Well, I suppose this is a developmental milestone we all hit eventually — the “handwringing over media like it’s a shortcut to societal improvement” stage. These days, the only activism most of us can routinely manage is fighting about kids’ movies with bigots on Twitter, so it behooves us to believe that our media consumption is activism. It’s not enough just to enjoy something, it must have a profound and meaningful societal benefit. It’s not enough that we don’t like a thing, it must be deeply problematic and causing harm to others. It’s not enough to like or dislike things all on our own — we must propagate our favorites to the masses, stomp out supporters of competing ships with the zeal of…well, of fans. Y’know, fanatics.

So here I am, bellying up to present my manifesto for the betterment of society based solely upon my own desires and interests. I am, after all, a white person, and that’s sort of what my people do. How can you become more like me and thereby immeasurably improve the universe, you breathlessly ask?

Produce and consume better interactive fiction. Play — and make — better games.

Jack Thompson still lurking under the bed

Gamers have a lot of defensiveness around the question of how, and how much, gaming affects our brains. This was once perfectly understandable — when something is socially unacceptable, scientific examination of that topic is often weaponized to keep it in the margins. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, any psychological study that investigated gaming was inevitably framed by fearmongering. The same parents who once blamed their bad parenting on “that durn rock music” now moved on to “violent video games.” Jack Thompson became a bogeyman without ever having much of a legal leg to stand on, as a poster boy for a larger societal fear of technology and the internet. But it seems that for a lot of gamers, nothing has changed in that regard — many communities still dive under the covers whenever someone with a degree glances their way, terrified that Thompson will jump out from under their beds and take the games away.

This reluctance to engage with academic examination of our hobby has resulted in a kind of bifurcation in how we perceive gaming: it can’t be subject to the same neurological mechanisms that operate when we consume other kinds of media, no! That would mean that we’d have to examine and critique games from an informed, socially conscious perspective, and hold them to higher standards than “ability to lovingly render an AR-15”! That might mean that Modern Warfare isn’t literally the best game ever made!

A quick dip into your brain

If we’re willing to honestly engage with how games affect us, a survey of recent studies examining how we absorb fiction gives a lot of insights about how gaming might alter our perspectives. In 2009, researchers at the University of Granada were using fMRI machines to figure out how our brains distinguish fiction from reality, and found that when we are evaluating new things, we activate the portion of the brain involved in autobiographical memory retrieval, and look for personally-relevant references to what we’re seeing. In other words, when we encounter a thing we haven’t seen before, our brain goes searching for any appearance of that thing in our memories of the real world. If we have lots of these references in our personal experience, we conclude that that thing must be real.

But “real” or “not real” isn’t a binary where your brain is concerned; it’s more like a gradient. There are degrees of how “not-real” something feels to us. An example from that study: children judge fictional characters that are associated with real events in one’s life, such as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, as “more real” than fictional characters that are not associated with real-world occasions, like dragons. They have personal experiences that reference Santa, whereas (unfortunately) no adult has ever told them that a dragon will sneak into their house in the middle of the night. Celebrities, replete with personal references from our media and people we know, feel “more real” than Santa. And our family and friends, intertwined in our brains with millions of minuscule memories, feel more real still. Let me drill down on this, because it’s important. This indicates that we differentiate reality from fiction based on how well it connects with our existing experience.

This should frighten you.

This should frighten you. It should terrify you, actually, because you know the world to be a morass of misinformation and propaganda these days, and research is telling us that our baseline conclusions about what reality is are drawn based on these same preconceptions. From our bubble of personal references and biases, from our existing worldview.

Our existing worldview… it comes from our experiences and memories, right? Except that we rewrite our memories every time we recall them. They change each time we bring them up, without ever being aware that the information has been altered. Each time we summon the memory we attach another “tag” of personal reference to it, thus becoming more certain each time that what we remember is what actually happened… even as the memory strays ever further from reality.

But there’s another problem with our memories, because we never saw what actually happened, not even when the memory was first encoded. Visual information takes about 120 milliseconds to reach the brain and be processed, so in order to keep us from lagging forever 120 milliseconds behind real life, our visual cortex predicts what we should see based on its expectations — based on previous experience — and then feeds us a constructed image of the world. This image is only corrected after the fact, if our brain’s projected reality conflicts with incoming sensory data. This is why we often see things that aren’t there, most often the things we believe or expect to be there.

We see what we expect to see, we rewrite our memories to make us certain that what happened is what we thought we saw, and then we make judgments about what exists and what doesn’t on the basis of these largely fabricated memories of events we barely experienced. Things are real to us to the extent that we can personally immerse ourselves in them— either because “that person on the news is someone like me” or because “I relate to that character’s suffering,” we conclude that what we’re seeing reflects something authentic about reality because it matches our previous experience of reality.

The storytelling animal

So when we look back on our lives, whether we mean to or not, we construct a fictional narrative that is cleaner, more coherent, and more favorable to us than reality. Based on this narrative, we judge our behavior and others, we make significant decisions, we choose whom we will spend our lives with. Our personal narrative is a foundational part of how we view ourselves, and we adapt that narrative as we live and grow, usually subconsciously. Only in the past few years has research come out that indicates the profound psychological effects this personal narrative has on our identity and mental health, and the dramatic changes that can result from consciously shaping these narratives.

Our bonds, culture and communication have always been fundamentally centered on storytelling. Man is the storytelling animal — it’s our main evolutionary adaptation by which we navigate our world, now that we mostly interact by throwing words rather than rocks.

Storytelling is how we build ourselves, how we understand the world and each other, how we believe — against all evidence — that our lives should operate. We assume that life has coherent, identifiable causes, beginnings and ends, heroes and villains, even a message and a moral. It takes a distinct effort to recall that the real world is frustrating precisely because it is almost never narratively satisfying. We read, watch, and play fiction, and we forget each and every time that reality is stranger and more chaotic by far.

Out-of-body experiences

So, what does this have to do with gaming? Well, when we play a game, we’re doing the same thing mentally that we do when we read a novel — we’re committing to spending a lot of hours inside someone else’s head. We’re immersing ourselves in another person’s perspective, and in exactly the way our brains learn best — small portions with breaks in between over a long period of time.

The effort of spending a long time in another person’s head — even a fictional person’s head — trains our empathy and theory of mind, our projected conception of how other people think and feel. It trains us to reach outside of ourselves with openness and curiosity, looking to learn rather than dictate or correct. The capacity to identify with a character in a story assists us in identifying with real people because when we are sufficiently immersed in a fictional narrative, our brain interprets those events as reality.

Remember that the brain has no senses of its own — it sees nothing, hears nothing, gets nothing from the body but raw electrical pulses. From these pulses, the brain constructs your reality. If you connect with a character in a novel, your brain has no idea that that person isn’t real — to your brain, because Frodo has more personal references and investment attached to him than, say, Kim Jong-Un, Frodo is more real than Kim Jong-Un, and what you felt and thought and experienced while immersed in Frodo’s story will be more impactful on your personal narrative and psychology than any actual event that was less personally meaningful. This means that the more you immerse yourself in fiction, the more your real self can and will be changed by those fictional events, exactly as if those events were real. Your brain doesn’t know that they aren’t. They’re just as real as everything else you experience — that is, not especially.

Games have the ability to produce this effect more readily because we are more likely to identify with a character over whom we have control. Virtual reality rigs have been used to produce out-of-body experiences, demonstrating that it takes very little prompting to cause the brain to identify an in-game avatar as the self, reacting instinctively to threats to that avatar as if the physical body were threatened. But we don’t even need VR to demonstrate how deeply and physically we identify with our character onscreen — just ask yourself if you’ve ever leaned all the way over on one buttock, yanking and straining with the controller in your hands as if that would keep Mario from skidding off the edge of the track into the abyss. You’re not dumb, you know how games work. You didn’t actually think that moving your body would help… but for a second, you were so immersed that when you started to fall, your brain’s first reaction wasn’t “quick! Press the button that saves Mario!” It was, “quick! Reach out and save ME!”

It’s easy to immerse in an interactive experience like this, but not all interactive experiences are going to be equally enriching, obviously. Mario Kart won’t teach you a whole lot of empathy — perhaps the opposite, if we’re honest. And not all interactive experiences have to be enriching. The point is that there’s enormous potential for those games that choose to acknowledge and actively use their immersive power to alter us as people, because when we’re truly immersed in a game, our memories of that experience are as integral a part of our personal narrative, as completely “real” to us, as anything else. We don’t learn empathy unless we learn it the hard way, but games give us an easier path than ever before, one that doesn’t require narrative analysis or a literary education in order to engage with it.

Bending spoons

A few people have taken a swing at deliberate brain-hacking with games already. I don’t want to give the impression that this is an unexplored field, but the trouble is, the people making games to study and improve your brain aren’t… really… talking to the people making games to sell for money and play for fun. As a result, the neuroscience people… they don’t make very good games. That’s just not their skillset, and that’s very unfortunate, because the potential is inherent to the medium.

If you had $150 to burn in 2005, you could have picked up a game called Journey to Wild Divine, which came with a fingertip biofeedback monitor. The idea was to navigate through a series of environments and simple object-manipulation puzzles by controlling your internal rhythms — in this case, heart rate variability and skin conductance — and the game purported to teach stress-management and meditation skills that would help.

I did not have $150, or even fifteen, in 2005, so I can’t say whether Wild Divine was fun or functional. But it was the first commercial attempt at bringing home what is now called neurofeedback. There hasn’t been another mass-market game based on that technology that I’ve seen, but these days they consider neurofeedback “individual therapy” for insurance purposes, and recommend it for treatment of PTSD, ADHD, and other executive function and stress-related issues. Twice a week I go in, let the nice lady put electrodes on my head, and spend an hour bending spoons with my brain.

I’ve learned so much from the experience, and it’s addressed deep-seated issues that therapy and medication didn’t touch, but every time I go in, I can only think, “This would have looked bad and played worse on the goddamned original PlayStation. Did you guys know that we’ve gotten just a bit better at making games since then?” It’s monumentally frustrating, because the technology to use games to deliberately modify our brains exists. The interactive medium that does this best, with the least friction, the most enjoyment, and thus the easiest uptake for our energy-conserving brains? It exists. But unless it can be shown to be a guaranteed blockbuster hit with the coveted Straight White Billionaire Cosplayer demographic, the games industry has absolutely zero incentive to do anything but re-release last year’s hits, like a giant cow horking up its cud for another squishy, tasteless mouthful.

Character creator

It’s good to remember the inherent faultiness in our perception and processing when we’re arguing with people who have wildly different worldviews, sure, but the more interesting question is… how could we use this? If the intellectual knowledge that something is fiction doesn’t diminish its effect on us— if we can be traumatized by fictional experiences even when we are the architect creating those experiences — how could we use this power to consciously shape our psyche? And how might our current games be shaping us subconsciously, without the explicit intention of the designer or the permission of the user?

We must start to ask, “How can entertainment media affect our worldview?” not hysterically and censoriously, as previous generations of parents ascribed their parenting failures to “violent video games”. Previous generations have asked these hard questions explicitly and exclusively to shut down discussion and invention in a new field they found intimidating. We have to be smarter and more mature than that when we look at the things we love. We must start to ask how our parents’ worldviews might have been shaped by the books they read, and how our children’s might be shaped by the books they aren’t reading. We must examine how twenty years of clicking on heads to make them explode and being called “hero” for it might be altering our own morals, our self-perception, our estimations of our own abilities.

We must honestly reckon with the fact that our lives are a perpetual ret-con — not to be ashamed of it, as if it invalidates our identities, but to know that our brains are all alike in this way, and if we accept that, we could, like… do something with it?

Imagine how games could be used to convey experiences that truly change us, experiences that are impossible or unethical to subject a human to, but which might help us understand people who are suffering in our world right now. Our games agonize over bush-league moral questions like, “Would you like to send a kitten to college, or murder a baby?” so that they don’t have to engage with real moral questions that meaningfully affect our lives, like “How does it feel to be despised on sight because of your skin color? How does it feel to have those angry, judgmental eyes turned on you, feel yourself pushed back from doors and spat on, your life threatened, because of something that the character creator wouldn’t let you change?”

The “experience racism firsthand” game might not be super fun, but supposedly we’re on board with the idea that games can be more than just fun. Depression Quest wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had in a game, but it was more compassionate and truthful to my own experiences of depression than anything I’ve ever played. It made me feel seen, and it made depression viscerally comprehensible to those without it in a way that a less-interactive experience could not have done. How can we use games to allow us immersive, honest insights into the lives of others, in a way that works deeper into our personal narrative and psychology than static media ever will?

We have the ability to change our perspectives, our very selves, by means of our media choices, but only if we make better media choices and better media. Only by making more conscious, thoughtful entertainment, entertainment that acknowledges its own power to shape both the author and audience, can we take hold of that power to make meaningful changes to ourselves and our society. That’s the deal we learned as kids, right? You can play with the cool toy when you’re ready to take responsibility for whatever you break with it.