Losing yourself in virtual worlds can have good as well as negative effects

As a teenager, Pete Etchells lost his father to motor neuron disease, and often, when the anniversary of his death rolled around, he found solace in playing video games, like hunting for the elusive Time Lost Proto-Drake in World of Warcraft. Gaming started as an escape, but over time, he found those virtual worlds helped him grapple with the difficult questions of human mortality and death. He even recreated a log cabin in Minecraft, drawing on memories of where he’d stayed at Yosemite on vacation with his father.

Now a psychologist at Bath Spa University in England but still an avid gamer, Etchells specializes in understanding the behavioral effects—both positive and negative—of video games. He chose that focus after going on an alcohol-fueled pub rant as a graduate student, annoyed by a fear-mongering newspaper headline claiming that computer games cause dementia in children. He knew from personal experience how gaming had helped him process his grief, and his research has helped bring concrete evidence to bear on the lingering debate about whether video games are bad for you.

Etchells explores all this and more in his first book, Lost in a Good Game—part personal memoir, part cultural history, part popular science. Ars sat down with Etchells to learn more about how gaming can be a force for good, instead of rotting our collective brains.

Ars: Your book is being touted as a vigorous defense of video games, after years of pearl-clutching media coverage about the presumed dangers of gaming, particularly on young people—fostering addiction, depression, violent aggression, for instance. Isn’t gaming, just like any technological innovation, a double-edged sword? It’s how you use the tool that imparts a positive or negative effect.

Etchells: A lot of people seem to think that I’m trying to act as an apologist for video games, [dismissing] all these scary things because I like playing video games. And it’s not that at all. There is an area of psychological research that tries to look at the positive effects. If you play video games, do they improve your reaction times, or do they make you better at decision-making? If you play loads of car simulators, are you a better driver?  Are you more creative? If you believe the positive effects, then you’ve got to accept that the negative effects are there as well. My feeling is that video games might have a slight effect on us, either good or bad, but they’re not massive effects, and they’re not really worth worrying about either way.

Ars: What are some examples of games designed to promote positive effects?

Etchells: There was a game that came out a few years ago called Re-Mission, a third-person perspective game, where you get shrunk down and go inside somebody’s body, and you’re tasked with fighting off cancer. It’s specifically designed for adolescents who are going through chemotherapy. There’s a big problem with that group in terms of understanding what’s going on and why they have to go through various treatment regimens. So this game was designed to explain all of that in a relatively safe environment. It’s one of the few video games where someone’s actually done a randomized control trial on it, and they found that the kids who were given this game to play showed better adherence to treatment regimens.

Ars: In the book you talk about another third-person perspective game called Last Day of June, designed to help people process grief. A couple, Carl and June, are in a car accident that kills June and leaves Carl crippled and wheelchair bound. But he is able to relive their past memories whenever he touches one of the paintings she left behind.

Etchells: I don’t want to spoil the story for people, because there are twists in it, but it absolutely broke me when I played it. There’s also a new game called Apart of Me, similar to RE:Mission, in that it’s directed at younger children who’ve lost a parent. It’s a way to understand what’s going on and explore their grief in a relatively safe space. And there’s a game [that just came out], by Electronic Arts, called Sea of Solitude. The underlying theme for that is coping with depression.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Credit: YouTube/IGN

There’s also a game called Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice that came out [in 2017/2018]. It’s set in the Viking era, and the main character, Senua, suffers from psychosis. There’s tons of games where you have main characters that have schizophrenia, or some sort of psychopathy, and they’re really badly done. It’s all the classic negative, cliché tropes about mental health—horror games set in mental health asylums. But Hellblade was partly funded by the Wellcome Trust. They matched up the developers with researchers and psychiatrists with expertise in psychosis, so that they could accurately portray what it’s like to have a psychotic episode.

The researchers have gotten emails from people who’ve played it, who have psychosis, thanking them: “It’s the first time I’ve been able to show somebody else a game and say, ‘Look, this is what it’s like for me, sometimes. This is what happens when I have episodes.’” I think mental health issues lend themselves really well to these sorts of games, because it’s something that a lot of people can relate to. Intrinsically, it will have a human element to the story, and that makes it easier to bring an interesting narrative to the game.

Ars: Gamification has become something of a buzzword in certain academic circles. Is that what we’re talking about here?

Etchells: I really dislike the term gamification. To me, gamification is a scientist who wants to get a lot of data about something and [decides to] turn a lab experiment into a game. The simplest way to do that is to create a game with levels, or give somebody points for every trial they go through. Or there are citizen science projects, where you’re using people as computers to crunch data for you, because people are really good at pattern matching. You play some of these games, and they’re terrible. They’re so boring. Games like Hellblade and Sea of Solitude are games first and foremost. They’re designed to be an entertainment experience, with the stuff around mental health as an added extra. That side of things needs to be led by game developers, because they know how to make experiences that draw people in and make people want to come back to those games.

Ars: Many years ago, there was a famous virtual outbreak in World of Warcraft, dubbed the Corrupted Blood incident. It was a disaster for the game, but studying what happened and how different players responded has actually helped epidemiologists interested in better understanding how diseases spread. 

Etchells: You just reminded me that I meant to write about it in the book and I completely forgot. The Corrupted Blood incident is a really good example of where things need to go in order for us to improve this relationship between game developers and scientists. There were a couple of epidemiology papers that came out, where they mapped what happened in the game and said “Look, this is basically what happens when there is a real-life epidemic. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could tap into these games more?” You could get point-by-point data on where players move, every second, who they interact with—really fine-grain data, to try and improve models of how disease spreads. It was really exciting, and then that was it. There was nothing else after that.

Ars: Is there an optimal way to use that data for research that you’d like to see?

Etchells: The Corrupted Blood incident happened by accident, and scientists were coming in afterwards saying, “Can we look at what happened here?” What would be nice, is [to] say to a developer like Blizzard, “Look here’s proof of principal, with this thing that happened, we know that we can get some amazing data. Can we build some quests into World of Warcraft, where we can collect specific data? We’re not collecting everything that people do in the game, it’s just if they play these certain quests, then we end up collecting data from that, and that will help us answer this research question.” We could build in things like informed consent before the event actually happens.

I think that’s where a real power of video games could lie, but at the moment, it’s nearly impossible to do. I’m sure game companies are doing this in-house. Riot Games have been doing this for a long time. They have an entire behavioral psychology team doing research on, for example, if you tweak the color of a warning message in games, does it make people behave less aggressively? But the idea of generating answers to interesting research questions is at odds with the fact that, inherently, you would have to release corporate data. You’d have to open up these games, and then competitors can see what you’re doing, and they can nick that stuff for free. It’s a problem for all sorts of collaborative industry research.

The 2005 Corrupted Blood incident in World of Warcraft attracted the interest of epidemiologists, who hoped to use the data to improve their models for how diseases spread.

Credit: YouTube/Player Base

Ars: Video games have been around for several decades now, making them a unique part of our cultural history. Your book explores the equally unique challenge of preserving vintage games for posterity. 

Etchells: The question is, how do you present the past to people in a meaningful way? With video games, the most obvious thing you can do is stick them in a museum, put them behind a glass panel, and in 100 years’ time, [unveil] a video games exhibit. This is what a Nintendo 64 looked like, or a Nintendo Switch. You can look at it for a second and then you move on. That’s a really boring experience, because these things were designed to be played. So, the next level is to have copies of these things that people can actually play. Power Up Gaming does this every year—they have games consoles from the 1970’s to the present, and kids can play whatever they want. But if you take somebody who’s grown up only ever knowing Xbox or PlayStation, and you give them a ZX Spectrum, they just don’t get it at all.

I was watching somebody load up a game on an older console from a cassette; it takes five, maybe 10 minutes for it to load. And then you get this blocky, pixellated game. Plus, games were really hard back in the ’70s and ’80s. Iain Simons, director of the National Videogame Arcade, [told me] they have kids who start playing the original Donkey Kong and absolutely hate it, because it’s a really hard game and very few people get past the first level. It was designed for that because there was limited memory. You couldn’t have that many levels, so every level that does exist is really hard. That’s not the kind of video game experience that we’ve got nowadays. When you throw somebody into that, without any context, they hate it and think it’s rubbish.

Ars: Is there a solution to this conundrum?

Etchells: James Newman, who is a video game historian, has some neat ideas on how to explain to people what the original Super Mario Bros. game was like [to] somebody who’s never known anything other than Xbox One and PS4’s. You can turn it into a much more interactive multi-dimensional experience. Maybe give them an original NES controller to use, so that they’ve got something tactile to connect to the game with, but they can use that, not just to play the game, but to navigate around an environment that explains the culture that was around that game at the time.

That’s been done with Super Mario, where you’ve got this big interactive screen that shows you one level of Super Mario Bros. You can zoom in and out of different bits of it, and there’s videos that are attached that explain how these games were developed, how people actually played those games at the time, and how that sort of game play evolved. Hopefully, you can get a little richer experience if you then get a chance to play the game afterwards.