Psychology: January 2008 Archive Page

Lauren Collins (The New Yorker)

Teen-age identities mutate so quickly online, and can be masked so easily, that by the morning after Megan was pronounced dead Josh Evans had vanished from MySpace. It wasn't until a month after her death that a neighbor named Michele Mulford told the Meiers that Curt and Lori Drew, who lived four houses down, had created "Josh" in concert with their thirteen-year-old daughter, a longtime friend of Megan's. (An eighteen-year-old girl who worked for the Drews was also involved.) The two thirteen-year-olds had recently quarrelled. Mulford's own daughter, also thirteen, had been given the password to the account, and had sent at least one unkind message to Megan in Josh's name. Megan had accompanied the Drews on several vacations, and they knew that she was taking medication. For nearly a year, on the advice of the police, the Meiers had kept quiet about the Drews' involvement in Megan's death.

Leigh Alexander tries to quit gaming for a week.  How long does she last?

What I did learn - and this was the primary aim - was just a little bit more about why I play, and what gaming means to me, does for me. I thought that without games, the world might open up just a little; that I'd divert that gaming energy into learning new things, visiting new places, developing more relationships. But, even given only a few days to experiment, I realized I felt then, at least for that moment, content with the size of my world and the people in it as they are.

On the other hand, the absence of games left a distinct sense of feeling stranded, as if bridges I had made from my imagination into worlds made by others had been closed for repairs. I didn't have a bad couple of days; more ordinary than I would have expected, and neither more nor less fulfilling.

But it did feel like my world was a bit smaller; there were emotions, impulses and dreams that had nowhere to travel to, that languished amid the everyday. It's true that I learned perhaps gaming has cultivated in me a lack of long-term patience, a need for more regular stimulation, a poorer attention span. It's also very possible that I zone out with games to avoid dealing directly with things that cause me frustration or sadness. But I'm now certain there is a singular fashion in which games engage both mind and emotion - not only for the purpose of play, but for personal reasons both creative and therapeutic - that no other form of media approaches. It's a quality unique to gaming, it speaks to the power and responsibility game developers have assumed, and it makes sense out of the intense, often perplexing personalization we feel toward the games they make.

In the passage I quoted above she said her days without games were no less fulfilling than her days with games, but the crisis in her experiment comes when she is lying in bed, feeling sick, and cannot think of anything to do in order to make her happy again, other than give up her pledge to take a break from gaming. (She also apparently hangs around with gamers, watching them play.)

I'm lying sick on the couch in the basement (which is where my wife banishes me when I'm ill).  Playing a game won't make me happy. Regaining enough mental capacity so I can evaluate the homework students submitted Friday -- THAT will make me happy. Feeling well enough that I'm willing to crawl out of bed to find out which child is dragging something heavy across the kitchen floor (and why) -- THAT wouldn't exactly make me happy, but it would make me less anxious.

Every so often I wish I had access to the unbroken swaths of time -- 12, 16, 20 hours at a time -- when I could do whatever the heck I wanted. But then I read this article and I realize how fortunate I am to have a rich life (with the attendant responsibilities) that mean my life still has meaning even though I have to go through long game-less dry spells (and can only sip at the casual games, rather than delve into RPGs or figure out how the heck to get out of the canal where I've been stuck in Half-Life 2 since June 2005).

It's always hard for the kids to make the transition to "Daddy is working" when, from their perspective, it looks like I'm just tapping away at my computer, as I often do in my spare time.

When my wife interrupted me to ask me to get something down from a high shelf, I had just learned that I had accidentally deleted the directory that contained the entire database for the Seton Hill weblogs, as well as the last 7 or so years of this weblog.

I knew that my ISP backs up my whole site weekly, and I knew that I had added a nightly backup for those crucial files, but I knew that I'd have to put in a support ticket and I knew I'd lost the work I'd done since the last backup.  I have an RSS feed that sends me all the comments that get entered into any of the blogs, and I can recover any missing new blog entries from the HTML pages generated by the database.  I've been through this before, though not as a result of my own stupidity.

I was a bit cranky, but I got the thing from the shelf. Even though I knew I was poised for a couple of hours of copy-and-paste tedium, as I recreated a course website from the HTML files generated by the database, something penetrated my brain when my wife offered a very nice "thank you."

My wife is of the "I shouldn't-have-to-say-it-because-it-should-be-obvious" school of thought. That generally goes for saying "please" and "I'm sorry," too.

But a few days ago, when the kids were clamoring for attention and she was curled up in bed with the lights off, she said something like, "Your kids are so excited to be able to play with you."

So it seemed, for a moment, that maybe my wife was making a particular effort. I asked her whether maybe she had made a new year's resolution to be extra nice to me.

She had an instant reply. "No, I am not going to spend the year sucking up to you. That's not my idea of a new year's resolution. You can put that in your blog."

Oh, well. It was a nice thought there.

Jay Dixit, in Psychology Today, surveys research that considers dreams to be the brain's training grounds for real-world emergencies.

The idea that dreams are a dojo for perfecting waking activities fits well with what is already known about practice. Mental rehearsal through visualization improves skills, enhances learning, and changes the brain, polishing performance in almost any domain, from sports to piano playing.

The single most pervasive theme in dreaming is that of being chased or attacked. Just as athletes in training repeat parts of their performance, we may, in our nightmares, be attacked and chased over and over again, not to solve a particular problem but to actually practice efficient escape behavior.

Saber-toothed tigers no longer stalk our villages, but Stone Age themes still rule our dreams. "Nowadays, the evolutionary footprint is clearest in the dreams of children, who often dream about being chased by monsters, much the same way we were once chased by predators," says Revonsuo. As life has evolved, so have the threats we rehearse. "You insert a modern danger into that ancestral key and get a bizarre combination," says Revonsuo. "We dream of being chased, shot, or robbed, getting into traffic accidents, a burglar in our house, or perhaps smaller mishaps such as losing our wallets--and that prepares us for our waking life."