When the Fun Stops: The Science of Addiction

[Music] today I'm going to talk about a concept that has increasingly consumed my time and energy which is the topic of gaming addiction and I hope to share what I've learned about it in the last five or so years with you so first Who am I well what am i I guess I'm an experimental psychologist so I was I originally trained as the kind of psychologist that helps people but then I was approached by my PhD supervisor who had the idea that maybe we could use empirical psychology quantitative psychology to study video games in the study benchmarking and game development so I co-developed the pens which is an application of motivational theory to game development as a player experience and each satisfaction approach I'm most

interested in behavior physiology and human motivation and this kind of encompasses kind of small scale data things in the lab things you think of as play testing and large scale or big data following tens of thousands of people over time with behavioral data with trace data with survey data and I'm increasingly interested in evidence-based policymaking so basically if you're a lawmaker or if you're a regulator or if you're in charge of an education or health system how do you make a decision on the basis of scientific knowledge about technology specifically in a way that kind of conforms to or as harmonizes with what we know from science I'm I was also born in 1982 so I'm really in the sweet spot for having played the original Nintendo and so this was my present on my seventh birthday so why am I here what are the

kinds of things I'm going to talk about well I'm sure that that everyone in the room has has tiny bits or large bits or chunks of an idea about what gaming addiction is I'm gonna try to cover these five topics I'm gonna start by trying to offer somewhat of a historic perspective on concerns about games and addiction in particular I'm going to talk about kind of what is the philosophical or theoretical position that's required to kind of understand what gaming addiction is I'm going to talk a little bit about the different classes and the different kinds of scientific evidence that that psychologists psychiatrists epidemiologists and some kinds of sociologists kind of apply so the question of gaming addiction this is just every time we use the word addiction you're allowed to just put giant quotes around that word I'm gonna talk about the direction the trajectory that I see things going if nobody in the

industry changes their current behavior sets what the endgame is going to be and I'm gonna try time permitting to be somewhat optimistic and offer an alternative vision that doesn't involve plowing into the side of a mountain so to start for some historic perspective to kind of zoom out in terms of how we see our concerns about games concerns about games are very certainly not new the first documented case I could find of a relatively popular game was in the New York Times in the mid-1970s there was a game called death race I was an arcade game a coin-operated arcade game where in I think it was a two-player game you drove around killing these gremlins and then every time you killed a gremlin there was a little tombstone and then you had to void that all the tombstones of all the gremlins you killed and then keep running down gremlins any case the

coverage of this concern of this game is basically the template for everything that we've observed in the subsequent 40 years 40 plus years of video game media coverage so we have an active ingredient for our concern and and this is a pretty common one for different video game concerns it's that games are interactive all right that's the thing that sets them apart from a different form of media that's the that's the thing that makes them qualitatively different in some way when people play games they they practice and act in a fantasy environment that generalizes either through confusion or desensitization it fear their experience in this virtual environment kind of gets mixed up with or written over what they would have otherwise developed as as a person if they had never played death race 2000 and then and then when we're talking about the effects of games on people we typically identify a

vulnerable party they're typically not a 36 year old straight white guy there's some other group of people depending on the kind of media and might be children it might be migrants it might be women really depending on the different kind of media that we've had a concern about there's always a vulnerable group if the effects aren't obvious on this on an individual level an argument gets made that on the societal level the effect must be significant and in this one specifically the expert that they brought in he said that this would lead to a higher level of pedestrian traffic fatalities but that's always but with these kinds of concerns there's always one of these things that even if there isn't a clear you know transitive Rock a scratches Rock B Rock B scratches rock C so then a on C there's some kind of probabilistic notion that happens across the whole population and then I apologize most of the time that they're an expert weighs in they are a psychologist I'm just

because we're so fancy and and they always end in free advertising for the game developer this one closes with but mr. Brooks was unfazed every time a story comes out he said we get more and more orders so I think these these cabinets sold for about $1,000 each so concerns about violent video games and I promised him what labor this too much I have a point depending on how you slice the data you actually could think that violent video games were positively associated with youth crime for some period of time between death race and and when I got mine Nintendo but then other thing happened in society and so from like the mid-90s until the the present era there's almost a perfect negative correlation between teen crime and violent video game sales in the United States so there are some classes of evidence that relate to concerns that's in that in some cases can ameliorate them at least for certain parts of the population but addiction is a little bit

different so when we talk about addiction and technology or addiction and games interactivity is still a feature of it but actually in a weird way it's both a younger set of concerns and a more static set of concerns so in the same way that that interactivity is important for both the the the the mode or the model of the lens that we see technology addiction or gaming addiction through is is intrinsically different because there is a model that already existed for us to think about gaming addiction so in the in the late 1990s there was a psychiatrist called Ivan Goldberg is one of New York's leading addiction researchers and he was so frustrated with the medical model of addiction that as an act of satire on a on a email list on a listserv he actually created gaming a he created Internet addiction and he just like kind of like took the checklist approach and just like point out how silly

psychiatrist had been about pathologizing all these normal parts of life in the late 90s apparently the internet was still part of life though maybe wasn't as fun I and he was shocked because actually it turned real people started coming to him with their imagined or real problems with technology addiction and so really what's going on here this is kind of one of many indicators that the challenge that we might face with dealing with concerns are thinking about concerns about aggression are very different than what we see with addiction so we can compare these are kind of a direct basis so when we talk about violent games we actually have a pretty poor fitting model from social science to describe the effects that we would expect but when we talk about addiction to games we have a pre-existing model a mold people have been studying addiction for a very long time so there's an easy fit at least in terms of a lot of the Lange and a lot of the assumptions for violent games there's a lot of similarities to

other forms of media that have come before so we have comic books we have movies we have novels that have you know like crime novels and a lot of these fears a lot of these concerns were busted so when we think about parallels to our concerns about games and aggression when we think about those parallels it kind of leads us to be like huh maybe there's not it there there but when we think about addiction it's very different with games with games there's a lot of novel factors that other comparison media don't have many of the fears are supported but in a kind of weird way like we have anxiety about things like I don't know election interference or the attention economy or the monetization the monetization of attention and they're not really about games or addiction proper but because they happen on the same device because these things are kind of intrinsically cross-platform now our anxieties don't kind of stay with a console the way they

might have in the mid 90s so you know there there's definitely a there's a real qualitative difference between how a parent or a policymaker sees a doom sold on cd-rom in a box in the early 1990s and and how they see Call of Duty 4 with endless you know DLCs and and added features and dynamic challenge generation and so the the boundaries of the media are very different and every time that somebody thinks about the limits or the lack of boundaries on it it kind of leads them to think oh my goodness what else could be happening so actually the the I say this is draw a contrast between the two concerns they both involve many of the same actors they involve many of the same kind of stakeholders in society but they are fundamentally different challenges

the second thing I want to talk about is kind of the philosophical or theoretical underpinnings of addiction now I've heard this a few times Celia is great with this a few others are really great with this is that we need to be really careful about how we use the term addiction and we have a common use of it we we kind of it's kind of the same as saying something's fun or it's engaging or it's immersive but how we react to the word addiction really depends on the thing that we're thinking about the substance that we're talking about if we say my loved one is addicted to to smoking or to heroin or to gambling that's very different than saying he plays too much golf on Sundays my teenagers just like can't stop on Instagram or you know the the battery keeps dying on the phone because there's so much Fortnight being played there's something fundamentally different about

how we use the word addiction for these things but in English we don't have a lot of really good ways of discriminating the two one way you could discriminate the two however is with the off-the-shelf model that we inherit from the Medical Sciences so in this model there's an active ingredient behind different forms of addiction so for smoking its nicotine for heroin it's certain classes of opioids for gambling people think it's dopamine but they don't really know we can see things like when you give Parkinson's patients l-dopa and they have more free-floating dopamine in their systems they they might for the first time in their lives become gambling addicts so there's some treatment effects there but we're not quite sure on both but the mechanisms for certain kinds of behavioral dysregulation x' things like gaming things like shopping it's not very clear what the kind of mechanism would be what the active ingredient might be but there is kind of in the way that we practice science on this topic an assumption that there is some shared kind of commonality

there's some kind of active ingredient that like lives inside of all gambling or lives inside of all sports addiction does that make sense yeah thank you so with that in mind with a medical model in mind all good psychiatrists and epidemiologists begin to build taxonomy x' they're basically two you've heard about I would imagine the first is the American model from the American Psychiatric Association and the second is a model from a working group at the World Health Organization with the World Health Organization the the American model is there was a proposal made for research on a topic of something called internet gaming disorder the internet is not defined and games are not defined but there is a taxonomy of potential symptoms that are identified and I'll talk about them a little bit more in a little bit but it is kind of like a a

syndrome without any of the core definitions I've emailed people asking them very desperately in industry and in academia and psychiatry well what the hell is an internet game and nobody can tell me the World Health Organization has a more general concept it is it is called gaming disorder so it doesn't have the Internet in it for any reason and the basic idea here is instead of having symptoms or some kind of indicators of what the illness should be they basically say that it's when you do gaming for a year and across that year you suffer significant impairment to something that's important to you so it's a bit of a tautology so it's a little bit of a you know I'm snake eating itself but there's a little disclaimer that says but if it's really bad if games are super duper disruptive then you don't even need to have this problem for a year and this is basically where we're at right now because it's it's a class of argument by analogy

which is to say that we think there might be a problem here we think there might be an active ingredient we think that people's lives might be impacted this might be the cause of a disorder or the cause of ill health and this is kind of where we are philosophically alright so in some ways gambling disorders are jumping off point and in some way different substance abuse disorders are jumping off point but but here's really where we're landing so according to the American Psychiatric Association essentially they took the checklist of of indicators for gambling disorder they took out the word gambling and they put in the word internet gaming so there are nine possible indicators I just counted actually I only put eight on this slide and the idea is that if you could say yes to five or more of these then you might be classified as having a problem with gaming and again the idea here is that each one of these possible symptoms is it's like equally indicative of you having a problem and that assumption is kind of supported by the

fact that or rather that assumptions supported by the idea and that there is something in all games no matter what type they are that's analogous the thing that's inside all cigarettes no matter who manufactures them that is kind of generally addictive for those who might be vulnerable that makes sense all right so in the third bit I'm going to talk a little bit about evidence so as a scientist I love evidence as someone who lives in England I love that my airplane works and gets me here and also I'm really interested to know what scientists have been up to for the last twenty years so depending on what words you use when you look up a literature on video gaming addiction you can call disordered gaming problem gaming gaming addiction internet gaming disorder gaming disorder you kind of have to write a pretty long search string there's between 50 and maybe 300

Studies on gaming addiction in the last few decades and they fall into one of basically four tranches the first this kind of measurement so if there's a there there how do we measure it the second is uh neuro imaging studies so in some way can we learn something about how typical versus non typical gamers approach games based on something that is a signal that we can detect detect in an fMRI scanner symptomatology these are studies about kind of what would gaming disorder be correlated with in the world of psychopathology how does it kind of fit the larger excuse me in the larger puzzle of mental illness and then treatment so this is if somebody has a problem how might we help them alright so overwhelmingly the great majority of

those 250 studies are measurement studies all right so these are large typically large scale so maybe between 150 and you know our work has upwards of 20,000 participants and the idea is that using some form of Survey Research you cast as wide a net as possible within this medical framework and you try to test if those symptoms are those indicators if the sniffles and coughs that you think are related to the underlying problem of gaming addiction if if those are actually present in the population and how good are those questions at discriminating a player who's playing out of a sense of choice and volition from a player who's playing out of a sense of say compulsion feeling like they have to play instead of feeling like they want to play unfortunately the great majority of this research uses what's called convenient sampling so in the rare cases where you

actually get gamers who have problems with play it's because the researcher has gone to a gaming addiction subreddit or they've gone to a part of the internet where where gamers who have problems regulating their play kind of congregate and then they conduct this research and in some ways this is a bit like researching drug use only outside of a needle exchange you don't get a very clear sense of how many people in the population have a problem if you're sampling only within certain kind of tranches in certain parts of certain communities but but it but it is the case that of these 250 studies are not 250 but of about 200 of these studies really what's going on are these convenience samples so people are running a thesis they're doing a project in a high school or a school system or or they're having friends of friends of friends of friends of friends take surveys the second class of study are different

types of neuroscience studies these are much much smaller studies they have small samples because the amount of the amount of money it takes to cost of like at least seventeen hundred dollars an hour to give somebody to prepare someone and then do an fMRI scan so these studies typically have very small samples between 10 and 20 people in them and the basic idea behind all of these studies is they give a large number of gamers in a community a survey they try to flag the ones that are like low players and high players or the ones they think might have a problem gaming and the ones that think they think are quote unquote normal alright and then they have them do tasks in in an fMRI where they show them in many cases reminders of their favorite game and then they try to see how much activation there is relative activation there is between the two groups and while this

doesn't actually tell you anything about addiction you do observe some differences and you don't know if that's just because they like the games a whole lot but there have been many many studies like this and and one of these will come out at least once a month every month for the rest of our lives the symptomatology studies sorry I'm getting Vikram I should I should I should not get grim for another 15 minutes all right the third set is is much less common than then it should be and I consider it a very interesting set of study a class of studies where basically people try to figure out if you score high on these questionnaires of gaming disorder what else do you score high on not thinking necessarily the gaming disorder causes these other problems but how how do different kind

of constellations or how do different kind of clusters of these disorders kind of relate to each other or interrelate it's gaming in some way a coping mechanism this problem gaming in some a coping mechanism for something that's either organic going on in someone's brain or a link to a social environment or some kind of stressor like school and unfortunately this is this kind of research is really hampered by the medical model so there are some gatekeepers in academia who have some very clear ideas about what gaming addiction is and isn't and so if you kind of come with this kind of open minded exploratory perspective it's much harder to publish the papers and I don't know how much you know about academic publishing but it's it's quite important not as important as getting grants but but it's up there does that make sense alright now I saw I thought I saw a hand I got really worried for a second there all right and then by far thankfully the rarest class of study are the treatment

studies so these are exceedingly rare I found three of these and and I look every few weeks I have a search that runs and in these studies basically what happens is either there is a behavioral or a pharmaceutical intervention with a population of players who are either self-identify or a therapist has decided they have a problem with games the typical treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy which one might think works with a lot of different problems but I am I am quite worried from an ethics perspective about before we have disorders a disorder that has real symptoms and a real course of treatment potential course of treatment that we're giving people medication for gaming that makes sense so those are the four classes it's a great majority of the

studies are these cheap and easy studies where you collect a load of participants you ask them about their favorite hobby some of them say they have a problem you do a bunch of statistics second is you con a research agency into giving you two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and you scan 30 people's brains and show them pictures of World of Warcraft and fortnight dances the third is you kind of do some really cool Network science which I'm sure some people in the room know how to do and you try to see how these things constellated over time and then you have the island of dr. Moreau so if so when you look at this literature kind of by and large the data is actually fairly low quality it the studies aren't done very well there isn't a lot of transparency nobody has their hypotheses before they collect their data you can't see any one statistical models because

they don't share their code so there's been a few consortiums of researchers of which I count myself where we kind of try to point these things out we try to say hey hold on a second there are two billion video game players in the world these 250 studies are kind of garbage we're really going out on a limb here if you're running a health system this isn't you know you wouldn't you wouldn't identify a new parasite this way why why are you why are you talking about a new behavioral disorder well unfortunately games are very very popular so does anyone know what the base rate fallacy is all right what if I told you that almost all serial killers wear socks all right if you didn't know how many people

in the general population wore socks you could interpret this as a pretty good signal that the person any given person with socks you don't actually have socks it is a serial killer games are super popular this means that a giant slice of young people upwards ninety-five percent depending on how you count are pretty engaged with some form of game that kind of hits them at the right they bounce off a bunch of stuff but it hits them at the right angle and they find their game for a few months or a few years so when something bad happens in a young person's life which is inevitable there is an unending stream of anecdotal evidence and this anecdotal evidence I have to tell you openings are getting grim I is more than enough for this party to stop all right

the it is true that there is actually some evidence of absence but because the evidence base is so crap we have to fall back on the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence so we don't know what we don't know because research isn't being done properly and in the meantime we're going to have monster of the week scary story and that's more than enough to motivate regulators and that's more than enough to motivate people who run health systems in a way that we would have never seen with violence and aggression so we'll talk a little bit about endgame alright this is my most optimistic slide so I think best-case scenario this party

is going to go on for about five more years alright so the public the people who control taxation and commerce they're that tiny little boat actually this this metaphor breaks down the more I think about it I thought I was very clever when I drew this picture okay I'm just gonna go with it it's a indestructible boat it's in god mode okay so there is a a level of understanding that the public and policymakers have they can Intuit a whole bunch of stuff about gaming addiction or about kind of the larger halo around games and behavioral dysregulation that are kind of the obvious salient features very few people like real money transactions no one likes plate to pay to win right loot boxes are like if I ever hear that

word again and anti-social behavior on platforms where people don't take we're developers don't take these things seriously and kids come right rightly to their parents terrified or minorly traumatized by a irresponsible design decision there are some things over the surface that that quote-unquote normal people can see there that are kind of illnesses in the industry all right but as the little boat that's indestructible gets closer to the iceberg they're gonna be able to see all the other stuff and once they start poking around with regulations their hands are just going to go into all of these different pies there's a lot of booths around this kind of stuff I don't know you should walk around the expo center it's kind of cool stuff so why is this happening why why

is this collision inevitable well there are some things that you don't that the people in this room don't have a lot of control over all right first generally there's been a deterioration in the quality of science journalism so a lot of newsrooms don't have scientists covering science beats anymore because of just things that are happening in that profession second there's been since the year 2000 there's been a rise in what could be called moral entrepreneurs so these are it's not necessarily morals in terms of right or wrong but it's morals in terms of norms this is an idea from sociology so the idea is that there are people who kind of listen to to the feel the way the wind is blowing interpret what the norm is around a technology and then what they do is they sell that back to us in the form of parenting advice in a kind of a high profile book and in the last in the last two decades we've gotten this increasingly with social media with

games the does anyone in one in the audience do that raise your hand if you know who Phil Zimbardo is this is good oh I heard a little I heard a ringing noise somebody didn't listen to my rule about ringing okay it's not my rule just give me perfect scores please all right I don't care you can all make noise I just need the perfect scores so anyway so some of you had your hands up let's assume 11% who knows that Phil Zimbardo wrote a book about video games one two okay I might have yeah we probably talked - you talked about it all right he did he wrote an entire fills and Bardo the guy who did the Stanford Prison Experiment he wrote a whole book about how video games are feminizing boys this was completely new to me I read the book it was thankfully it was quite short just type just just type of Zimbardo show Bilski debate when

you have some free time and you can watch what happens but but there is now and there's kind of an economic thought leader niche around technology and so every six or ten months it's kind of like behind like pulling a lever or a loot box we get a different new technological demon and a lot of them land on games you don't have a lot of control over that I do my best as a scientist um there's a lot of technological anxieties in the air so in the same way that we might be very proud about games being able to play on all of these different platforms not mentioning any giant company it's the case that we also do other things on those devices like our email or our grinder or like no I didn't say that but I we and so in our minds when we use this device we have a pretty undifferentiated sense of what it might do for us or to us and if games

are part of that ecology that part of that kind of that blurring of our hopes and our anxieties then what we might think of as an affordance helping somebody play a game on a platform it might actually associate our other feelings about arguing on Twitter with lovely games of fortnight and then the final thing is that and this is absolutely true and I'll speak autobiographically there are a lot of really bad psychologists out there there's a lot of bad academics and professors out there and I can't control their behavior and I try to call it out when I can when I have knowledge of it but your industry has some pretty bad actors in it and and they might ruin the party for you and you don't necessarily have control over that things you do have control over all right I've heard the answer to bad speech is good speech more speech you just keep pulling that again you just keep finding analogies

one way you can say is the answer to bad science is good science the problem is is there's no good science and that's partly because it's actually very hard to do good science on gaming addiction because unlike other things when you if you're a researcher and you want to know the effects of nicotine on on smokers or on on mammals you can go out to the store and you can buy cigarettes and you can analyze everything that's in them as a biochemist alright then you can synthesize your own thing and you can run your own study you actually can't do that with a lot of games because of how they're designed how they're updated how the IP is traced and taken care of and so actually scientists have a much poorer idea a much less enriched idea of what actually happens inside of games because so much of it is considered IP so much

of it is considered proprietary so much of it is outside the scope of of scientific inquiry it's a bit like imagine that you're coming across it's late at night and you come across a drunk and he's looking you know furtively around at the ground underneath the street lamp and you say to him you know sir what are you doing and he says I'm looking for the keys to my house and you say why did you drop them here and he says no but this is the only place that I can what's happening part of the reason why the literature on on gaming addiction or on aggression is is so irredeemable is because you all have the data that's required to actually study it and what many academic scientists are left with are the scraps and this is part I think in some way of two things the first thing is a lot I know people in the industry were really burned by the aggression debate and the First

Amendment's basically the reason why we're not having a very different set of conversations right now uh and the second is an on by default defensive posture a reactive posture and it's true that things are only steadily slightly getting worse every six months and so area under the curve profit things are fine but they are getting irredeemably worse there are certain authorities that are looking very closely at regulating I'm on - in the United Kingdom and there is blowback so a few months ago so it's very easy to think of something like the World Health Organization as an organized body that really has its ducks in a row see them in America so I can use duck idioms and they really weren't they were really internally quite the the World Health Organization they were

really quite fraught about this Gaming disorder thing the the the people who were working in the icd-11 they had really gone out on a limb alright and there was a lot of debate internally in the UN and then the ESA decided to publish a rebuttal to the evidence and it cherry-picked some of my research just the parts that show games aren't so bad not the parts that say that people's thoughts about them being good are also overblown cherry-picked some stuff about games being great for cognitive development yada yada yada and then went to town with a press release and you know what everyone woke up to the next morning in the UN they circle the wagons moment so now they're much more convinced that they were right the whole time and you're all evil I would have warned you not to do that so my my piece of advice

here is I think you probably all should consider bracing for impact there are a lot of bad things that can come from this reactive stance from there not being good science from there being monster-of-the-week anecdotal Anik data from from rightfully scared parents the first is there's going to be stigmatize we're gonna stigmatize a hobby of more than a billion people on this planet the second is that there's going to be a lot of really dumb regulation coming down the pipe it's going to be inspired just like the medical metaphor the medical model metaphor it's going to be inspired by that so in the in the EU we have these I don't know if they're in America yet like these giant packet warnings on cigarettes that show you like a lung that got coughed out of a Dilophosaurus or something you're gonna get that there's going to be depending on the patchwork of markets and regulations in some places more aggressive regulators

are going to fragment the market the marketplace and you're going to have certain kinds of labeling rules they're going to be sin taxes cost of doing business it's gonna it's going to make the violent video game stuff look like nothing and then there's going to be fines so there's going to be a lot of compliance and that's going to have two effects the the first effect is it's going to start siphoning giant amounts of money out of your organization so Google can sustain four and a half billion euro is followed by 1.7 billion euros and they can pay really really clever lawyers to like kind of like make that follow a diminishing function I don't know how many gaming companies consistent I don't even know if the big boys can sustain more than a few billion dollars of direct fees their fines and I don't think they can afford to leave the EU market so in a lot of ways there have been short-term victories that are going to lead to long term defeats on this I

see someone wearing a Nintendo shirt and I think Nintendo might be fine actually so you know what can we do and I'm not I'm going to intentionally try to end a little early so we can have questions not comments what what what can you guys possibly do to turn a corner on this and to turn turn this defeat into an opportunity you need to be proactive there needs to be a fundamental shift in your approach to something like gaming addiction or gaming an aggression or whatever and there'll be other I promise there'll be other things that people will make up if addiction ever goes away it's be afraid of this is going to involve you considering what are your first principles or articulate what do you want to be in developers as responsible citizens and designers of playgrounds for children this is going

to involve reading human rights law so the UN Council UN Charter on the Rights of the Child say that young people have a right to information and they have a right to play and if I have my way they'll also have a right to play video games and other forms of entertainment when this gets revised because it's from the late 1980s but the only way that we get there is if you are at the table so Lego has ethical design principles for their embodied toys they check in with those before they build their environments and I understand that Lego environments are a little bit more constrained than League of Legends but but but they they've got a touchstone and they're all and the touchstones in this industry or rather fragmented I think that you need to be part of good science I think you need to promote it and there's a lot of ways that you can and I'll detail some of them in a minute and I think that you probably need to coordinate because none of you are as

big as a Google or a Facebook and I I really think that there needs to be in the same way that the free put wait fair fair play alliance sorry I have a sticker I should check it but in the same way that the Fair Play Alliance is trying to articulate a certain set of standards I think you're going to need that more broadly to answer kind of the big questions of play so it's not just about reaction I'm so I'm gonna close with this um I think you need to foster and model good science I think that involves in engaging in in strategic tactical and strategic data sharing you need to think about the the kinds of data that you collect to improve your product or to monetize your product you need to think about that in terms of how that can be used to improve our fundamental understanding of how billions of people spend tens of billions of hours of every

week of their lives hopefully having fun this can involve data sharing hackathons at different levels of education with your data you get to figure out which kids are really the ones who are you know potentially potentially hireable you might consider funding an actual research organization to study play kind of an extension of what's going on in the uxu E space user experience space right now think about collaborations with academics when you do them not as like you bring in in a petri dish or not picture just but like you bring in a sample of an academic or you share data with just him or her but actually think about this is more of a team-based activity about joint knowledge production and I think that really the defensive miss to stop or you'll all go extinct there are things about games that are great and there are probably things about games that aren't and I think it's important that we know what

those are and we know how that we're sure about them as we are about our reasons for things like airplane staying in the air all right because so much of ourselves are invested in these mediums they're so amazing and we owe it to everyone who plays to to learn as much as we can and that means we might find some scary stuff but I firmly believe that we everyone's entitled to their own opinions about art and about this medium but they're not entitled to their own facts so with that I'm gonna say thank you for your time and attention and please for the love of God ask me questions [Applause] hello hi so uh I'm someone with a deep interest in this to begin with I work at valve now as an economist but prior to that I spent about fourteen years as a

social policy researcher so this is this is very dear to me and I see what your point is about the bad evidence that's out there in the market right now but you know obviously you and and we are interested in the actual truth about this and I'm wondering if we as game companies are to fund research or do partnerships especially given that you know many game organizations are gonna have interests and just showing the positive signs of game and not the negative are we gonna be combating bad science that says that gaming is a bad thing yeah with bad science that says gaming is a good thing mm-hmm that's a great question so and this is not a problem that is specific to games or getting the games industry I think that it is a natural human instinct to want

to see the positives of the things that we're most invested in and we love the most I think fundamentally this comes down to whether or not the money the data the research is the cooperation whether or not that's contingent on the findings so in the social sciences more broadly and the Medical Sciences there's a movement to something called pre-registration and registered reports this is the idea that you write down what you're going to do before you do it and you or it's peer reviewed before you collect your data and that's the only way that this will work so basically it is a this is why it requires open-mindedness and a certain level of letting go of control because there will be things that but transparencies the thing that will save us on that so you may not be able to share the exact data set that comes out of one of these collaborations or the projects but you can create a simulated data depending on the class of data which other people can can question your

code or your models so well I'm happy to follow that up but there's a number of people unless you have one more just very small yeah I agree with everything you said about standards I'd also advocate for transparency in how data sets are created yes because that's an important piece of it yes computational reproducibility is something that scientists are horrific I thank you everyone's horrific at it you're welcome I think there and then I'll alternate or not alternate obviously thank you I find that when we act as advocates for games and ambassadors of our industry and we have to defend ourselves against things like internet gaming disorder classification and the certain kinds of studies the the bad science studies I find there's a real danger and tendency to dip into dog mattes ISM and in some cases come off as anti intellectualism what do you recommend especially if we are not scientists or psychologists how

do we sort of avoid coming off that way I think curiosity is the thing that's missing so one of the one of the real tragedies of you know both of concern focused research in psychological science and these other sciences is that there's actually a very low level of curiosity or interest and what the hell games are and so when I was training as a scientist I wanted to do Studies on motivation and so the way I learn is through examples and so I'd have to read other lab studies and it really ground me down the lack of curiosity and so I I think remembering that you're not going to lose your job if you listen to a parent who's flustered or trying to identify if the person has try to try to identify what their interest or where their passion comes from for arguing with you and I think that the insights you get I mean it's very banal when you get to the moral entrepreneurs or their whole

reason for being is to sell a book and a consultancy etc etc you do not need to listen to those you can your please feel free to argue with them but I think a lot of people just don't have a lot of clarity on what exactly they're unhappy about hope that helps absolutely thank you okay sorry what do you think is there risk but the responsibility of conferences like GDC that host talks that teach dark patterns and promote the attention economy I think in the first instance we need to understand the the reasons why those things either work or don't work on a very thorough level so you talk to say Tristan or these guys who are doing the time well-spent movement the other kind of like they have come to they're found Jesus moment

they've decided that when they worked at Google they were evil because they manipulated people and now they've realized that that was wrong and now they'll help right but when you ask them about the research that underlies their thinking that they were these kind of Oppenheimer's of social control they point at studies that are garbage from the social sciences like there's this there was a Cornell professor Brian Wansink who like had this unending Super Bowl experiment but he's a fraud stirrer the experiment never worked and these guys who think that they have you know fooled the world you know it's possible they still did but the the evidentiary basis for their claims for good or bad are kind of based on his whole series of assumptions so I get tricked by dark patterns it makes sense to me that that happens but I think that the first duty of an organization is to actually document the phenomena closely because

if we regulate it without understanding it or if we kind of set rules about it without understanding it you know it's a dinosaur's amber scenario so good yeah Thanks hello so regarding the iceberg metaphor Oh God an algae it's a very strong boat okay anything quickly well my question is why do you think that the boat will catch up with the iceberg because as it seems to me like you said every six months something new comes up uh-huh so what do you makes you believe that the regulators will actually get y'all because they haven't been able to catch up I mean that's a I don't know so I have two answers one is is polluted by my own experience which is that I had years of my life where I wasn't on parliamentary I wasn't giving evidence the parliamentary subcommittees on these topics and now an increasing amount of my time is spent doing that and I think

it's just a matter of historic record that you know different companies in countries different countries are looking more closely at these mechanics now so as your question is it happening or why is it happening I mean will they ever catch up because it seems to well but we are developing new ways what they'll do what they do in the plane right so what they'll do is they'll write a rule that is oh I just remember the second part of answer that I didn't give they'll write a rule that is like a catch-all rule and then when a company that's large enough to step out of line steps out of line they'll sue it right or though the levy of fine and sorry and that was the other thing I wanted to say that it's not just the companies can't sustain these fines it's that the cost of compliance is very high so it may cut out smaller studios from certain markets and then that's a real opportunity cost for human play some make sense yeah okay

I mean we talk more about that it's really boring regulatory frameworks for me I would you say that screen addiction ties into video game addiction at all is that similar in that it's not entirely properly studied or it's it's entirely the same thing is it yeah so you just take out literally you can just take out the word video game and you can put in smartphone screen social media it's all the same kind of my Azzam of social science so the fundamental problem is that it's large-scale social data from surveys and so because one person fills out the survey everything that they reply to has kind of a background level of correlation and so things like I use a screen a certain number of hours a day and I feel sad those things share 1/3 of 1% of covariance and if you just if all

you care about is a p-value if all you care about are statistical significance then you can say something scary but I work by Amy or Ben and I on screen impacts you will overdose on that if you're interested thank you thank you and I think I can actually do the next two in the next three minutes if they're reasonable yes when it comes to these sort of like research organization are there any good examples and other industries where that's actually been not a defensive thing I'm aware of is a super defensive like makes it worse kind of organization yeah I don't know so I think in my mind the model is a there's something called a psychological science accelerator which is a coalition of hundreds of psychology labs all around the world and we all run the same experiment at the same time and that way we know what we find is either there or not there psych science accelerator unfortunately all the collaborations that I'm aware of in the gambling gaming

industry that one and different kind of health organizations and governmental organizations those have all failed pretty in different ways though spectacularly in different ways so their their use cases but but yeah I'm writing a white paper on how it not how it cannot be a dumpster fire and so it should work with Facebook too I hope ok all right one last one good a from Rochester nice oh well no one's perfect yeah so you talked a lot about I really like the slide where you you were talking about like when you're addicted to like drugs at you and like I think it's it really hit a note where like we're trying to isolate this X right this X that is video game addiction and let's say 20 30 years from now every one of us in this room knows exactly what makes a game addicting right we found X yeah and I really think that at that point in time there's gonna be a lot of companies which I won't name

names that want to be the marburo of games they don't care about morality they just want to make addicting game so people play them and there's gonna be a lot of people who just want to make fun games that are the opposite of whatever this X is right and so how do you think that as you know a community we can deal with something like that because I feel like that would literally tear like the entire games in its riot so this is this is where I returned to my facts versus opinions thing so if we actually have good scientific evidence scientific evidence that this thing is an opiate you know let's just imagine it's it's a horrible addictive thing yeah right it's like it's kryptonite to children ah but addictive kryptonite what I think that if we have clarity on it if we have the facts on it it'll be very very easy to regulate okay and and it's not going to be up to a mom and pop game studio on I I don't know they're gonna make like 3d augmented body suits in this future that you have but it's not going to be

up to to you to police them I think that if we if we have a common set of facts it'll be ridiculously easy to to regulate them okay all right I think that that is time and I thank you all for your time and attention I don't know what the scale is but if it's a ten-point scale you give me a ten and if it's an eight and eight right alright thank you so much