The genesis of this reaction may lie in the neurotransmitter dopamine. A number of studies have revealed that game playing triggers dopamine release in the brain, a finding that makes sense, given the instrumental role that dopamine plays in how the brain handles both reward and exploration. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist collaborating with the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University, calls the dopamine system the brain’s “seeking” circuitry, which propels us to explore new avenues for reward in our environment. The game world is teeming with objects that deliver clearly articulated rewards: more life, access to new levels, new equipment, new spells. Most of the crucial work in game interface design revolves around keeping players notified of potential rewards available to them and how much those rewards are needed.
If you create a system in which rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It’s likely those Tactical Ops players in an fMRI machine were able to tolerate the physical discomfort of the machine because the game environment so powerfully stimulated the brain’s dopamine system.
Of course, dopamine is also involved in the addictiveness of drugs. “The thing to remember about dopamine is that it’s not at all the same thing as pleasure,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, who looks at dopamine in a cultural context in his book, Satisfaction. “Dopamine is not the reward; it’s what lets you go out and explore in the first place. Without dopamine, you wouldn’t be able to learn properly.”
The SEEKING emotion is the biggie, as far as I can tell. It's one of the four core, hard-wired emotion systems in the brain. All mammals have it (I assume all living creatures must have it, but I don't know), and it drives most of the behaviors we engage in to stay alive, well, and interested in the goings-on about us.
My biggest surprise, when I first read Panksepp's chapter on SEEKING, is that curiosity isn't an intellectual property, as I'd always thought.
Curiosity is an emotion, one of the core emotions. Curiosity is SEEKING.
For years people thought the SEEKING system was the brain's "pleasure center." That's what I was taught. Psych courses used to regale undergraduates with tales of rats with electrodes implanted in their pleasure centers who would just keep pressing the lever to turn the current on until they died of starvation.
It turns out that was wrong.
The SEEKING system isn't the pleasure center.
The SEEKING system is the go find stuff center.
SEEKING is the hunt.
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Animal and Human Emotions
by Jaak Panksepp
Dopamine neurons report an error in the temporal prediction of reward during learning by Jeffrey R. Hollerman and Wolfram Schultz 1998 Nature Neuroscience volume 1 Number 4 August 1998, pp. 304-309.
Satisfaction: Sensation Seeking, Novelty, and the Science of Finding True Fulfillment by Gregory Berns (ewww...the Scientific American review, posted on Amazon, has just taken this book out of the To Acquire category)
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