Culture Clash Oct09

(October 2009)

Welcome to the Reward Center
The campaign against happiness
By Matthew Sakey

GamePolitics notes a chain of schools for troubled teens now offer treatment for game addiction in addition to the usual suspects of fat kids, badly behaved kids, junkie kids, sad kids, crazy kids, and unaccountably angry kids. Their justification? We've heard it a million times:

"Video/online games stimulate the brain's 'reward centers' which gives the same high drug addicts feel," intones school physician Charles Lee.

Wait a minute. Something is stimulating the brain's reward centers? Oh noes! Zounds! Woe! The humanity! This must be stopped, stopped at once! We do not, no sir, approve of stimulating reward centers around here. Reward centers, and the stimulation thereof, should be strictly monitored, controlled, and - when possible - eliminated altogether.

When exactly did we transition from opposing things because they are harmful to opposing anything that stimulates the brain's reward centers? Do these self-flagellators want to banish all joy and plunge the world into an eternal darkness of gloom, where the only thing that's rewarded is getting rid of anything that's rewarding? Because that's what it sounds like.

Let me explain the brain to you. It's basically a ball of… well, I can't explain the brain to you because I know nothing about it, but I do know that like any efficient machine, it's generally organized into discrete sections that perform certain responsibilities. One of them, apparently, is in charge of rewards. It probably has a medical-sounding Latin name. Whenever you do something worthy of getting a reward, this center revs up and squirts out a little bit of Happy, which you are then free to enjoy.

But you see the insidiousness of their argument. There's nothing wrong with being happy, or finding something rewarding, just as there's nothing wrong with playing a game. Having your brain's reward center stimulated is perfectly okay. Stimulate like bunnies; stimulate until the cows come home. We spend most of our lives doing things we have to do in order to enjoy a fraction of our time doing things we want to do, things that are rewarding. How is that dangerous? It only becomes troublesome when addiction sets in, and then only in the cases where it's illegal or harmful to you or those around you. Addiction is not illegal; that's something that people often lose sight of in this debate. But more importantly, the whole "reward center stimulation" refrain isn't about addiction, it's about the reward.

We often hear opponents of gaming equate the practice with drugs by darkly arguing that the same reward center gets poked. It sounds innocuous, but it's not: because they aren't saying that games are dangerous, they're saying that happiness is. Slowly and subtly, a vocal minority of people, often with very different agendas but who all seem to share a profound opposition to pleasure in all forms, have co-opted the messages of more well-meaning groups, like those who fight against drug addiction, and bent them to their will. Gaming just got lumped in on account of the reward center thing. It's the same with sex. The people who want to ban a cervical cancer vaccine because of the outrageously laughable conviction that it'll cause young people to have more sex. Young people are going to have sex whether you want them to or not. But these individuals don't actually oppose the vaccine, or cancer, or the cervix, they oppose sex, because sex causes pleasure, and they have no truck with pleasure. Guess what? Sex also stimulates that same reward center.

Now, overstimulation of the reward center can lead to an obsession with continuing that stimulation. In some cases, with some stimulants - not all - that can lead to addiction. But addiction is loosely defined; in and of itself it is only harmful when it subtracts from the subject's life, to the point that other pursuits and needs are overshadowed. There is, after all, a reason that we don't have non-autonomic control of that region, and doing anything to the exclusion of other things can be harmful. But still, the apples-to-oranges comparison of gaming to drug use doesn't compute.

Any gamer knows that games don't stimulate the reward center of the brain in the same way as drugs at all. Play a game and at most you'll enjoy yourself; a far cry from shooting up. Only a complete fool would say that playing a game creates the same sensation as being loaded, despite the fact that the same section of the brain is lighting up. And if the experiential proof that playing games and doing drugs don't feel remotely the same isn't enough, play Demon's Souls for a few hours. Then compare the respective stimulation of your reward center versus your incoherent with rage center. Play Korsakovia and compare the stimulation of reward center and beside yourself with terror center. And those are great games, so really the reward center should be running red hot.

It's very troubling to me when people compare the organic pleasure derived from games with the artificial pleasure derived from drugs or addiction. It unfairly singles games out - hanging with friends and playing team sports also stimulate that reward center; no one claims kids are addicted to them - and it intentionally misleads. It plays into the hands of people who oppose pleasure, people who want everyone to be as dour and miserable as they are; it isn't a tool used by genuinely concerned individuals who just want to help others find balance in their lives.

Happiness, and the pursuit of it, is really a person's own business, even when that person is below the age of majority. Yes, when the pursuit of happiness turns into a harmful addiction, treatment should be an option. But only then. I don't know whether it's religious guilt, sexual frustration, or simple meanspiritedness that drives these people to squelch the pleasure caused by things they don't like while ignoring anything else, but it makes me sad. For them. Because more and more it seems that they'll only find happiness when they've accomplished the dubious goal of creating a world that has none.