Don’t let virtual characters take over your life
View(s):Spending too long in a virtual world could be bad for your real life health, warns a new study. Researchers found computer games and simulations may be duping players into ignoring their own vital health signs. A series of experiments by researchers from Melbourne University showed playing immersive games can actually dampen someone’s response to pain and lead to them potentially caring less about others.
The artificial nature of virtual avatars, with their ‘mechanistic inertness, rigidity and a lack of emotion and warmth’, means extended periods of exposure to them numbs game players.
Experts say as people take on the role of virtual characters during immersive video games and begin identifying increasingly with the non-human characters on the screen, it leads them to forget about their own important body signals in real-life.
Psychologist Dr Ulrich Weger warned of the profound effect the virtual world could be having on human nature.
He said: ‘We see this blurring as a reality of our time, but also as a confused and misleading development that has begun to shape society.
Along with Dr Stephen Loughnan from Melbourne University in Australia, Dr Weger used a simple pain-threshold experiment to see if playing the games had a measurable effect on someone’s ability to recognise their own vital signs. Volunteer gamers were asked about their playing habits and took part in a pain tolerance test that involved retrieving paperclips from a bucket of iced water.
In a second experiment they played either an immersive or a non-immersive computer game before repeating the paperclip test. Their results, published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, showed the immersive gamers could remove ‘significantly’ more paperclips from the bucket, while they were also indifferent to other people’s unhappiness.
The researchers said this suggested the immersive gamers were acting from the perspective of an automaton-like avatar and were desentised to both their own feeling and others’.
© Daily Mail, London
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