The Brain Game: What Causes Commitment and Obsession with Video Games?

Researchers have examined the objective and subjective parts of game-playing experience based on analogies of physical models of motion.

As per history, games are not a separable aspect of humanity and mostly for excellent reasons. Video game advocates praise their pros: they aid generate skills related to solving problems, stress-relieving, socializing, and exercise the mind and body every time.

Games also have a negative side - they are very addictive. The major development of the video game industry has driven all types of games that target various types of people.

This comprises digital famous board games such as chess and also exceeds to gambling kind games such as online casinos and applying bet on horse races.

Involving in all types of entertainment virtually will lead to obsession behavior under particular circumstances, some video games are more particularly linked with addiction compared to others. But what accurately makes these games so potentially addictive?

This is a tough question to answer because it manages directly with facets of the human mind, and the inner workings of the mind are mostly obscurity, However, there may be an approach to answer it by leveraging what we are familiar with about the physical world and its laws.

At the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan, Professor Hiroyuki Iida, and colleagues have been working on a methodology known as "motion in mind" that could aid us to understand what attracts us to games and makes us want to keep reaching for the comfort.

Their way is centered around modeling the fundamental mechanisms that work in the mind when playing games through a likeness with definite physical models of motion.

For instance, the concepts of potential energy, forces, and momentum from classical mechanics are regarded to be similar to objective and/or subjective game-related facets, comprising pacing of the game, unpredictability, and fairness.

In their recent study published in IEEE Access, Assistant Professor Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid and Professor Iida, also from JAIST, associated their "motion in mind" model with the concepts of engagement and addiction in a variety of types of games from the apparent understanding of the player and their behaviors.

The researchers employed a similarity of the law of conservation of energy, mass, and momentum to mathematically decide aspects of the game-playing experience in means of gambling psychology and the subjective/objective observation of the game.

Their conjectures and outcomes were carried by a "combined theoretical model of engagement and obsession," previously resultant from ethnographic and social science studies, which recommends that engagement and infatuation are two sides of the same coin.

By comparing and examining a variety of games, like chess, Go, online casinos, basketball, soccer, and pachinko, among others, the researchers explained that their law of conservation model expanded upon this presumption, revealing the latest measures for engagement while also presenting some of the mechanisms that lie beneath addiction.

Their way also provides a clearer view of how the apparent (subjective) complexity of solving doubts during a given game can vary from and even offset the real (purpose) one, and how this influences our behaviour and reactions.

"Our findings are precious for consideration of the dynamics of information in diverse game mechanics that have a contact on the player's state of mind. In other words, this aids us to set up the relationship between the game-playing procedure and the associated psychological feeling," states Professor Iida.

Such an approach will aid developers to make game content more appealing, healthy, and personalized both in the short and long term.

Additional studies shall make the tailoring of game experiences much simpler, as Professor Iida states: "Our work is a method of obtaining something for involving behavioral psychology and game-playing experiences, and soon we will be able to mechanistically influence and adjust the notions of rendezvous and addiction towards particular needs and use-cases.

"Let's anticipate these findings can take us one step towards deaddiction to games while keeping the fun integral!