It's funny, I can tell how in control of my life by gauging how much I play games. When I start obsessing about playing games (I like playing them, but when I feel I have to play them to escape), I know something needs to change in my life. I'm saying it's that way for everyone, but it really is a great tool for stress relief for some.
I guess it's a form of mindfulness, in a way.
I used to game really heavily during a pretty terrible period (divorce + grad school) in an attempt to cope. Of course it actually just made things worse overall while distracting my brain to make it seem temporarily better, it diverted a lot of the energy I might have used towards engaging and fixing the problems.
When I game severely (FPS shooters are my crack) I can get focused for a dozen hours at a time. My body almost shuts down, I get into a trancelike state and my metabolism recedes. I forget to eat, I don't get tired. When I finally do sleep I will wake up the next day and actually have a headache until I play again for a little while. It was that kind of physical withdrawal that made me realize long ago how pernicious it was, at least for my particular physiology and brain. Now I will only play games like that in a social setting, never alone lest I fall back into that spell.
One time in grad school I stayed up all night gaming and I slept through my alarm. I missed an exam. That I was proctoring. I went straight to a pawn shop and sold my console when I realized what I was doing to myself.
Sound like dopamine at play!
You are mindful and react on direct stimulus - while gaming, you do not think on future or past, you are immersed in your actual activity - it IS mindfulness.
BUT it does not improve mindfulness - it is easy to be mindful at interesting times - that's normal, but not so when nothing interesting is around, and you are just left alone with your own thoughts or problems. Thats what various mindfulness practices trying to improve - to be mindful in common "boring" or bad situations too.
And like for any improvements you usually have to make some effort - not just do something when it is natural.
I disagree. Reacting is the polar opposite of what mindfulness is about. Mindfulness is about, among other things, responding appropriately to what is happening, not reacting.
What you're describing, the state people get in when playing computer games, is a state of hyper-vigilance. Acute-awareness of what's directly in front of you induced by a simulated battle.
My exposure to gaming has been almost entirely seeing other people play FPSs.
Thinking about it, the most recent game I played was http://play.quantumgame.io/ which is none of those things I characterised games as.
Thanks for calling me out.
Exploration is harder -- I can't think of any off the top of my head that have absolutely no combat component. However, that's pretty much how I play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I've barely been engaging in the combat aspect of it, choosing mostly to just roam and explore and climb and enjoy the view.
No it's not - it's called "flow", a state where you lose your reflective self-consciousness (i.e. the core of mindfulness).
But maybe you mean something more sophisticated?
- ego
- loosing track of time
- loosing track of physical reality, such as bodily sensations
- reacting
- desiring an outcome
- judging
Not all of them, and not for all video games. But any of those characteristic seems to be something quite antagonist with mindfulness.
Now somebody that is very focused, very selfless and equanimous in a competitive game will have something close to meditation. But first they are rare, and secondly the very existence of the game, being virtual and... a game, seems to be orthogonal the mindful state state.
I'm not a competitive player though, and:
- when I play dota I react A LOT.
- when I'm coding or watching a movie, I completely forget reality.
It contrast a lot with my meditation practice. Maybe some people are better at dealing with screens that I am.
It's interesting how my desire to game has almost entirely disappeared since I left there and started a new company. I'm sitting here building deep learning rigs with fat GPUs, I could just add another partition running Windows and have a killer system for Overwatch . . . but nah, I'm having too much fun with Tensorflow to care.
526/1816 [=======>......................] - ETA: 1123s - loss: 0.2013 - acc: 0.9386 - val_loss: 0.3690 - val_acc: 0.9122
As a variation on this idea... I have a job now where I do have control over some stuff that matters to me (and it definitely helps!) But I still like to take a video game break once or twice a day.
My game of choice is a Risk-clone on my phone. It's nice because it moderately cognitively challengeing, offers some variety with different maps, and the AI is quite mediocre -- which means I usually win. Games generally take 5-10 minutes and winning I notice gives me a little lift (even though I know my opponents are at an inherent disadvantage). So I've concluded overall it's a plus for my mental health.
Of course, every once in a while I do lose, which makes me a little grumpy. In that case, I'll usually just play another game straight away and win.
I find the same with a certain chess program on my phone where I find running the lowest AI quite nice for 5 minutes and I have a couple thousand games versus it. I know I could do something more challenging, but there's something to be said for simple puzzles to be solved almost in a ritual way for comfort and stability
That said, it still was too much time invested into stuff that isn't improving my life. Even the stuff improving thinking fast is training the intuition for wrong situations. I'd be better off doing part-time or contract work involving similar skills. Probably...