Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Playing Video Games is an Addiction worse than Alcohol

Video Games is a double edge sword.

One end of the spectrum is fun.

The other end is addition.

It cannot be honed in by assessing the number of hours somebody play.

I will deal with the physiology in brief later.

The game console developers know how to entice a guy or girl.

Their objective is to make money out of this misery, the addiction.

It is all about enchepheline stimulation.

They brain's enchephelin production is static but the individual variation is slight.

Ultimate goal is Ecstacy and I put this into some categories in an order of frequency.

1. Number one is games or sports.

The addiction has two modes

Players and the Spectators.

Good example is UK after the loss to Italy.

One end or misery lasts more than 90 minutes of play.

The ecstasy of win is also temporary and lasts until the eventual loss.

They game managers have methods like in general elections.

Qualifying games and tournament final every four years.

Olympics is a good example.

2. Number two is politics and elections.
There are very few winners and 99.99 losers.

I will stop at that.

3. Number three is this elite (the delusion within the game players themselves) group called meditators.

Their illusive goal is also very transient Ecstacy.

In Buddha's terminology less than nanoseconds until attaining Arhathship.


4. Number four is the research professor on any field trying to hold onto his or her mis-contrused concept.

A good example is bat woman in China.

5. Number 5 is a confabulating alcoholic.

His goal is also Ecstacy.

I will leave you to decide which one is good for you.

I have deliberately excluded some religious practises and hard drugs in my discussion, religion due to its inherent sensitivity and drugs due to lack of my knowledge of street drugs escalating numbers.


Regarding console games I never thought that game played at wrong frame rate can burn a newly installed GPU.

Of one set the frame rate above 60 for visual effects, it is more than likely the rate of input data does not match the handling capacity of the GPU and before on set of data is sent out (output data) other set coming in jams the sorting capacity of the GPU.

Heating ensures and these circuits are closely  wrapped in wafers in small compact  unit or area without heat sinking capability.

A fan help to a limited level but not any more of the sustained heating while playing a fast game.

Steam Deck should look in to this problem in depth before mass production of its units.


Coming to game physiology and how the console makers let an individual player to believe in stepwise manner that he/she can beat the machine.

Human  can never beat the machine he has built.

So to overcome this inadequacy in feelings he builds games of increasing difficulty to entice the owner of the console.

The Stream Machine has 50,000 games and the Linux repository has over 60,000 applications (not games, that one can use for creativity).

Our nervous system has a big lapse in response to pure electrical.stimulation.

The brain has developed an ingenious strategy to overcome this lag phase.

The brain records this experience embedded in the neural system (how this is done is a mystery and I believe it various from person to  person) as a FALSE memory and retrieve it forwards to the retina.

In other words retina is made to believe it as a true event of NOW not a past event (but in reality it is a past event replayed).

In psychiatric terminology it is an illusion.

The reality is a concept created by man.

So we live in constant illusion and delusion cycles or strategy to overcome over neural deficiency or lag phase.

Coming to analogue devices like a TV or Camera or Cellphone that records all physical events and when delivered to us filter about 95% of the input and display to us about 5% which our retina can (understand ) convert to electrical impulses as true events (series of images cramped into about 36 out of 10,000 or more).

The game box manufacturers know this and they only manipulate frame rate of different events (it is called rendering and rasterization in digital photography in printing for example) and drive the player to Ecstacy level gradually in increasing steps of difficulty.

What the computer does is to filter unnecessary analogue details so that the CPU is not overloaded with unnecessary information.

So buying these fancy New Graphic carda elevated in price is an entry to the grand *Delusion Mode* of industry hype.

If you have  working computer do not throw it away.

If you have lot of  money, then buy a new one with graphics improved (do not buy a graphic card and toil looking for other parts to assemble) and keep your head just above water, since the next version will be advertised soon as next or better option with minor modification to the older one's manufacturing defects.

This is a money game, too.

In other words a grand illusion.

To leave psychiatrists some leeway, I won't use delusion and reserve it for their use.

Mind you psychiatric dictionary has more words (to confuse us all) than combined physics, mathematics and science (pathology has much less) that I calculated once, before writing an article (putative) on memory many moons ago.