, condition the players? I think it is safe to say that the end result is not making people into murderers. But I believe there must be some conditioning effect. Maybe players end up less respectful of life and others, or also in the case of GTA less respectful of the law and authority. How big is the conditioning effect from violent video games?
Back in college I played a marathon 36 hours at a LAN party, mostly first person shooters like Counter Strike. I remember going to get some food and, on the way, seeing someone I thought I knew in the distance. My first instinct was to raise my sniper rifle and see who it was through the scope.
I also had a friend who played lots of Team Fortress, in which the rocket launcher has a red laser dot to guide it. You could make him jump if you hit him with a laser pointer, at which point he'd be all embarrassed by his conditioned response.
Before I went to Army Basic Training, I had spent hours playing the game "America's Army". Among other features, that game has an extremely accurate simulated shooting range that is almost identical to the real one. (you shoot these green 'pop up' targets that are man-sized)
In the game, you had to score 'expert' in order to be issued a sniper rifle in online multiplayer battles. So I replayed that part of the game dozens of times in order to finally hit expert.
Anyways, shooting my real M-16, I found that the skill translated. My own breathing and the wobbling of my iron sights seemed just like the game, and I 'clicked' on each target. Hit 38/40 without any problems, 'expert' level.
I would say it was actually easier to do this in real life than in the video game.
I've read soldiers manning fixed machine gun turrets saying that shooting back felt just like a video game as well.
Nothing like learning to read. The article says the players learned to FAVOUR on teams jersey, and it had nothing to do with FLAVORED drinks.
They "recruited 22 volunteer subjects." ... "Three-quarters of the subjects sat in the chair that reminded them of juice."
IANAM, but I'm pretty sure 3/4 of 22 is 16.5...
So was there a test subject who sat in the chair that only partially reminded him of juice?
What? Pavlov's Classical Conditioning still works?
Oh well.
If I demonstrate classical conditioning on some other video game, can I get in the news too? Pretty please?
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
22 people this test is extremely statistically significant.
This is why I try to wear green in public and avoid wearing purple at all costs.
I don't want anyone to put a cap my ass before they remember that they aren't playing a videogame.
Had to use a fire extinguisher for the first time in real life the other day, and after using them several times in games (notably San Andreas) found that it was almost an instinct to arm it, point at the base of the fire, and shoot. My co-workers were amazed.
I'm thinking that a rich virtual environment, with multi-thousands of participants, would have room for lots of advertising.
For instance: Enter the virtual room, watch a video about our product, or take a survey about our candidate, and in exchange get a plasma blaster and 400 rounds of ammunition.
Same here. Had some helicopter IRL buzz kind of low after I finished that game, and the first thing that went through my head was "*curse* find it, Find It, FIND IT!"
My wife, who tends to know what I'm thinking before I do, saw the thought flit through my head and laughed for five minutes straight.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Well, these days, common sense or self-evident truths (as in, "we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal...") seem to be unacceptable to most people, so you end up with stupid studies convincing stupid science-bound people of things that more well-rounded people know, and not only know, but feel and connect with at the core of their being.
They do that on Playstation Home (for the PS3). Except, instead of giving rewards, they make you pay for costumes. There are previews for upcoming Sony/Columbia movies and ads for PS3 and PSN games. Playstation home is a spectacular failure any way you slice it, though.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Last week video game conditioning, and some attentiveness, saved my car from being totaled and me from...who knows what. I was driving down an icy road and, to get to the point, an opposing driver was rear ended and launched directly toward me with a 60-70 mph speed differential. Keeping in mind that I was in packed snow, not asphalt, I used by awesome video game-honed reflexes to instantly but not wildly react, steering myself left and into the oncoming lanes of traffic in order to avoid the car that was launched at me, which ended up rolling across my lanes and up a sidewalk, and the giant car that launched it, which ended up spinning into the sidewalk on its own side of the street. As a bonus, I managed to confirm that a real car on snow behaves a lot like a car in GTA4 on pavement.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
It seems very strange to suppose that intentionally creating an association between visual and taste stimuli would magically not work, just because a video game is involved.
And, yet, when violence is involved everyone on this site strongly presumes that there is absolutely no link between stimuli that rewards violent or aggressive behavior and real life aggression. Not a smidgen, not an amount that almost all sane people can control and thus not an amount that has marginal effect on society. None.
'Cause everybody knows that the issue is all about evil politicians and busybodies wanting to control your life. The subject is always black and white -- never gray.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Twenty-two people is hardly statistically significant. Call me when these people start doing real research.
Well, this would explain why every time I see an abandoned building, I feel compelled to wander through it looking for health packs and extra ammo.
I sometimes wonder if this hasn't affected me.
I've played a whole lot of adventure games and now every so often I'll see some random discarded object lying around on the ground somewhere and I get the odd feeling that if I picked it up and carried it around eventually I might figure out where I can use it for something.
This phenomenon seems to be common enough that there need to be a name for it if there isn't one already.
(I've had the experience with Chess (forming pawn islands), Othello/Reversi (flanking) and a few video games.)
Pac Man taught me to eat pills in the dark, moving to repetitive music. That has to be why I like techno. An important lesson of Pac Man - when you start eating too many pills - ghosts will chase you around. Once in a while, when you take that bigger dose however, the ghosts fuck right off. Oh - and eating fruit definitely helps when you've been sketching out for days on end... :-)
Tetris has taught me to improve my spatial shape matching skills, and also increase my interest in electronic music.
Asteroids has me thinking about Near Earth Objects, and the risk posed by them breaking apart after shooting them.
Mario Bros has taught me to embrace the boiler repair knowledge I've learned from my father. That magic mushrooms can make you feel big - stumbling upon evil infected mushrooms can kill you, eating weird flower seeds makes you trip out and think you can do things like throw fireballs. Still need to find Princess Peach however...
Mega Man has taught me to defeat science subjects one at a time, and then acquire skills that can be used to defeat the other subjects, while munching on pills (related to Pac Man). Thermodynamics = Heat Man, Lasers = Flash Man, Metallury = Metal Man, Explosives = Crash Man, Biology = Wood Man, Bongs = Bubble Man. :-)
Grand Theft Auto has me avoiding cops, and doing
criminal things - obviously related to Pac Man. The one thing that never made sense is - how does picking up a hooker off the street increase your health? I imagine that'd most likely slowly decrease your health...
Dope Wars taught me about drug price variability, market opportunity and risk.
Command & Conquer/Red Alert has generated an increased interest in world domination.
Leading to larger scale, advanced strategy - like Civilization. Increasing my interest in trade, sociology, research funding, energy policy, and how to win all out nuclear war. :-)
And then taking an interest in armed combat scenarios - like America's Army or Battlefield.
Sim City taught me to identify stupid zoning decisions, road layouts, traffic problems, pollution, gentrification, economic downturns, and associated costs.
Half-Life taught me to push crystals into energy beams. Now I do it as often as I can, hoping that one day, I will open that inter dimensional portal, and have to run around in an orange HEV suit, bashing alien creatures in the head with a crowbar, while having to fight the military at the same time. Hence why I'm studying photonics. :-) Come on inter dimensional portal!
Haven't played any serious flight simulator games in a long time however.
And the number one thing, and probably most beneficial skill I've learned from video games is credited to DOOM.
How to edit batch files, remove memory managers, all leading to the downward information spiral of computers. When you're 13, and basically don't know anyone with any computer knowledge, this kind of experience is golden.
There needs to be a video game that deals with drug abuse withdrawal though ... that one just doesn't seem to be covered yet.
People want to say video games alter people to the point where they are normal one day and killers the next. So to that we say we have played them all our lives and it has no affect on us.
Killing target after target after target doesn't directly make people into trench coat killers, but it normalizes the event to the point where when you hear about such a thing happening in the real world, your automatic reaction is not one of disgust and outrage and a feeling that we must work to decrease violence. It's one of, "Oh. Kill it back".
I'm not saying that automatic reactions are particularly good, but in the context of a world where people are cattle, being able to control how and which way they herd is valuable, especially if you want to keep people locked in a perpetual state of war.
Some of the games being played today by both kids and adults would have been utterly shocking to the world back in the days of Pac Man. This appears to have changed.
you somehow think you are better and more observant than others because you want to think other people are saying all these things don't affect them at all when really you lack contextual reading comprehension skills. In other words, you are being immature and arrogant because you think you know better than everyone else.
Hm. Pardon my own psycho-analysis, but I didn't get that so much. I could be entirely mistaken, but the poster's comment struck me more as being driven by a frustration with mass self-deception rather than an attempt to win ego points in a game of, "I'm The Smartest!". --People locked into that game are more likely to be threatened by any statement of fact coming from a peer.
Whatever the case. . . Answer a falsehood with what it calls for. The truth. If we can do that without trying to 'win' ego points, then we're doing well. It's hard to do. The ego is the gate keeper preventing us from seeing objective reality.
-FL
I have to admit, after playing Burnout Paradise, I felt the urge to drive through any yellow blockades I saw in real life...
Why do I get the feeling that this will be taken out of context by extremists like Jack Thompson, to continue their campaign to destroy all video games intended for people over the age of 8?
Yes, it is logical that we are affected by the same things in video games that we are in advertising, but it isn't as if it can completely turn around your behavior and morals.
I mean, playing GTA, Doom, or Halo isn't going to cause you to go out, buy a gun and go on a murderous rampage. There are other things which are responsible, and the games that the majority of reasonable people play make a convenient scapegoat. And this research may just put a sign over games developer's heads saying "BLAME ME!!!"
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
I wish theirs an admin in life, or at least a votekick.
I wish theirs aimbot in life, or at least a speel checker.
I wish there's end turn in lines, or at least a build 0.
I wish there's catch up assistance, or at least a Cessna in my garage.
If your game bleeds into your RL, you should be grateful. I never seem to pwn in RL, posting to slashdot everyday.
When the toilet lights at our company started flickering I became really edgy for not checking all bathroom stalls for enemies like Doom 3 had taught me.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
How Tetris affects your life.