what’s the opposite of play?
Your first instinct is probably to say: “work.” But there’s another,
better answer to the same question that could be the key to developing
powerful new treatments in the field of mental health.
The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.
This idea was first offered up by Brian Sutton-Smith, a noted psychologist of play who died earlier this year.
Sutton-Smith became well known in the 1950s and ’60s for studying
children and adults at play. He observed that most people tend to
experience stronger self-confidence, increased physical energy, and
powerful positive emotions, like curiosity and excitement, during play.
This is a perfect contrast to depression. People who are clinically
depressed lack the physical energy to engage with ordinary everyday
tasks. They’re overwhelmingly pessimistic, particularly about their own
capabilities. And they experience a distinct absence of positive
emotion.
Sutton-Smith did most of his research long before the technological
advances that allow scientists today to scan brains for evidence of
blood flow patterns related to mental illness and well-being. And he
worked long before the explosion of video gaming—according to a
meta-analysis I performed, more than 1.23 billion people play globally, including 155 million people in the United States.
But thanks to a rapidly growing body of scientific research, we now
know that his intuition that “the opposite of play is depression” is a
perfectly apt description at a neurological level of what’s going on with these 1.23 billion video gamers.
In the past few years, multiple fMRI studies, including a seminal one conducted at Stanford University,
have peered into the brains of gamers. Their results show that when we
play video games, two regions of the brain are continually
hyperstimulated: the region most associated with motivation and
goal-orientation (often referred to as “the reward pathways”) and the
region most associated with learning and memory (the hippocampus). When
you think about the experience of playing a video game, it makes perfect
sense that these two regions of the brain would be hyperactivated. When
we play games, we’re immediately and constantly focused on a goal.
Whether it’s to solve a puzzle, find hidden objects, reach a finish
line, or score more points than other players, the goal focuses our
attention and creates a sense of motivation and determination. As we
anticipate our potential success, our reward pathways light up.
Meanwhile, all video games—not just “educational” games—are designed
to be learning experiences. Level 1 of any game is easy, because players
are usually not very good at a new game the first time they try it.
Immediately, the learning process kicks in, as they figure out the
rules, test different strategies, and improve their skills. Crucially,
as players succeed and advance in any video game, it gets harder, which
requires players to continue to learn and improve for as long as they’re
playing. This experience of consistently getting better at something is
perhaps the signature pleasure of all video games. When there is
nothing else to learn, and no way to keep improving, we usually stop
playing. This is why adults don’t play tic-tac-toe! But as long as the
game requires us to improve, our hippocampus will be engaged.
If you’ve ever wondered how you—or a loved one—can fail 20 times in a row at an Angry Birds or Candy Crush Saga level and yet still be enthusiastic and determined to try just one more time,
this distinct neurological activation pattern is the reason why. To
nonplayers, this tendency to keep trying again and again to finish a
game level can seem obsessive and irrational. But it’s exactly the
resilient behavior you would expect from someone whose brain has been
primed both to stay focused on her goal and to gain confidence in her
ability to learn and get better.
Now here’s where it gets really interesting to researchers like me
who are interested in the connection between gameplay and depression:
These two regions of the brain, the reward pathways and the hippocampus,
are the same two regions that get chronically understimulated, and that even shrink over time, when we’re clinically depressed.
In other words: Video game play is literally the neurological opposite of depression.
When the reward pathways are underactivated, we can’t anticipate
success. As a result, we feel pessimistic and lack the motivation to
do—well, anything. And a lack of blood flow to, or even shrinking gray
matter in, the hippocampus is associated with difficulty learning new
skills or developing effective coping strategies—which makes it all the
harder to get better at anything, let alone from depression.
No wonder several major video game studies
have showed a correlation between playing more than 20 or 30 hours a
week (depending on the study) and depression! Some researchers
originally interpreted this as evidence that video games can cause
depression. But today, a more common interpretation among the
researchers that I compare notes with is that many depressed players are
actually attempting to self-medicate with games. They experience a
dramatic sense of relief from their symptoms while playing, and
therefore, the more depressed they feel, the more they play.
Self-medicating with games can be a dangerous path to go down. If you
play games with an “escapist” mindset—that is, to ignore your problems,
to block unpleasant emotions, or to avoid confronting stressful
situations—you’re more likely to suffer some of the negative effects
that many studies have found associated with playing games, like
anxiety, depression, or social isolation. That’s because the more
depressed you feel or the more stressful your life gets, the more you
play games—and the less time and effort you put into action that could
help solve your real-life problems. Your problems therefore get worse,
so you spend more time gaming to escape them. It’s a vicious cycle.
If you know someone who is addicted to games, they are almost certainly
playing with an escapist mindset. In fact, researchers have found that “the use of games to escape daily life” is the No. 1 factor that predicts excessive or pathological game play.