Being immersed in hours of role-play video gaming can make the gamer numb to real-life experiences unable to gauge important body signals in real life.
Role-playing video games have become increasingly popular these days. In such games, the gamer takes on a virtual character or avatar of a superhero or a warrior. These video games can be really addictive with individuals immersing in them for hours. According to a new study, this may not be good for the sensory system of the body.
The authors of the research studied what happens when gamers identify with a nonhuman character such as an avatar during immersive video gaming, and how it especially influences their experience of pain. Avatars often have automaton-like, robotic characteristics such as mechanistic inertness, rigidity and a lack of emotion and warmth. University of Witten/Herdecke researchers found that being immersed in hours of role-play video gaming can make the gamer numb to real-life experiences which can lead to him ignoring important body signals in real life.
For the study, researchers asked participants how much time they spent each week playing video games. Their answers were correlated with a measurement of pain tolerance from counting the number of paperclips that they could retrieve from ice-cold water. In another part of the study, all participants were asked to play either an immersive or a non-immersive computer game before taking part in the same pain-resistance task. Researchers noted that participants who played immersive video games showed a reduced sensitivity to pain and, therefore, removed more number of paperclips from ice-cold water. Such participants were also more indifferent to other people than the participants who played non-immersive video games.
Lead authors of the study, Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan, concluded that when people spend hours playing immersive video games they become desensitized to pain in themselves and in others. According to Weger, this misleading development has blurred the human-machine boundary
"We see this blurring as a reality of our time but also as a confused and misleading development that has begun to shape society," said Weger. "We believe this should be balanced by other developments, for example, by working on our awareness of what it really means to be human. We should also look into how we can best make use of the beneficial applications of robotic or artificial intelligence advances, so as to be able to use our freed up resources and individual potentials wisely rather than becoming enslaved by those advances.
A previous study revealed that role-playing video games bring out the worst behavior in autistic children, especially boys. Problematic gaming behavior was characterized as "being unable to stop playing, becoming irritable or aggressive if someone interrupts playing, having grades suffer because of playing, losing sleep and similar problems."
