Latest / Art of the Question / The Surprising Benefits of Gaming - Prof. Shawn Green - #38

Transcript

The Surprising Benefits of Gaming - Prof. Shawn Green - #38 · Art of the Question

• Julius Moorman: Yes. So again, Sean, ⁓ thank you so much for for meeting with me today. I think before we start to get into the specifics of ⁓ this field of science, I was curious to know ⁓ are you a gamer and how did you get interested in this field of science? Yeah, sure. ⁓ you know, I am ⁓ a less active gamer than I was in my twenties now that I'm in my forties. ⁓ just, you know, time ⁓ you know, ⁓ you don't have quite the same amount of time, but ⁓ yeah, still a a pretty active gamer and, you know, play pretty often with with my younger brother ⁓ still is a nice way to communicate. ⁓ but the way that I got into this is I was a very active gamer in college. I was always interested in the brain and in learning. And so in college as an undergraduate, I joined a lab that ⁓ was studying the effects of congenital deafness on ⁓ visual capabilities. So you know if you are born without the ability to hear, you've got ⁓ big parts of the brain that aren't receiving the input that it's expecting. And so like question is is what is it doing? And ⁓ you know, is there are there any adaptations to vision? ⁓ say, you know, ⁓ often we use say our our hearing to detect things in the periphery, ⁓ like if we're gonna cross the road. And, you know, if you don't have a sense of hearing, do you have changes in vision? And so the lab was focused on that, led by ⁓ Dr. ⁓ Daphne Babbier, who's at the University of Geneva now. ⁓ and so we started a project that was intended to look at the effect of congenital deafness, where we would compare people who are born deaf with people who are not deaf but were native. Sign language users, because obviously sign also uses lots of peripheral vision with hearing individuals. And ⁓ when I first tested this out, as often you do, test it on some friends just to see if the if the tests were working well. Cause we wanted to know if hearing people were different from congenitally deaf individuals. ⁓ but first we just want to make sure that the measures were working appropriately. And the three people that I tested kind of scored off the scale on that one. And this was a a measure that we kind of knew where people should be. And these you know, my friends were like thirty percent higher than they should have been. And so obviously I was probably eighteen, nineteen at the time. And so the first thing we we checked is just whether I messed something up. That's usually the the most likely ⁓ thing when a nineteen year old is is doing their first experiment. ⁓ but once we confirmed that all of the measures were correct, then we had kind of the puzzle like, why are these people so much better than expected? And this was right when campus network started having really kind of good T one internet connections. ⁓ and we were playing ⁓ Team Fortress Classic, like an early first person shooter online, kind of every night. And so ⁓ you know, that became my undergraduate senior thesis, ⁓ kind of looking at the effect of of gaming, right? Like this was still this kind of a an early period of of games, right? Like early first person shooters sort of been the late nineties, ⁓ PC gaming just kind of taking off. And so games are still at that time pretty maligned. You know, people thought of it at best a waste of time and possibly kind of brain rotting. ⁓ and so yeah, it was ⁓ interesting finding at the time to show that that playing these games were leading to really positive effects on some perceptual and cognitive capabilities. ⁓ and been doing it ever since. That's super interesting. I love that story. And I completely agree that back in the day, like gaming used to have such a bad reputation. Pretty much on par with what we're seeing when we're talking about social media like Instagram and TikTok, like doom scrolling waste of time. Whereas I think those are actually harmful and are actually rotting our brains, presumably. ⁓ whereas gaming, of course, gaming is such a broad term, which is something that I'll want to get into as well, because one game games are very different. It's ⁓ it's not just yeah. You have shooters, you ⁓ you have arcade, you you have sports games. There's many different kinds of games. But anyway, I I believe like most of them, or pretty much all of them, had a pretty ⁓ re pretty bad reputation, at least among some people, not that long ago. So I'm I'm happy to see that that's kind of starting to shift. At least that's my perception. And you mentioned there that you had a very personal experience with these three friends of yours who were gamers that were scoring off the charts and that that led to your interest in in this topic of science. Is that also what what started the field or are more people were more people working on it a around that time? So how when did we first start to realize that gaming could potentially have positive ⁓ benefits for the brain? Yeah. So there was certainly a like a you know, a smattering of papers even as early as the, you know, the mid eighties, kind of pointing in that direction. ⁓ you know, a paper here, a paper there. ⁓ but I think, you know, we kind of hit a good point in time when ⁓ when gaming really also became, you know, mass popularity. ⁓ so ⁓ you know, the the work that was in the eighties was, you know, on, you know, arcade gaming, which was pretty different. ⁓ you know, there was a couple of papers, Patricia Greenfield had a really nice paper in the early nineties. ⁓ but you know, in terms of when you started to see like populations of gamers, ⁓ you know, I think some of our our early work kind of it certainly led the field with respect to action games, because action games certainly weren't really a thing, you know, people treated all games kind of necessarily as the same in that early work. Genres hadn't really kind of leave themselves off and thinking about what the different mechanics and demands of different types of games were. ⁓ and so I'd say, you know, our our early work ⁓ you know, was certainly an important part of it. There was, you know, but I think as soon as there were games, people started to recognize that that these tap certain cognitive abilities. Like it's the reason they're fun in lots of ways is that they put demands on some of these systems. Right. And You have this experience. You see that your friends are performing better than expected off the charts even. What where do you go from there? What what was the science that followed that experience? Yeah, sure. ⁓ so ⁓ you know, the first thing once we yeah, once we established all the measures were correct, we brought some other people in and they scored completely normally. So we kind of knew that the measures were working as intended. ⁓ so kind of the way that we still do you know, work now is we kind of go in two stages. We first do what we call the correlational type of study, where we just take advantage of the fact that people as part of their daily lives have different gaming habits. ⁓ and so we can ask whether people who are really avid, in our case, specifically shooter action game players. ⁓ so we bring them to the lab and then we bring people who play minimal games, don't play any action games. I just compare those two groups. Ask, is the people who play the action games perform better consistently than those who don't play that type of game? If we see that's the case, then that points to a possible causal relationship. But there could be other reasons we see that, right? It could just be that people who are born with really good skills gravitate to playing the games because they demand them. And then they're also good at our tasks, right? And so what we want to see is is it the case that the act of playing the games is driving improvements? And so for that, we actually have to like deliberately train people. ⁓ so we take people who are not natural you know, they don't as part of the natural life play these types of games. Bring them to the lab often, you know, they, you know, they've never had experience, for instance, using the WASD mouse combination to steer around. It actually takes a little bit of practice for them to just navigate around in these environments. But we train them in the lab for 10 or 30 or we've done up to 50 hours of training. some of the people we train on in action game ⁓ and some we train on another type of video game. Cause really our kind of core hypothesis is is it's not just gaming, as you kind of alluded to, that's driving some of these changes. It's the demands inherent in some types of games that aren't present in other types of games. ⁓ and so we always have one group that's training on, say, an action, first person shooter games. So we've used Call of Duty, ⁓ ⁓ I think Call of Duty is probably our most common one. Unreal Tournaments is another one that we've used a lot. ⁓ and then the other group will train on another video game that is kind of matched for how much fun people have, how engaged they are, but doesn't have any action components. So these are usually like life sim games, like the Sims or the Tycoon kind of games. ⁓ and so what we ask is, well, we test people before they do their training. Then they do their training, say in the lab for 10 or 30 or 50 hours. We test them again and we ask whether the people who played the action games for that period of time have improved more from their pre-scores to their post-scores than those who played the other type of game. ⁓ so works very much like a like a drug clinical trial would, like a, you know, a randomized clinical trial with an experimental drug in a placebo. We want to know whether or not the experimental game, you know, the action game with all of these demands produces bigger effects than the Than the control game, ⁓ another commercially successful game with no kind of action features. Right. And what what exactly is it that I mean they're being trained and then they're being trained, and then after their training, they're going to perform a test. Like what what does this test consist of? Yeah, sure. So these are all really kind of sterile standard psychology tests. So ⁓ you know, they might you know, have a screen flashed really quickly and they're looking for a particular target anywhere in a broad field of view. So we're kind of measuring how quickly can they can they pick out information from their peripheral vision. ⁓ they might be asked to like track a bunch of circles moving around on the screen. ⁓ and we ask how many circles can they track simultaneously, kind of the capacity of their attention. We might ask them to make a really speeded button press anytime they see a per a certain type of stimulus and then not press a button when they see another. So basically measuring kind of their ability to both respond quickly and inhibit responses. ⁓ so these don't look anything like video games. These look like psychology tests. They are like squares and circles and letters. ⁓ and so that's one reason, you know, another kind of interesting point about the effect of the games is that we know that if you just like have someone practice basically anything over and over and over again, they'll get better at it. But often they don't get better at anything else. ⁓ things that, you know, as soon as you change something in a little way, often people won't get much better at it. So ⁓ for instance, ⁓ there's work on actually within the gaming world, ⁓ on Tetris. ⁓ if people play lots and lots of Tetris, you might think that ⁓ they're getting better at like learning to like mentally rotate or something like that. In practice, they're just learning a lot about those seven pieces. So if you get different pieces or you change the game in some way, they don't like necessarily show any giant advantage. ⁓ and so the fact that playing the action games then leads people to perform better on these really standard tests of multitasking or visual attention or basic visual perception that don't look like games is another reason that they've been of interest to the field. Right. So what you're saying is that it's primarily at least based on on the science and our current understanding, is that it's primarily action games that are ⁓ that make people perform better at certain tasks? Yeah. So I mean the ones though kind of the the broadest idea of the field is that ⁓ the things that you're gonna get better at are the ones that kind of are heavily we call it loaded upon, ⁓ you know, like heavy demands in the game itself. So for instance in action games, you've got to make really Quick, accurate ⁓ motor movements. So like speed of processing is important. You often have to monitor a pretty wide field of view because things could appear at the edges of the screen. So peripheral processing, excuse me, is important. You often have to keep track of like multiple moving things. ⁓ And so the types of perceptual and cognitive advantages that we see align with that. So for instance, we see you have big effects in. Visual attention, the ability to like pick out relevant information and suppress irrelevant information. But things like verbal skills that aren't really there's no demands on verbal skills in these games really. we don't really see any changes there. So it's not like the action games improve everything. They're improving the things that are are really demanded by those games. Right. So ⁓ presumably ⁓ mul multitasking could be could be one of them. A sustained about of focus, perhaps? Yeah, I mean, so sustained attention is certainly another one that that shows up in there. ⁓ you know, in lots of lots of games you do have to like basically sit and wait and hide. ⁓ and so one thing I'd say is that ⁓ you know, one thing that's changed a lot is the game space. So when we first started studying games, really the only games that had those characteristics were first person shooter games, right? Like this was Still very early. Actually, my senior thesis, the game we used was Wolpenstein. ⁓ it's one of the earliest ⁓ kind of 3D shooters. now, you know, in 2026, there's lots of game genres outside of shooters that have some of these characteristics, right? So MOBAs have some of these characteristics, real-time strategy games have some of these characteristics. ⁓ action RPGs have some of these characteristics. And so really what matters is like, does the particular game load upon these? cognitive abilities. ⁓ and yeah, now there's there's more games than just shooters that have that that aspect or have those aspects. Yeah. And I mean, I understand why you or your focus would improve. I and s understand why your your vision could improve. how you are more likely to be able to filter out useless information and solely focus on things that are relevant for the task at hand. But I can also imagine perhaps with a game like Age of Empires or something that is probably less intense at the moment and and requires less like hand eye coordination, perhaps, but does include a lot of strategizing, even competitive Pokemon play, right? I mean, some of these players have to think like maybe five, six, ⁓ eight 10 steps ahead and and really imagine what their opponent is going to do. So it's a very different style of game, but I can imagine that those types of game, more strategy ⁓ types of games, similar to why chess is considered a good brain exercise, right? Is there also any any science being done on on those types of games at the moment? Yeah, I mean, those are hard and like chess is actually a a good example where I would say results are kind of at best mixed there. ⁓ you know, ⁓ partially because lots of chess, ⁓ you're learning kind of routines that work for chess, right? ⁓ so obviously early game, you're learning opening lines. ⁓ but even like, you know, mid game, end game, you're learning kind of strategies that work for chess and kind of working through strategies that work for chess. You do have to look ahead, but you have to look ahead in the chess space. And so like the question is always, is that going to then transfer to other things? ⁓ and that's where kind of ⁓ oftentimes the learning ends up being surprisingly specific. There's actually a really ⁓ famous result in chess where ⁓ you know, early work had suggested, you know, chess players had this really, you know, massive memory ⁓ for like chess pieces, right? You know, you showed them a a board of chess pieces and they could kind of reconstruct the board, you know, put, you know, many, many, many pieces back where they were. ⁓ way more than someone who had no chess experience. And then it turned out if you just put the pieces in random places rather than in places where they would be in a chess game, that advantage fell apart, right? ⁓ so it wasn't that they were necessarily had like good memory. They could reconstruct what a chess game would look like. But if you had pieces where pieces would never show up in a chess game, that advantage didn't hold. And so that's kind of more often the case is that when people are are really practicing a skill, they're learning something that really applies to that one and and not much else. So for I agree, like games like Age of Empires, you do have to like do kind of a lot of long term planning because the way that you invest early resources will impact how later decisions can be made. The question is always then, you know, it's like, ⁓ will that impact how you like plan your finances or other things in the real world? ⁓ and those are, yeah, they're just like difficult studies to do in practice. So I think there's definitely interest in other types of games. ⁓ you know, ⁓ kind of more planning focused games. Actually one of my graduate students is very interested in planning focused games. ⁓ there's people who are interested in like fighting ⁓ games, rhythm games. ⁓ so I think the message isn't that like action games have effect and other games don't, but ⁓ I think that's the area where we know the most about what they do. ⁓ you know, I think other games probably have ⁓ effects as well. How broad they are is always the question. Yeah, and I also ⁓ assume that it's like kind of easier to to have accurate science about the benefits of ⁓ a shooter or more reliable results rather not easier per se but if you can test so how fast someone will react or how fast someone is able to recognize the only relevant dot on a screen and is able to filter out ⁓ non-relevant aspects of this exercise is probably easier to test on subjects than how well are these people able to plan their lives after they started playing Age of Empires, for example. Even like the simple psych tasks of planning are are kind of ⁓ a little bit fraught, like, you know, ⁓ so it is the case that as you move higher and higher kind of in in in cognition, our capacity to make simple measures of them kind of falls apart because they're inherently not simple measures. So It's definitely the case that we are better at measuring cogni you know, certain types of cognitive skills than others. And that does also align with the types of skills that have been focused on in the action gaming literature. Yeah. And how how long does one have to play these types of video games, the shooters, in order to see some of these cognitive benefits? Yeah. ⁓ so I mean we've done train like you know, ⁓ like most learning things, you know, like more tends to be better. ⁓ although the relationship's not linear. Like, you know, most things it's it's pretty saturating. ⁓ we've seen effects in as few as, you know, ten hours, ⁓ but they're not that big. ⁓ you know. Often now we're having people play for somewhere between forty and sixty hours, I would say. ⁓ which is a drop in the bucket compared to like how people actually play in their lives. ⁓ a couple of things. Though that we kind of usually note there is that ⁓ the way that we train people in the lab, ⁓ you know, aligns with like best practices in all learning. So often when people are like playing just for fun, you know, they're playing like, you know, multi-hour sessions. ⁓ you know, we have people play for usually no more than an hour at a time. ⁓ you know, if you think about like, you know, if you know, doing an hour of weightlifting is good. Doing ten hours of weightlifting all at once isn't ten times better. Like oftentimes it's it's worse, right? ⁓ so you get these diminishing returns, right? You know, you've ⁓ so an hour for us seems to be a pretty good spot where ⁓ if you train for more than that, you don't get any like extra benefits. So like if you train for and actually this is a really famous result in all of learning science, like if you ⁓ practice something for an hour a day for ten days, you will get way more benefit than if you say practice five hours a day for two days. Right. ⁓ and so distributing the practice through time is really important. So we have people play an hour a day, give them time to like sleep and consolidate their learning. ⁓ we also kind of make the difficulty really progress ⁓ such that they're always kind of just at the edge of what they can do, which isn't necessarily where people like to play games. ⁓ people like to be successful and But being successful means that you have less to learn. Like if you are dominating a game, you kind of don't have that much to learn. And so we're kind of keeping people in a place that's like not where a game designer would keep people. ⁓ because it's a little bit frustrating. It's a little bit too hard for them. But being in a place where it's a little bit too hard for you is where you have the most to learn. ⁓ so we're not just having people play the game as they would in their in their daily lives. We're kind of ⁓ having them play the game in a way that we know will maximize their learning. So distributing it through time, keeping the difficulty appropriate, these kinds of things. That's interesting that you mentioned that because that's exactly one of the questions I had is I presume that if a game is too easy, there's not really much plasticity happening. But if a game is too difficult, then probably you're also not learning very much if if you just spawn and immediately get killed. I mean Presumably there's also not not much learning happening there. So this sweet spot of yeah, being slightly uncomfortable, failing, then succeeding, and then failing again and then succeeding again, seems to be the the sweet spot. Wha why why do you think that is? Why is plasticity happening when we are in such a state? Yeah, I mean, think the the simplest way to think about it is that the air signals have to be informative. Right. You have to like know which way to drive the system. So if you ⁓ we actually had a stud, you know, ⁓ you know, we're ⁓ had a study we're funded by a group that wanted us to use an online only shooter game. ⁓ and we don't usually we always use single player shooter games because we can control the difficulty of the bots. They wanted us to use this online game that they had developed. ⁓ but because we have naive participants. They had never played a shooter game. You can imagine what would happen if you stick someone who's like literally never used keyboard and mouse in like a modern shooter game. They basically spent their whole time, as you know, like basically trying to crouch and then dying. Right. ⁓ and in that situation, there's no good way for the system to know how to even change, right? Like, what was the cause of the failure? And thus what do I need to like, what direction do I need to move my systems to reduce the chance of failure? ⁓ if you're in a place where the error signals are uninformative, like I have no idea what happened or how I could possibly fix that. There's no really good way for the system to adapt. Like it it doesn't know, right? Like, you know, if we're kind of chasing a gradient, ⁓ if I don't know which way the gradient's facing, then I don't know which way to go. Right. ⁓ and so you need to be in a place where you're making errors, because that suggests you have something to learn, but they have to be errors that you that there's some inkling of how to fix it, right? Which way to go to make this better. And so that's kind of, I think, generally across learning, you know, not just in gaming, but but much more broadly, people try to keep people as in this this zone where they're making mistakes, but they're making mistakes that ⁓ are potentially understandable or correctable. Right. And there's one study I wanted to discuss that ⁓ yeah, managed to to make its way to the mainstream media as well. Which is the one where surgeons that were gamers, I'm I'm not sure which game they were playing, but I think just gamers in general were much less likely to make mistakes. And I I wanted to know is that like it's always interesting, you mentioned it in the beginning of our conversation there too. It's interesting to know like are surgeons that enjoy gaming just better at their job because people who tend to like these types of games are perhaps more skilled at these fine motor skills and that's maybe why they enjoy the game so much. Or is it really the game that's keeping them very sharp and that's actually helping them in their day to day life at work? Yeah, I mean so and ⁓ there have been a ⁓ a number of studies kind of correlational of the the ones that you mentioned where, you know, they they ask whether surgeons are gamers in their life and have shown, you know, they're ⁓ often like one of the bigger effects is just that they are quicker without making more mistakes. And like that's always better for surgical outcomes, right? Like if you do the same surgery but do it a little bit quicker, there's just like less risk for, you know, infection and and other things, assuming that you're going faster but not being more error prone. ⁓ There's been a couple of studies I can think of, two or three where they have done like the training type of setup and then had people do ⁓ you know, these are always in surgical simulators, right? ⁓ you know, ⁓ and one I think actually even trained people on Unreal, I want to say it used Unreal Tournament and showed like a similar pattern of results ⁓ where, you know, ⁓ the people trained on the action game were were performing better in the surgical simulator ⁓ afterwards. ⁓ and so yeah, I mean sir like especially often those focus on like ⁓ laparoscopic kind of surgery. ⁓ and those have lots of even stronger commonalities than than other types of real world things with gaming, right? 'Cause like, you know, you you're using joystick to control something on a camera. So you've gotta do similar types of transformations. And so that's a pretty natural, like, you know, ⁓ extension of of what gaming could benefit. Yeah, no, for for sure. And I imagine that it's if there was ⁓ a test or or an exercise that for example surgeons could do that made them twenty five, sometimes thirty percent less likely to make mistakes or perhaps make them do their work faster, like you say, without making more mistakes. That would be a huge benefit, right? And everyone would be the the the training would be mandatory for sure if it's ⁓ shown to have such benefits. What are we doing with the the gaming science at the moment? Is it being applied in a way that you think is helpful? Are we bringing this to the real world? Yeah, I mean, so the question for real world ⁓ training is always, is it better to do a broad type of training, like, you know, playing video games, or is it better, you know, with let's say surger ⁓ surgery, is it better to do something that's a little bit more kind of in the in the space, right? So like using surgical simulators, right? ⁓ you know, the same with like, you know, ⁓ there's work showing that ⁓ previous gaming experience is useful for ⁓ ⁓ piloting. Is it better to like, you know, a better use of time to have people playing the games with the hope that it transfers to those real world skills or to do the simulator that you know is going to be much closer to that, right? So the advantage of the gaming is that it impacts lots and lots of types of skills, but often ⁓ it's kind of necessarily the case that it's going to do so less powerfully than a type of training that's really titrated for the task itself. Right. ⁓ and so I think that's often where the The consideration and the trade-off lies is like, should we be training people for the exact tasks that they're going to be working on, or should we try to train people for lots and lots of different tasks, right? And some of that depends on things that are difficult to know, like how many different tasks are they going to have to do, right? If they're going to have to do one of five different types of surgeries and those don't have that much variance to them, it might be better to just train on the simulator, right? ⁓ if they're You have no idea what they're going to be doing in the next 10 years, then maybe you want some broader skills, right? ⁓ so I think that's often where the translational questions, you know, start to lie is like what's if we have limited time to train people, how do we wanna devote that time, right? And so I think oftentimes it's sensible to try to train for the exact skills because you'll get better transfer if you're doing something that's much, much closer to the real skill that they're gonna be using than something that's further, right? Yeah, no, I agree. It bet that makes sense. And yeah, I can I can also imagine that that there are some jobs, if we're just talking specifically about first person shooters, that there are some jobs that benefit more from people playing these games and therefore have improved vision and therefore are able to distinguish between what's important and what's less important, like the the first thing that comes to mind is an air traffic controller, for example, very high demanding job that has very ⁓ that has a lot of similarities with gaming, in my opinion. In fact, there are many games that simulate the experience of being an air traffic ⁓ controller. ⁓ what do you think are some of the other fields where playing first person shooters could be beneficial? Yeah, I mean the the places that, you know, often often what I'll say is like, you know, ⁓ we constrain our lives to not put lots of demands on some of these skills because like if that was the case, then like we'd make a mistake and then we'd die, right? Like we don't want. ⁓ so like driving is a really good example where like we don't actually want to put demands on our peripheral processing or, you know, ⁓ some of the other skills there ⁓ because of the the risk associated with it. So we constrain our driving environments really strongly. ⁓ to reduce cognitive demands. ⁓ and even still it's not a you know, it's it's the way you would expect that like most accidents are happening at intersections or these kinds of things. ⁓ so in practice, like we try not to put demands in these places in real world. ⁓ there are obviously jobs though that have more of it, you know. ⁓ those in like law enforcement or defense, ⁓ you know, piloting is certainly one of them. you know, The other place that we often think about are people who have deficits, right? ⁓ you know, whether they are ⁓ kind of part of natural aging, ⁓ whether they've experienced some kind of ⁓ traumatic brain injury or you know, stroke, something like this, where ⁓ there's rehabilitation needed. So those are kind of the two populations, you know. ⁓ I'm very much a basic scientist at heart, ⁓ but when we're thinking about like How do we use this basic science out in the world? It's either those who have jobs that are more demanding ⁓ or those whose capacities need to be augmented. ⁓ and often we're spending more time, ⁓ frankly, thinking about the the latter. ⁓ you know, how do we rehabilitate? Yeah. And that's interesting ⁓ point ⁓ you raised there is ⁓ for for rehabilitation, but presumably also to prevent things like ⁓ Alzheimer's or or deterioration of ⁓ certain brain disease. Is there any ⁓ science being done on gaming and elderly people? How it prevents ⁓ perhaps some form of of of brain deterioration there? Because I think what what you often see in people as soon as they retire They don't really have much cognitive load anymore. And especially if they're lonely, you see that people can yeah, deteriorate pretty fast. Whereas people who end up working longer and have a lot of social life that forces them to keep using their brain every single day. If they keep reading, they keep making puzzles, whatever, they seem to stay healthy for a much longer period of time. So I was curious to know if there's any science being done with regards to gaming and and the elderly as well. Yeah, I mean I think there's certainly ⁓ research showing that like previous history of gaming is is somewhat protective of of decline. ⁓ but as you said, like you know one the better ⁓ better predictors of reduced decline is just continued mental engagement. And so We tend to think of gaming as something that could be part of a you know, if you think of like a healthy cognitive diet, right? Like, you know, there's kind of lots of ⁓ ways that you can stay cognitively engaged and gaming can be a part of it, right? And I think, you know, to the the point of say social interactions, like, you know, when I first started studying games, gaming was very much thought of as like, you know, the the the teenager alone in his basement like playing a game by himself. Whereas, you know, the modern space of gaming is is very online. It's very social, right? ⁓ often it's people playing with friends or people that they know in some way. ⁓ and so it has like a a social component to it. ⁓ you know, as well. So yeah, I I think continued gaming, obviously the types of games that are appropriate ⁓ differ. And that'll also there's There's pretty big what we call cohort effects, where like my generation is probably the first generation. So I'm forty-five now. They really grew up with games. Like I had a Nintendo when I was five or six, something like that. And it's always kind of been a part of my life. ⁓ like my parents, that's certainly not true of. And so, ⁓ you know, there's these kind of difficulties that that you need to work through when trying to train people that didn't grow up with games. ⁓ like in my lab, we call some of the meta knowledge about games, we call it red key logic. ⁓ the idea if you find a red key in a video game, often it opens a red door. It doesn't make any sense outside of like knowledge about video games. But if you don't have this higher level knowledge, it can be hard to play the games. ⁓ so like we've trained ⁓ older adults on I don't remember if it was a Call of Duty or a battlefield, but it was a kind of corridor style shooter game, right? Where it looks like you can go anywhere, but in practice, you're like being rooted along a corridor, right? ⁓ and these older adults who hadn't have any experience with games, they'll like see an enemy up ahead and like very sensibly think, I should try to go around this enemy, right? ⁓ and so they'll like turn around and they'll like do their best to avoid these enemies, not realizing that the way these games are structured. Is that the presence of an enemy is telling you that's the way to go. Right. ⁓ and so not having some of the high level knowledge of how games work actually makes the games a little bit less ⁓ effective as training, right? 'Cause you're not doing some of the things you should be doing. ⁓ and so that will certainly change as like my generation starts to age, right? ⁓ you know, we'll we'll have the ⁓ and I'm I'm saying that as if I haven't already started to age, but ⁓ you know, have have more of that meta knowledge of how of how games work and thus can engage with a broader set of games, right? So like when I have my parents play even like little simple mini games, often, you know, kind of explain some of the rules to them in a way that if you had grown up with games, it would feel really natural. Right. So that's certainly a a challenge with training older adults on like commercial games is that they they expect certain gaming knowledge. And they expect certain types of skills. And so they're not always aligned well with an older population. ⁓ and so I think for that you just need a different set of games. Yeah, no, that that makes that makes a lot of sense. And do you think we've we've briefly touched on it in the beginning of our conversation, but of course when when the this field of science first arose, ⁓ I think the general consensus or or general opinion, at least from from a from a previous generation, was kind of negative around gaming. Like you also mentioned, like a very yeah, perhaps lonely activity. The the teenager in in his bedroom, ⁓ just not participating in the real world, not engaging with other people. Do you think like these last well 20 years have have made a significant change in how the general public thinks about gaming and also its potential benefits? Yeah, I mean, ⁓ probably in lots of ways. I think that's definitely true, right? ⁓ part of it is ⁓ you know, this this cohort effect, right? Where, you know, the people who are really negative about games in, you know, the nineteen eighties, ⁓ you know, they may no longer be with us, ⁓ right, you know, it's ⁓ forty five years ago. ⁓ Whereas now my generation that grew up with games are kind of in this position and and with have a less negative disposition towards them. I think also, you know, anytime a form of media comes around, people end up like, you know, there's a couple of terms that get used, like technophobia, ⁓ moral panic, right? Like you've seen it with lots of different types of media, right? Like people were very concerned that like comic books were suddenly gonna make everyone incredibly violent. And then they were concerned that television would do this. ⁓ they're concerned that movies would do this, right? And so I think some of the violence in games also led to a lot of concern, right? ⁓ and that's one that's a really complicated ⁓ area of study, right? But I think globally, you know, it's like games now saturate everything and we don't suddenly see like, you know, every kid is, you know, ⁓ violent, right? ⁓ you know, gaming is just as popular in the, you know, ⁓ in Netherlands as is in the United States, ⁓ obviously we have different baseline levels of say gun violence in in in the countries, but like you're not suddenly seeing like, you know, ⁓ gaming is increasing and like teen violence is just going off the charts, right? Even though pretty much all kids are playing video games and many of them are playing games that are pretty ⁓ aggressive. ⁓ and so I think as it basically became like a normal part of culture, the same way that like television has, like some of those concerns, right? Like This was very new. It was very different. And often people will will panic a little bit when they see that. And then, you know, games have now been part of really mainstream society for for 40 years now. So like not much negative effect. And I think that has calmed some of the the moral panic as well. Yeah, I think so too. And like I said previously, I think also we have bigger fish to fry with social media addiction, doom screen. Scrolling, people being on on TikTok 10 hours a day watching short form video content is ⁓ yeah, more harmful than ⁓ most ⁓ games will ever be, probably. What about virtual reality? I can imagine that even you there's shooters in virtual reality that that is I've I've played some of them. It's probably a very intense experience. Is there any ⁓ science being done specifically on ⁓ VR shooters? Yes. ⁓ I mean, there's ⁓ still technical issues with with VR, though it's always improving ⁓ that ⁓ they cause the issue like you know, simulator sickness, for instance. And some of it is unresolvable. ⁓ right? Like, ⁓ do you think how like a VR system works? ⁓ some of the cues that we use to depth, ⁓ For instance, like how fat or thin our lens is ⁓ will tell us how far away things are. Right. ⁓ the actual screen via VR system is here. So it's telling you there's one distance. But then the disparity, the difference in the image between the two eyes, is telling you a different distance. And oftentimes when you get mismatches between different sensory systems, so whether it's the multiple ways of of measuring depth. If it's your vestibular system that detects like body acceleration is telling you you're moving in one way and your visual system tells you you're moving another way, people will get sick. It's often white people can't read in cars, for instance. ⁓ until lots of people get sick in VR environments ⁓ and don't really like it for that reason. ⁓ it's also the case that like the field of view is not as wide actually as like even the the the monitor that I'm on right now ⁓ has a wider field of view than most VR systems. ⁓ the there's always a little bit of lag, right? Because it's trying to change the field of view as you move your head, but that has to be detected and then transmitted. ⁓ and that lag can can have some issues with it. So ⁓ you know, I think the system is certain like there's certain things that that technology will be able to improve. Some things it's less clear. And so I think people have been really excited about the promise of VR games for a really long time, but it continues to be honestly a pretty niche market. ⁓ and so I think part of the question for me, like actually, you know, I had this question with the you know, the the rise of three D televisions is like, why is this better? Like in what way is this better than than what we already have, right? Like, you know, when I was watching say I was watching soccer, you know, on my regular T V, I was never like, This would be so much better if I could tell if this person was behind this person. Like I can tell if this person's behind this person without the three D T V. ⁓ and Yeah, I the 3D TVs, I don't even think they still make 3D TVs. ⁓ and I think they'll I think all those channels have gone away. ⁓ and so for BR, I think honestly, in it like my opinion is still looking for a use case where this is so obviously better than just a standard setup that it warrants the cost associated with it and some of the downsides that come with it. ⁓ and so, like, is it actually more immersive? It's unclear whether that's true, right? If you watch someone playing on a regular monitor, they are moving their body. They're actually very active. It's not like they are not immersed in it because it's not wearing the headset. So ⁓ but some of the things I think will improve. Like if you could ⁓ yeah, if all of the visual stuff was matched up, ⁓ and had the right field of view, had the n lack of lag, I think there's lots of potential and and things have already improved a ton. The other that's just problematic in the game space, and I don't know if it can be fixed, is ⁓ you know, one of the purported advantages of VR is you can use your body in a way. ⁓ and it's not obvious to me that that's ⁓ an advantage. So like if you remember the Microsoft Connect, ⁓ you know, where there's like a little screen, right? And they're like, ⁓ it's gonna be the next thing. And people hated it, partially 'cause like I don't wanna have to squat a bunch. Right. Like in my like I'd rather press C to crouch. I don't want to have to squat. I'm forty-five years old. Like, ⁓ I don't want to have to jump a bunch of times. Like, I'd rather press the spacebar to jump. Right. And so, like, the reason we play video games is not to be limited by our own bodies. And so, like, VR is like, ⁓ you're in it. It's like, I don't know if I want me to be in it, right? Like, I want to be a a video game character. And that one, I think, you know. see how that one that one works, but you know, ⁓ the the being in your own body in lots of ways runs counter to like what makes games fun. I agree. Yeah. I hadn't thought of it that way, but it's true. I've I have ⁓ a meta quest ⁓ three headset and it's also I think part of when you put it on for the first time it's this novel experience and it's Incredible, right? The things they're able to make. I'm flying a plane, I'm I'm I'm running through streets and I'm shooting. I mean it's fun, but it's also kind of exhausting in a way. But I think it might have more of a place in an arcade hall, for example, where you're going to play like a short session and where it's cool as an experience. Maybe you'll do it with a group of people from your office or whatever. and then played for thirty minutes and then not again for for a long time. Whereas yeah, these these longer sessions, daily sessions, ⁓ it's probably less great for for that. I agree. If so it could be cohort effects as well, right? You know, it's like if if a generation starts growing up with them, their experience of it might be very different, right, than those that that didn't grow up with it. So ⁓ it can be hard to tell how ⁓ the presence of things developmentally will will change the the the the time course or or the popularity. Yeah. And w if we make it a bit practical, let's say I know it's not per se beneficial for for every every type of job, but let's say someone wants to improve maybe their their focus, they want to perfor ⁓ have some of those those benefits ⁓ we discussed earlier. What could be a healthy gaming protocol? ⁓ which which type of games, which games maybe specifically would be good to start and what will be a a good amount of of time to play and and how often if one wants to both enjoy themselves by playing these games but is perhaps not a gamer at this this point. But wants those benefits. Yeah, I mean, so yes, definitely like the entrance problem to modern gaming is a hard one, right? If you are not a gamer, like entering the space is is hard. And so ⁓ you know, often the friendlier ways to enter are games that have some kind of single player capacity. ⁓ so right, like if you're playing in a online only game, that is always going to have ⁓ like difficulty scaling problems. ⁓ and so like games where you can play for yourself and like, you know, if you need to go slow, you're gonna go slow. ⁓ you know, I think that's often the the easier way to get into games. And then, you know, I I think ⁓ Finding things that you like, ⁓ right? Like trying enough things to know what you like. ⁓ you know, there's lots of different types of games, like, you know, reading Steam reviews or, you know, reviews online, you know, ⁓ finding game types that you like and then what are games that are like this, right? Because, you know, there's it's obviously a really big space and you know, not everyone is going to be attracted to like the ⁓ you know, like I'm playing Borderlands four right now with my younger brother. Not everyone likes looter shooters. I was like, well, pick a different type of game, right? ⁓ I think that's gonna be more important than anything else. And then variety, right? Like, ⁓ oftentimes, you know, the human tendency is to like want to specialize. It's like, ⁓ I'm getting really, really good at this game. Honestly, by the time you're really, really good at it, if the goal is like to ⁓ be cognitively healthy. You kinda want you want new stuff, right? Cause like once you are no longer learning, ⁓ that's not to say there's like I'm I don't think I'm getting better at Borderlands four. I betcha my brother and I have like eighty hours in that game. But like that's not what it's not why I'm playing the game, right? I'm not playing it for that purpose. Like if the goal is ⁓ you know, staying, you know, cognitively engaged, then you need to basically still be learning, ⁓ and like doing switching of things. ⁓ and often that's frustrating, right? Like, you know, ⁓ You know, I'll have my parents, you know, play some games and they're like, ⁓ I've got the hang of it. It's like, ⁓ that's great. Now you gotta play a different one, right? ⁓ and then go through the frustrating part of like not being good at it again. ⁓ but that is kind of the essence of of what keeps us engaged, right? It's the same as other things that ⁓ you know, are are good for general cognition, learning a language, right? Like frustrating early on. you know, but ⁓ is really cognitively engaging, engages lots of different ⁓ subsystems. So, you know, I think that's kind of how I approach ⁓ you know, when people ask about gaming is like, it's a big space. Figure out what you like. ⁓ try out lots of things, right? and most people who say that they are not gamers, it is because they haven't tried a big enough space of things, right? ⁓ and I wouldn't worry too much if it's, you know, ⁓ Super, super like, you know, peripheral processy, these kinds of things. Lots of these things are gonna have more of of that than daily life, right? Even something like, ⁓ what's this silly game? Like ⁓ actually, I love Stardew Valley. ⁓ like Stardew Valley, right? Like pretty slow, pretty cozy, but you know, you gotta fight in minds and you do have to like, you know, there's there's more than than day to day life there. ⁓ same with like Minecraft. So, you know, I think finding things that that are engaging are as important as anything. Right. And is there something what a lot of people get wrong about ba ⁓ gaming and the potential benefits of gaming that frustrates you? ⁓ I mean I think the biggest thing that I see, and you still see this in the literature, is that people ⁓ use video games as one big category that's the same, right? ⁓ you know, and it's easy, you know, to do that. So often, you know, I'll see headlines that are like, ⁓ video game good for kids at school. It's like, ⁓ like video games good for elder. Like, you know, video ⁓ video games bad in blah. ⁓ and like often, you know, when I give I give talks to like parents groups, I'll replace the word video game with like foods. ⁓ it's like foods are good for you. It's like, ⁓ like what food, right? Like it depends, right? Like ⁓ like what is the content of the food? How much of it are you few of it are you eating over what period of time? Like all of these same factors matter for games, right? ⁓ what's the content of the games? How are they used? How long are they used? In what dosages are they used? ⁓ and so like in terms of like the science of games, those things matter a ton. ⁓ and often, you know, like, ⁓ are are video games good? It's like I don't know, like depends, like which which games, right? Like ⁓ you know, in in in in what ways. ⁓ and For parents, what I often will say, like it's less a big problem now that like people my age have kids, but ⁓ when that was less the case, you know, it'd be like, well, have your kid explain the game. Like kids love being smarter than adults. and you know, that's a a good way to know what's in the games and also to like interact with with your kids in a healthy way. So ⁓ I think that's probably my biggest frustration and as someone who works in this field is video games being treated as a monolith rather than a million different, fundamentally different experiences that will all have different impacts. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the gaming is is quite quite the the category, quite broad. And I love the the food anal analogy that you you made there. Is there anything ⁓ that you're you're you're currently working on or something that is exciting that's happening within the the science of gaming field? Yeah, I mean I think ⁓ I mean one thing that we've been interested in is the idea of of games kind of ⁓ teaching what what's been in psychology for a really long time called learning to learn. Basically where it teaches you to be better at learning new skills. ⁓ and, you know, that's ⁓ a a pretty powerful type of generalization where like You know, you're generally good at like extracting information from the environment and figuring out what things are and are not important, right? ⁓ you know, because if you play lots and lots of different games, well, you can't just be like, okay, you know, here's what friendlies look like and this is what enemies look like. And I can in every game, look for friendlies, look for enemies. Every game those are different, right? And so as you play game to game to game to game, what you have to get good at is learning to figure out what are targets, what's what's clutter, what's distraction. ⁓ and so really what you need to be taught is how to learn that quickly. ⁓ and so ⁓ yeah the idea that that playing games teaches you to learn some of these things more quickly than you otherwise would have, I think is is one that we're we're pretty interested in as a as a possible impact of of games. That it's it's at least teaching you things that are Or teaching skills that allow you to learn new skills more quickly. ⁓ and we've we've seen this in certain kind of even real worldish kind of places where like, you know, learn you know, people who are playing games are learning piloting skills more quickly. you know, they don't necessarily start better because like, you know, you don't know what you're looking for to begin with. ⁓ but you can really quickly figure out what you're doing. And so that that I think is a ⁓ an interesting possible outcome of gaming. Yeah, and it makes sense too, right? Because I see there's a lot of ⁓ football soccer players from ⁓ well from the Dutch team, for example, but there are also ⁓ wa examples from ⁓ non Dutch people, of course, but ⁓ there's many ⁓ professional footballers that are now very good at playing pedal, for example, or golf. Well the sports are completely different, they are. But of course having like a baseline athleticism because of being a professional football player is very helpful, presumably. But I can't help but think that there's just also something about the skills that they learned that the the foot eye coordination, hand eye coordination, ⁓ being able to to get a feeling for a ball, ⁓ that it somehow translates to these other sports as well. Is that kind of kind of the idea there? Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's similar to the idea of like trying to train up athleticism, right? Where you can more quickly adapt in new situations. And so that would be the yeah, the sports equivalent of of what we're thinking about the games doing. And and that that space, like doing more things early on would teach you kind of a broader set of skills that you can use with your body and how do I adapt my body. So ⁓ the Dutch team's actually my my I mean, obviously I'm rooting for the US and the World Cup, but I'm a very big Liverpool s ⁓ supporter. So Dutch is my number two. ⁓ given the number of Liverpool players on the on the Dutch team. Yeah, I mean ⁓ finally we we showed a good game ⁓ against Sweden ⁓ last time. We're playing again tomorrow ⁓ for at least we have to stay up until one AM. to to watch the match, so it isn't ideal. But ⁓ no, yeah, presumably the matches are a ⁓ a better time for ⁓ for you. ⁓ finally, Sean, we we've touched on so many interesting things and I've I've learned a lot today. Is there something we haven't touched on that you would still like to mention or think is important to emphasize before we wrap it up today? Yeah, no, I think ⁓ I think we've hit kind of all of the really big picture things, right? ⁓ in terms of kind of the the the way people play, the differences across play. You know, I think ⁓ one interesting place the science is going as well is it was it was much easier to do science on games when everything was linear, kind of corridor style, 'cause like everyone had the same experiences. But, you know, given the openness of games now and the kind of the the permissiveness to different play styles, ⁓ it's Both frustrating and exciting as a scientist, right? Where if I know that someone played a hundred hours of Skyrim, like did they play it as a stealth archer or did they play it as a hack and slash? And these are not the same, right? So even knowing that they played a given game for a hundred hours doesn't tell us what we need to know about their experiences. And so that both creates a lot of variety that we can ask interesting questions of, but kind of forces us to. Dig in more. ⁓ so you know, I'm I'm kind of excited about like the openness of games now that they let all these different play styles exist. ⁓ so you know, I think that's ⁓ an exciting and also like as a scientist, the fact that it's increasingly the case that people's entire gaming history is online and saved, ⁓ is just a crazy resource to have, right? Like we no longer rely on people having to remember what game they played when they were eight. We can just look at their Steam library and see exactly what they did or their Xbox Live account or whatever it might be. So I think it's exciting times for the study of games. It sure is. It sure is. And ⁓ I I think for for for gaming in general, I believe tomorrow ⁓ GTA six can be pre-ordered, which is ⁓ yeah, without a doubt, ⁓ the most anticipated game of all time. ⁓ I'm not sure whether playing GTA has many of the benefits we discussed today, but maybe certain missions or certain aspects of the game ⁓ could have it. So people that are going to play that game and and want to improve their cognitive ⁓ yeah cognitive capabilities ⁓ may ⁓ have to feel ⁓ le a little ⁓ less guilty if they ⁓ if they play ⁓ forty hours straight once that game ⁓ comes out. But yeah, Sean, thank you so much. Where can people go if they ⁓ want to keep up with the the work and the science ⁓ you're doing? ⁓ yeah, ⁓ I mean my ⁓ I'm pretty ⁓ well I'm easy to find if you look for ⁓ see Sean Green. If you search for Sean Green, you get the very well-known baseball player. ⁓ so I am not the most famous Sean Green, but ⁓ C Sean Green or Sean Green University of Wisconsin. ⁓ you'll you'll get all of my research. That's exactly what ⁓ happened ⁓ to me, but ⁓ I did manage ⁓ to find you in the end. Thank you so much, ⁓ Sean. I really appreciate you and ⁓ yeah, maybe ⁓ until ⁓ next time. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks so much.