Tipper Gore might pay a pretty penny to see this thought unfold. Could video games affect the minds of their audience by simply employing biological phenomena more precisely known as “Mirror Neurons”?
First recognized in monkeys almost eleven years ago and now being researched in humans, these neurons ‘imitate’ actions, gestures and even social behaviors, intentions, and emotions based on a persons previous history of experiences.
How mirror neurons work is quite amazing. You see someone yawn; you feel the urge to reproduce one yourself. Monkey see, monkey do. Simple. When we engage in an action and then observe someone else commit that action, same set of neurons fire in our brain. Thus we are able to empathize with others, or ‘…put ourselves in their shoes…’ so to speak.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10mirr.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071106123725.htm
What role then, can Mirror Neurons play in the mind of an audience partaking in ‘violent’ or ‘sexuality charged’ video games?
"Understanding the intentions of others while watching their actions is a fundamental building block of social behavior," said principal investigator Dr. Marco Iacoboni, an associate professor in-residence of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute's
Predisposed to learn social behavior from observing others, we are in for quite behavioral ‘learning’ from video games. Of course one could argue that our brains, in their infinite capacity to sponge up information, would know how to distinguish what is real and what is for the sake of entertainment. That, exposure to video games, doesn’t necessarily mean we will all turn out to be sexual deviants on a bloody crusade to steal all the hot rods on this side of the
Of course not.
However, consider this; by observing socially unacceptable behavior in a pleasant, relaxing (and in the name of entertainment) environment, what we are feeding our Mirror Neurons is that killing a few prostitutes while learning how to fly airplane is quite alright. That a banal outing to take a little mail to the post-office can be livened up a bit with a few shotgun rounds heaved at some innocent passersby.
So we may not be actually partaking in such activities, but really creating a place in our brain for acknowledging these events as acceptable.
A brief look at World of Warcraft can spawn a discourse on any online gaming community. It’s a skeleton upon which the colossal number of community members sculpt their own vision of who their characters are, and what kind of life-paths they choose. The wager is ultimately effected by improving skill-levels, group alliances through ‘guilds’ and bumping their characters up in ‘levels’ while choosing the best possible ‘realm’
No sexuality is hard-coded in the game itself, rather just hints at manipulating virtual ‘toons’, as one player noted ‘…it is like playing with dolls…’ A certain level of violence is hard-coded in the game (killing things, killing other people's toons), but nothing unusually graphic visually. Textually, there is nothing beyond a teen fantasy novel (a la Harry Potter). Violence and sexuality is driven by how players interact in the environment, not from the game itself except insofar as it lets people interact in the environment.
One issue that has heralded some controversy is the quasi-anonymity (that is, no one knows who you "really" are, though Blizzard (the company running WoW) can ban users or identify users to the legal system in extreme cases. Anonymity can be thought to encourage people to step beyond social norms and behave in manners not otherwise encouraged in social situations. Such role-playing in the game might encourage violent or sexual behavior by the dynamic of the role-playing "performance" and drama.
Julian Dibble would turn blue and green and pink too, if you let him speak up on the subject of anonymity, what is real and what is unreal in cyberspace. In his text ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ (http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html) he paints quite a lavish picture of what it means to wander in a world which cannot be policed.
3 comments:
With fMRI, we may be able to see if the same bundle of nerves is activated while watching a game character stab someone and while watching a real person stab someone. I suspect they would be. The next test would be to see if the same neurons fired when we use our Wiimote to cause our on-screen character to stab someone, and then to see what happens when we just hit 'A' instead.
I would like to know if the people whose neurons become accustomed to virtual murder feel the same sense of sadness and disgust when confronted with real murder on the new.
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