The Science Behind Why We Love Playing Video Games
Is it the games? or it’s us?
Video gaming is becoming a social phenomenon. According to recent Newzoo reports, there will be over 2.6 billion gamers in the world, and video game revenues are expected to reach $174.9 million by the end of 2020. While many industries are suffering financial losses during the COVID-19 pandemic, the game industry is thriving. In the U.S., the NPD group reported a record spending of $11.2 billion in the third quarter in 2020 (July—September) on video games, a 24% increase when comparing to the same quarter last year, while a $10.04 billion of spending on video games was reported in the second quarter in 2020 (April-June), up 24 percent when compared to the second quarter a year ago. So why do we like playing video games so much and seemingly even more so during the pandemic?
Video games and our brains
Researchers and scholars have been working hard on understanding the game playing experience. In one of the early studies by Koepp et al. (1988), they examined the neurochemical consequences of video game play. The amount of dopamine was measured during video game play using PET scans. Results…
