Virtually Numbed:
Immersive Video Gaming Alters Real-Life Experience
Role-playing
video games can alter our experience of reality and numb us to important
real-life experiences, a new study finds.
Spending time immersed as a virtual character or avatar in a
role-playing video game can numb you to realizing important body signals in
real life. This message comes from Ulrich Weger of the University of
Witten/Herdecke in Germany and Stephen Loughnan of Melbourne University in
Australia, in an article in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review, published by Springer.
The researchers studied what happens when gamers take on the role
of -- and 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.
Participants were asked how much time they spend each week playing
video games. Their responses were then correlated with a measure of pain
tolerance by counting the number of paperclips that they could retrieve from
ice-cold water. In a second experiment, participants played either an immersive
or a nonimmersive computer game before taking part in the same pain-resistance
task. The immersive video-game players exhibited a reduced sensitivity to pain
and removed significantly more paperclips from ice-cold water. They were also
more indifferent to people depicted as experiencing displeasure than were the
nonimmersive players.
Weger and Loughnan found that by taking on and acting from the
perspective of an automaton-like avatar, people are desensitized to pain in
themselves and in others. The point of view adopted during video gaming appears
to have implications that extend beyond the virtual environment, into real
life.
Dr. Weger points to what he sees as a misleading development: that
the human-machine boundary is increasingly being blurred, either by humans
entering virtual machines/robots, or by anthropomorphizing, in other words
adding human qualities to animated figures and toys. Machines are being
programmed to attract human inclinations, while virtual characters and robots
have started to perform tasks or roles that were traditionally held by humans,
such as that of robot counselling therapists. In such an environment it becomes
increasingly easy and normal to regard artificial beings as being akin to human
beings.
"We see this blurring as a reality of our time but also as a
confused and misleading development that has begun to shape society," says
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."
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