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This Is Your Brain While Videogaming Stoned
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Pot and video games have long been bound together in hazy, wedded bliss—as well as in compulsion and codependency. Many a World of Warcraft binger has been found in the darkest hours of the night with clouds of sweet, milk-white smoke curling around him, a bong next to the keyboard. But the way these lovers, games and weed, commingle has only rarely been studied, and when done so, usually exclusively in the context of substance abuse and how it relates to what is known as PVP: 'problem video game playing.'" Motherboard takes a different look.
Well, it's getting harder and harder to demonize video games. The kids of today are already the second generation of gamers, their parents are the first. Having a teenager (i.e. the time when you start wondering "just where did my kid go wrong?") means that you're about 40 years old. That is about the age where you had an Atari 2600 or a C64 as a kid.
Demonizing weed isn't easy either, since it's been around for two generations by now (or rather, two generations had some rather high rate of exposure to it).
What's left is demonizing the combo. Because when you were a kid during my generation (i.e. the "40ish" people of today), you were EITHER a geek OR doing dope. The combination was rather rare.
And it simply can't be that your kids are simply walking hormones that come without a user manual, where you have to figure out how to deal with them. So SOMETHING must be wrong here. He was always such a nice boy...
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From personal experience, drinking while programming isn't so bad, although the increasing mental and physical clumsiness will eventually become a problem. Smoking weed while programming, on the other hand, is asking for trouble. If you're a designer brainstorming before coming up with a rough design document, weed's probably an ally in many ways. Programming, though, God help you. I suppose it adversely affects the ability to base one logical proposition upon another, which is generally bad for a series of equations relying upon the results of the previous for a useful result.
While playing games it depends on the game. If it requires the same sort of sequential, analytical processes as programming then you're doomed. If it's just a twitch game with simple goals and gameplay you'll be minimally handicapped. In any case, I can't imagine being high will improve your ability to play a game; just your enjoyment of it.
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Playing stoned made them more confident. They felt like they were playing better, so they took more risks. A lot of games have systems in which risky behavior is often more greatly rewarded, but rewarded less frequently. Spelunky especially is one of those games. Tetris, however, can be much less forgiving of risky behavior, hence the lower scores there.
So I don't think this was a very good test of the effect of actual basic skills that contribute to good or bad play. I think a series of reaction time tests, memorization tests, and problem solving tests, independent from complex interactions within the game itself or the nebulous "score" would make for a better testing environment. Also, three people playing just four games, all of which are single player and most of which are puzzle games, doesn't seem like enough data to come to any useful conclusion whatsoever.
I've played with and against players who were high in competitive multiplayer games in which the high players were obviously making mistakes and playing poorly (the whole time insisting that playing high enhanced their abilities) to change my belief that playing high probably makes you worse rather than better. Especially in a multiplayer context with a group of highly skilled and experienced players, ones overconfidence can be much more directly and specifically exploited and countered. The high players were not only overconfident, but much less likely to recognize and acknowledge mistakes, leading them to repeat those mistakes or allow their opponents to capitalize on the mistakes even more frequently or severely than normal.