Murphy approaches video gaming as a sports psychologist, with 30 years of experience in that field. The American Psychological Association’s annual convention this month already discussed research showing the benefits video games deliver in learning and problem solving. Also at the convention, Murphy gave a presentation advocating for the study of competitive and cooperative behavior in gamers.

I had called him out of curiosity about my own approach to video games, whether it was shared in great numbers by others, and what that may say about the gaming community. We ended up talking more about competitive behavior and performance psychology, how it can help define gamers, and be deepened by studying them.

Video games are not treated as seriously in studies as they should be, Murphy argues. He considers that gamers’ behavior can be studied in the same context as participatory athletics, and that researchers might find that online play can deliver the same benefits. Colleagues elsewhere think that the lessons taught by online cooperation and competition could deliver similar payouts in assertion and self-esteem, and are worth a serious look.

“The gamer generation tends to be less risk averse and more willing to try things, even in the face of overfailure,” said Nicholas Yee, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, whose Daedalus Project studies behavior in MMORPG players. “It’s not the main focus of the field, yet, but there is a little data we can extrapolate from it.”

In his presentation at the APA’s meeting, Murphy laid out the case for the study of video game behavior by sports and performance psychologists. He pointed out that video game play rivals youth sports as the social competition venue for young people. Video games also offer advantages in that lab study can capture real-time behavior and decisions in ways that studying athletes can’t. There are also extremely large populations that are easy to find (such as World of WarCraft’s 8 million gamers). Finally, it’s another way to test sports psychology’s theories in a new area of behavior.

Broadly speaking, sports psychology has identified two orientations we all have toward competition and goal-setting. “One is ego orientation: You want to beat others,” Murphy said. “The other is task orientation: I want to get better, I want to learn the skills and improve them.” It’s not an either-or proposition, even though it showed up that way in my behavior with NCAA ‘09. Among gamers, you would probably find these four types:

• High ego, high task: Extremely committed to skill development and want to be recognized as winners. Highly competitive.

• Low ego, high task: Strong team players in cooperative games and environments, and motivated to complete single-player titles.

• High ego, low task: Strong desire to be a winner, but not that invested in developing the skills necessary. In other words, rarely reads the instruction manual.

• Low ego, low task: Participates in a particular game as primarily a social activity among friends, doesn’t want to be left out.

It might surprise you that high ego, high task is the largest group among gamers, according to Murphy. All other groups were equally distributed. That, taken with Yee’s point that gamers are less risk averse, paints a more positive picture of gamers than perpetuated by cultural stereotypes, that of the antisocial loner who prefers virtual interactions in the comfort of his parents’ basement.

As a man who grew up in the analog 1980s, gaming came nowhere near the kind of legitimacy that physical athletic pursuits had for setting goals or achieving them, or certifying you as a well rounded person. But properly researched, it’s possible that it could be seen in that light.

Murphy drew this analogy: Participation on athletic teams is believed to offer lessons of leadership or problem solving elsewhere, and experiences with video games can help gamers set up structured expectations and results in real world pursuits.

“The young, college-bound population that have played lots of different types of video games, it may have caused them to develop some sort of general skill sets to figure out the lay of the land in a complex, challenging environment,” Murphy said. “Because they’ve done that in games, they’re good at seeing what is the goal, and how do you win at the game?”

The game might be one’s high school or college career. “If the game is to get a high GPA, so, how do you do that? What are the strategies? It was an eerie conversation to have,” Murphy said, for gamers seemed able to zero in on the bottom line result, on the expectation that certain choices or conditions would objectively increase one’s progression toward that goal. Clearly, that kind of refined approach can have its benefits in life after school.

It’s not the only way a game can be framed in terms of the real world. Yee’s surveys have shown a relationship between gamers and the avatars they choose — and also the roles within an MMO guild they accept. “People create avatars that idealize or express who they are, and oftentimes they choose characters whose features are exaggerated., So it has a kind of multiplication effect, your avatar has more of those traits that you want, and then some of those effects persist outside the game environment.”

For example, someone creates an avatar that is physically taller or more imposing. Studies have shown that taller persons exhibit more confidence and show more assertive negotiations. Through his research, Yee has observed some carryover to those who choose these kinds of avatars in MMOs, Yee said, less so in real life than in online relationships. Where participating in a guild, for some. might be a crutch alternative to physical interactions with friends, it can also offer new experiences.

“People will say, ‘I never thought of myself as a leader in life, and then they become a guild leader, and they got something out of that,” Yee said. But, “It’s really dependent on what a player brings to a game.”

We've all felt a bit stressed when playing a video game - whether its the tension of creeping around a Doom map that you know contains a Cyberdemon or just the feeling of panic as the Tetris blocks creep inexorably up the screen - if you game you know that it can take a real mental toll.

Of course, there is a big difference between BFGing some demons and guiding an actual missile that you know will kill actual human beings. Could it be that the reverse is true & that the video game nature of drone piloting gives a sense of distance that insulates people from killing?

As an aside, current recruitment ads for the British Army show someone piloting a recon aircraft using an Xbox 360 controller. Make of that what you will.

Ghosts in the Machine [Slate]

Block, a psychiatrist in Portland, Ore., recently wrote an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry arguing that Internet Addiction should become a new diagnostic term.

It's interesting to read his thoughts and them to compare it to the things being said by the psychiatrists I interviewed back in 1999 when I wrote a story about how researchers think that Internet and Sex addiction are very similar. Back then a David Greenfield, director for the Center of Internet Studies, told me that the Internet was addictive and that that particular form of addiction was nearing a national epidemic... yet somehow we survived.

Unlike the Globe's story, my 1999 story has at least one well-known psychology researcher arguing that obsessive use of the internet isn't really about addiction, but curiosity of a new technology.

Block, who has some genuinely interesting ideas, also talks about the tie between school shooters and compulsive computer use, making sure not to say that computers cause violence.

BLOCK: With these shooters, their last act was to turn against their own computers. As a psychiatrist, I think that's relevant.

'Craft Addicts: Do online games trigger a new psychiatric disorder? [Boston Globe]

I positively adored the semi-juvenile, vaguely temperamental mermaid who'd been living in the bathtub of a nerdy scientist. After receiving a letter in a bottle from her mother under the sea, she returned there, but I visited her once a week at midnight on the shoreline. It was so romantic, I bucked up and gave her the Blue Feather that signified a proposal.

But she's a mermaid. She needs water. I found myself, after our wedding ceremony, with a very sweet little wife who lives, round the clock, in the duck pond outside my house ...

Even worse, after realizing the mermaid was exotic enough to capture my attention and yet too exotic to settle down with (I confess, I've heard real men describe some girls in similar terms), I turned my attention to the quiet, sweet and domestic little farm girl. Her health is frail, and she likes to stay home and cook delicious vegetables. I could picture her shuffling peacefully around my kitchen. I ought to be ashamed of myself.

It's an interesting piece on one of my most adored games. I'd certainly never really thought about the whole wooing-proposal-marriage process in a more reflective manner (it seems easy enough to say 'I'm not crazy about mermaids, pink hair, or consumptive farm girls. Who's left?'). Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some chickens to fling.

Playing The Field [GameSetWatch]

"What we're trying to do is take people into a virtual crack-related neighborhood or crack-related setting and have them experience cravings, just like they would in the real world," Rosenthal said.

It's all a form of classical conditioning, a phenomenon first explored by Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate when a sound occurred, commonly believed to be the ringing of a bell. By ringing the bell before feeding the animal it began to associate the bell with the anticipation of food.

The main difference here is the use of virtual reality to provide the stimulus, rather than actually putting crack cocaine on a table and hitting the addicts with rolled-up newspaper whenever they reach for it. "Bad crackhead!"

While the program has had some success, Rosenthal doesn't see his work as merely a way to help addicts recover their lives.

"This isn't about cocaine, and this isn't really about substance use," He said. "This is about creating new learning and extending that learning to the real world."

The major downfall of our ability to track objects is speed. Because once these dots hit the on-screen speed of 0.15 metres per second, subjects were only able to track one dot at a time. I wish that I could put such a speed into real world context, but if you are interested in experiencing the phenomenon for yourself, hit this link to test yourself. It's...humbling at high speeds.

Brain can juggle eight balls at once [newscientist]

When I met with Nick Yee last week to discuss his fight against The Barbarians at the Gate, we ended up going down a lot of tangents. One of the more interesting ones was his paper on superstitions in massively multiplayer online games.

Yee told me about how MMOS, which he says are in many ways a fancy Skinner Box, create a lot of odd superstitions in gamers. Not superstitions in the spiritual or religious since, but repeated behaviors driven by strong beliefs that doing one thing will lead to a certain outcome, despite evidence to the contrary.

A good example of this sort of non-religious superstition is a study B.F. Skinner did in which he instilled superstition of this sort into pigeons by feeding them pellets every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days each pigeon had developed its own independent superstition about what produced this manna from heaven. One though circling clockwise was necessary, another that it had to attack a spot on the cage to get the pellets. Gamers do the same thing, it seems.

Using his Daedalus Project, Yee found that about 380 MMO players had witnessed at least one superstition while playing. Yee found a bunch of interesting similarities about how gamers respond to this superstition, but more interesting, I think, are the superstitions themselves.

Instance Seeding

Most superstitions players described involved low-chance or high-risk events. For example, a low-chance event may be a rare loot drop. In World of Warcraft, there is a pervasive superstition that the loot table in high-level instances is determined by the first member of the group who steps foot inside the instance.

Some People Are Luckier

One interesting variation of the instance seeder superstition claims that certain characters are luckier or have better loot tables.

Lucky Charms

There is also a pervasive item-based superstition regarding drop rates across many MMOs and this is the belief that having certain objects in your inventory will improve the drop rate of rare items. The specific item changes from game to game, but takes the same general form.

And the list goes on and on.

It's funny because I can think of several occasions where I too have unwittingly become a victim of superstition. I think it's because as a player we have no way of knowing what the rules are, the ones hard-coded into the game, and the secrets, the easter eggs. And that we want to find those secrets out.

Kinda like life.

Superstitions [The Daedalus Project]

Reuters has an interesting story up about MindHabits Trainer, a game developed by researchers at McGill University in Montreal which is meant to cut down on your stress, increase your confidence and make you a happier person.

The very simple game get you to look at a series of pictures and click on the faces that are smiling, avoiding the frowners. By doing this five to ten minutes a day the game has shown to help people feel less stressed and have higher self esteem.

I played around with the game this morning and find it very interesting. There are actually four different games, all of which are about getting you to accentuate the positive in your mind. I could totally see something like this hitting the DS. It seems like a perfect fit.

Online game smiles seen vanquishing the blues [ZDnet, thanks to my big bro Drew]

Reach Out Central (ROC) is an interactive program that's designed to help you explore how your thinking, behaviour and feelings all interact with each other. Choose your own character and try out different ways of reacting to real-life situations. On the way, you might change the way you feel by changing the way you think - it's easier than you'd expect.

Some of these newer games-that-aren't-really are going in some pretty interesting directions - I wonder how effective this kind of training (therapy? something?) is, but I suppose anything that opens discussions about touchy issues and problems is not usually a bad thing.

Reach Out Central: a game for tough times [Wonderland]

Psychologists at the University of Rochester polled 1,000 gamers and asked them what keeps them glued to games. They found that gamers "reported feeling best when the games produced positive experiences and challenges that connected to what they know in the real world."

Sometimes we need a virtual replacement of tasks we don't get to accomplish in real life to make our brain happy:

"It's our contention that the psychological 'pull' of games is largely due to their capacity to engender feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness," says Ryan. The researchers believe that some video games not only motivate further play but "also can be experienced as enhancing psychological wellness, at least short-term," he says.

See mom? I'm not wasting my life, I'm just doing right by my brain. Michael McWhertor

A reason why video games are hard to give up [PhysOrg]

Anderson Analytics has conducted psychological research via text mining software to gauge the subconscious response to brands like Xbox and PlayStation (but not necessarily the consoles themselves). Their findings?

...there were significant differences between boys who saw Playstation images and Xbox images. Boys who saw Xbox pictures were higher on power motivation than boys who saw Playstation images. Boys in the Xbox group also scored higher on self-confidence than participants in the Playstation group. In addition to these differences between Playstation and Xbox, the images of these game consoles affected boys in different ways. For boys in the Xbox group seeing the ad increased levels of distrust. This increase was not seen in the Playstation group.

Wow. Thanks a lot, Microsoft. I hold you directly responsible for helping to raise a new generation of cocky jerks. Michael McWhertor

Xbox or Nintendo , Barbie or Bratz , a New Study Confirms that it Really Does Pay to Advertise [via Gamespot]

We'll just dismiss this idea right now with one word: Horde. While it's true that you won't see an aesthetically unpleasing avatar in most MMORPGs if you are playing the "good" side, half of all World of Warcraft players wander around as anthropomorphical bovines, rotting corpses, slimy orcs and big-nosed trolls. Which just goes to show that people love to play ugly avatars... as long as they are both ugly and cool looking.

A bigger sociological question might be why ugly is equated with evil, but if you've ever spent the morning yawning into the toilet after catching a sober look at the face of the soused trollop you brought home from the pub the night before, you'll understand the psychological reasonings behind it.

Where are the ugly avatars? [Guardian Gamesblog]

I had a chance to speak with Dr. Elizabeth Zelinski recently about the theory behind brain games.

Zelinski is a professor of gerontology and psychology, and dean of the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. She also serves as a spokeswoman for Nintendo on brain games.

She deftly dodged my attempts at trying to get her to talk about what, if any, actual benefit playing Brain Age might have. She also talks a bit about the principles behind the game and how a person's brain age compares to their IQ.

Dr. Z on Brain Games [Rocky Mountain News]

Video Games With Heroes Make Kids Aggressive [Yomiuri]

Deconstructing the PSP.

Lab to study emotion of gaming [BBC]

Inflicting pain on griefers [CNET]