Video games sometimes get a bad rap for grabbing all of our attention and blinding us to the outside world to the point where we forget about it and the people in it. I can’t tell you how many times my wife has had to stand between my game controller and the TV to get my attention when I’m fully engrossed in a game. She hates it and doesn’t understand the confused “Where did you come from?” look that usually washes over my face. look.
Sometimes, however, this disregard for reality and those around us is just what the doctor ordered.
There are many ways that video games can create this feeling, which psychologists call spatial presence and immersion. Immersion is usually what happens when all of someone’s attention is dominated by something; they can’t take their eyes off of it and stop focusing on anything else. It happens all the time in games. Spatial presence is a related but separate phenomenon that occurs when a player creates and fills in mental representations about the virtual space in which the game takes place. If rich enough, the player may actually begin to favor this virtual space as a reference point for where they are, as their awareness of the technology mediating their experience declines. This is done by wrapping them in rich sensory information, commandeering their mental resources and attention through gameplay, and removing signals or flaws in the experience to remind them that oh yes, this is a video game. You might be thinking that virtual reality creates a sense of space and immersion that no other way of playing a game has. You’re right.
One interesting use of video game immersion is as a pain management therapy. People who have suffered severe burns have to go through very painful but necessary surgeries where their skin is stretched. Painkillers are part of this treatment, but if you’ve been reading the headlines, you know that opioids are dangerous and not always completely effective. An article in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking describes how an 11-year-old boy with severe burns to his feet, arms, shoulders, and head was able to obtain an Oculus Rift VR headset to use during one of these painful treatments.
Using a VR device, he and the other subjects in the study played a game called “Snow World,” which was designed to distract players from the outside world. While playing the game, patients threw snowballs at VR snowmen, igloos, penguins and other features of the game’s winter world. The idea, say the authors, is that the snow world “floods the brain with attention-grabbing information from multiple senses …… Less attention is paid to processing pain signals. Patients feel less pain and spend less time thinking about their pain. And, in fact, when they entered virtual reality, patients’ self-reports of pain dropped significantly during treatment.MRI scans even found that the area of the brain responsible for processing pain signals was less active when patients could play games. This is all thanks to relatively inexpensive video game equipment.
It’s both fascinating and heart-warming, and it’s nice to see the immersive quality of the games being used for something purely good. While I doubt a game like Snow World is necessary, the fact is that you can see the same success in many commercial games. Throw me into a Fortnite match or a God of War match, and you could probably do whatever you want with my skin.
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