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Playing shooters causes damage to the brain

TL:DR

CKYCHID.jpg
 
I can see how hours and hours of how a typical person plays Call of Duty can make you go braindead. Mindless running and gunning, prestiging, with the only thinking you're doing is regards to loot box management.

Good think you specified here. If the reason you have a 1 kd is because you actually don't have the motor skills to perform better than the average person, then so be it. But if you're above average or average in the skills department and play the game with any kind of forethought, you should easily be in the 1.5-2 kd range (or higher like me if you've had years of experience).

Just because Cod is the most popular doesn't mean it's inherently the least stimulating. Having the most responsive controls on console for a decade might have something to do with it but what do I know?
 

Part of the problem. Keep perpetuating the myth that high level skill in FPS doesn't translate (and that there aren't thousands of kiddies playing CSGO chasing skins)

Funny how COD was a hardcore shooter darling before the 360 'broified' it and made it exponentially more popular.
 
Part of the problem. Keep perpetuating the myth that high level skill in FPS doesn't translate (and that there aren't thousands of kiddies playing CSGO chasing skins)

Funny how COD was a hardcore shooter darling before the 360 'broified' it and made it exponentially more popular.

I think the skins are the worst thing about CS:GO, I hate that part of the game, but it seems necessary to keep an active playerbase and stuff like skins and stickers helps fund tournaments and pro teams. I thought hats ruined TF2 but most people didn't agree.

The first COD was great, but it never touched the popularity of CS 1.5/1.6 back then as far as competitive play went

I honestly thought COD could replace CS as the next big thing in the competitive scene when COD4 first came out, but then all subsequent COD games ruined that with numerous poor decisions. However, it was clear they just wanted to sell a bunch of copies year after year, not build a competitively viable game with some longevity.
 

SomTervo

Member
It doesn't to me.

High level multiplayer like CS:GO is constant problem solving, decision making, communication and strategy.

I'd be interested to see a specific study on a competitive shooter.

IIRC the correlation is that

> people with dementia have more activity in the part of the brain that deals with spatial awareness - other parts are weakened or disused
> while playing videogames these spatial awareness centers take most of the processing power and other parts of the brain aren't activated so much (like in people with dementia)

Yes, in CS:GO you'll be doing problem solving, decision making, communication, etc, but your brain is contextualising ALL of those decisions within the realm of 'spatial awareness' - where targets are, where you should move, where your teammates are, how to angle and throw that grenade, etc. So the spatial awareness part is taking most of the brunt.

Still early days for the study and idea, though.
 
I think the skins are the worst thing about CS:GO, I hate that part of the game, but it seems necessary to keep an active playerbase and stuff like skins and stickers helps fund tournaments and pro teams. I thought hats ruined TF2 but most people didn't agree.

The first COD was great, but it never touched the popularity of CS 1.5/1.6 back then as far as competitive play went

I honestly thought COD could replace CS as the next big thing in the competitive scene when COD4 first came out, but then all subsequent COD games ruined that with numerous poor decisions. However, it was clear they just wanted to sell a bunch of copies year after year, not build a competitively viable game with some longevity.

ALL of the subsequent cod games? I think that's a stretch...if you actually analyze cod4 from a competitive standpoint and compare to either BO2 or 3, I think it's apparent the later entries are more well balanced games (not to mention both are proving to have LEGS--BO2 broke Amazon top 10 after being reintroduced on backwards compatibility, and BO3 is still one of, if not the most, streamed titles on PS4 nearly 2 full years after the game's release...that kind of retention in cod is unheard of)
 
ALL of the subsequent cod games? I think that's a stretch...if you actually analyze cod4 from a competitive standpoint and compare to either BO2 or 3, I think it's apparent the later entries are more well balanced games (not to mention both are proving to have LEGS--BO2 broke Amazon top 10 after being reintroduced on backwards compatibility, and BO3 is still one of, if not the most, streamed titles on PS4 nearly 2 full years after the game's release...that kind of retention in cod is unheard of)

Ok I haven't played them ALL. COD MW2 / MW3 / BO they release so many it is hard to keep up. I gave up after I saw the direction the series was going in.

1. Did they re-introduce dedicated servers?
2. Did they get rid of unbalanced kill streak rewards?
3. Did they do away with paid map packs splitting the community?

Those were my primary issues.
 

LordofPwn

Member
wow that sample size is alarmingly low. I mean it's big enough to make a hypothesis to then actually test, but not enough to make any kind of certain conclusion.
 
Ok I haven't played them ALL. COD MW2 / MW3 / BO they release so many it is hard to keep up. I gave up after I saw the direction the series was going in.

1. Did they re-introduce dedicated servers?
2. Did they get rid of unbalanced kill streak rewards?
3. Did they do away with paid map packs splitting the community?

Those were my primary issues.

Dedies have been in the pc iteration of cod in WaW and og BO (so, treyarch stuff). Ghosts was rumored to use a hybrid system and BO3 actually does.

I don't know what qualifies as unbalanced but the killstreak rewards since MW2 haven't been OP imo (at least the last 4-5 iterations for sure haven't had them--crap in infinite warfare, good but not op in BO3, crap in Advanced warfare, crap in Ghosts, good but not op in BO2 and same in MW3)

Paid map packs don't split the community in the way you think they do. Everyone in the lobby has to have them in order to play a dlc map and the games prioritize connection over everything else (advanced warfare excluded) so I still get plenty of lobbies with just BO3 vanilla owners
 

horkrux

Member
Funny how COD was a hardcore shooter darling before the 360 'broified' it and made it exponentially more popular.

Reducing recoil to cater to console players, removing mod support on PC, adding more clutter to make you feel good despite losing... all those things tend to achieve that.
 

Gxgear

Member
Without reading the paper itself, I would imagine it's only natural that the part of the brain that controls autopilot not essential to playing action games that requires constant attention.
 
Reducing recoil to cater to console players, removing mod support on PC, adding more clutter to make you feel good despite losing... all those things tend to achieve that.
Reduced recoil? Compared to what? Cod has never had much in terms of recoil but BO3 and infinite warfare have longer ttk guns compared to earlier entries that had stopping power and laser beam weapons. Come back when you know what you're talking about.
 

Raptomex

Member
Reduced recoil? Compared to what? Cod has never had much in terms of recoil but BO3 and infinite warfare have longer ttk guns compared to earlier entries that had stopping power and laser beam weapons. Come back when you know what you're talking about.
I think there was this whole thing about Destiny 2 having little or no recoil on consoles a while ago. Although, I thought that was proven false or not entirely accurate.
 
This is a nice recent review article dealing w/ the inter-relation between caudate and hippocampus in learning, and the relevance of different sorts of video game experiences to both.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721416687342

Senior author, V. Bohbot is a real-deal memory/hippocampus researcher, too.

Short story, there is a LOT of evidence in behavioral neuroscience that simple goal-directed learning privileges striatal reward networks at the expense of hippocampal networks, and that 3D allocentric navigation in learning tasks privileges hippocampal networks over striatal reward networks.

This isn't a new idea, and it's very well supported. It would almost be surprising if these sorts of different video game experiences did NOT produce this sort of differential effect.

This is something everyone in modern life should think about -- how they've structured their lives/habits around reward and goal-based activities. Basically, have you contrived to live in a Skinner box? Or do you get out and have complex, unpredictable, real world experiences? Video games are just one small piece of this, and probably much less important in the grand scheme for societal trends in brain connectivity than things like social media habits of teenagers. Orientation toward immediate reward isn't always bad. It supports lots of prosocial behavior and lots of societal and technological innovation. But it's clearly a double-edged sword.

And, again, the "small sample size" dodge isn't that relevant to a case where subjects were assigned to different groups. 100 subjects is bigger than most experimental behavioral studies where you actually have to find people to participate and get them to do so (and 90 hours of participation is almost unheard of!). Reasonable power for a simple comparison w/ assigned control group. This doesn't appear to have been a correlational study. Of course more data are needed for increased confidence, but, again, this finding follows a long history of reward learning data (much of it w/out video games, true) all pointing in the similar direction.
 

haozz

Member
This is a nice recent review article dealing w/ the inter-relation between caudate and hippocampus in learning, and the relevance of different sorts of video game experiences to both.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721416687342

Senior author, V. Bohbot is a real-deal memory/hippocampus researcher, too.

Short story, there is a LOT of evidence in behavioral neuroscience that simple goal-directed learning privileges striatal reward networks at the expense of hippocampal networks, and that 3D allocentric navigation in learning tasks privileges hippocampal networks over striatal reward networks.

This isn't a new idea, and it's very well supported. It would almost be surprising if these sorts of different video game experiences did NOT produce this sort of differential effect.

This is something everyone in modern life should think about -- how they've structured their lives/habits around reward and goal-based activities. Basically, have you contrived to live in a Skinner box? Or do you get out and have complex, unpredictable, real world experiences? Video games are just one small piece of this, and probably much less important in the grand scheme for societal trends in brain connectivity than things like social media habits of teenagers. Orientation toward immediate reward isn't always bad. It supports lots of prosocial behavior and lots of societal and technological innovation. But it's clearly a double-edged sword.

And, again, the "small sample size" dodge isn't that relevant to a case where subjects were assigned to different groups. 100 subjects is bigger than most experimental behavioral studies where you actually have to find people to participate and get them to do so (and 90 hours of participation is almost unheard of!). Reasonable power for a simple comparison w/ assigned control group. This doesn't appear to have been a correlational study. Of course more data are needed for increased confidence, but, again, this finding follows a long history of reward learning data (much of it w/out video games, true) all pointing in the similar direction.

I agree. 90 subjects is a decent size. But the harder questions revolve around how much atrophy was observed, what effect the atrophy has, and the details around the subjects' playing conditions (90 hours over what period?)
 

keraj37

Member
brain or titanfall ....

That's the question!

You brought smile to my face, thanks!

BTW if I just knew it in 90s (wolf3d.exe, doom.exe, Dark Forces etc) - I would save like 50% of my brain. I could use it now in my professional life.

Well, life goes on. I hope brain is like liver so it grows with time.

My brain hurts, you know!
 

Fury451

Banned
The two main authors both have their doctorates.

They should know better about putting information like this out there then with their sample size alongside the way these things are sensationalized and read for headlines only.
 

Fercho

Member
Considering the shit that people says online playing these games, their YT channels and such.....I tend to agree xD LMAO
 

tesqui

Member
Huh, no wonder my memory is complete shit. I've been playing FPS games since I was 4. I played Doom, Descent, Quake, Half-Life, and Serious Sam all at a very young age. Some people grew up on Nintendo, I grew up on fucking PC FPS games.
 
Huh, no wonder my memory is complete shit. I've been playing FPS games since I was 4. I played Doom, Descent, Quake, Half-Life, and Serious Sam all at a very young age. Some people grew up on Nintendo, I grew up on fucking PC FPS games.

Fortunately, memory is composed of multiple orthogonal components. Your experiential and allocentric spatial memory might be weaker if you've shrunk your hippocampus. But your procedural/motoric/egocentric spatial memory could all be stronger if you've grown your caudate.
 
It doesn't to me.

High level multiplayer like CS:GO is constant problem solving, decision making, communication and strategy.

It's very unlikely any of the study participants were high-level CS players, let alone a majority that could impact the results. In fact if the study wants to analyze the effects of those 90 hours, the logical choice would be to pick complete newbies to the game.

And I just realized that if you give a newbie a game and tell him "play 90 hours of this", they're probably going to play in the most rote and automatic way possible, which explains the results and is also pretty useless as a base to analyze normal play.

I'd be interested to see a specific study on a competitive shooter.

I myself would be interested in seeing the results of the same study applied to Go or Chess. Pick complete newbies, explain the rules to them, pit them against each other and measure the results. It would be interesting to compare them with the results of this study.

In any case, a better study for videogames would be to pick relatively frequent players, and have some of them stop playing and others keep playing. For best results I would pick players that aren't super dedicated or pros, as seriously breaking their daily routine would cause false negative results in itself.
 

Mooreberg

Member
Later in life? Most people behave like they are experiencing dementia in the middle of a match. It would explain the Mercy and Lucio players.
 

Fury451

Banned
Huh, no wonder my memory is complete shit. I've been playing FPS games since I was 4. I played Doom, Descent, Quake, Half-Life, and Serious Sam all at a very young age. Some people grew up on Nintendo, I grew up on fucking PC FPS games.

Those games requires some hella important spatial awareness and reflexes.

Descent especially, that shit had you flying on the ceiling while navigating the most insane labyrinthine levels
 

PK Gaming

Member
IIRC the correlation is that

> people with dementia have more activity in the part of the brain that deals with spatial awareness - other parts are weakened or disused
> while playing videogames these spatial awareness centers take most of the processing power and other parts of the brain aren't activated so much (like in people with dementia)

Yes, in CS:GO you'll be doing problem solving, decision making, communication, etc, but your brain is contextualising ALL of those decisions within the realm of 'spatial awareness' - where targets are, where you should move, where your teammates are, how to angle and throw that grenade, etc. So the spatial awareness part is taking most of the brunt.

Still early days for the study and idea, though.

Wait, is this true? I thought it was the opposite.
 

horkrux

Member
Reduced recoil? Compared to what? Cod has never had much in terms of recoil but BO3 and infinite warfare have longer ttk guns compared to earlier entries that had stopping power and laser beam weapons. Come back when you know what you're talking about.

There was a big change in recoil going from MW1 to 2. A few years ago I was looking up why TTK was so much lower in the sequel, but it wasn't actually due to higher damage, it was just because they had decreased recoil.
Can't speak for the newer games, but there is no reason to believe they went back on this.
 
Neuroskeptic covered this in a nice succinct writeup:

So how solid are these results? This is a really well-designed set of studies. The fact that West et al. conducted three seperate experiments that all converge on the same conclusion is very impressive – any one of these studies could have been published as a paper in its own right. The sample sizes are moderate (n=33, 43, 21 respectively.)

...

Overall though, this is a well-designed paper which presents a lot of data. Despite my stats quibbles, the fact that the three studies all pretty much find the same thing is very encouraging, and it means that much as I would like to (I love Borderlands), I can’t just write off these results as flawed. Maybe games really do change the brain.

More at the link, including a critique of the statistical methods.
 
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