and faster learning required to master new skills and abilities. This powerful combination makes you more ambitious and justifiably more optimistic about your odds of success.
For many video game researchers (and video game players!), these neuroscience findings make perfect sense. Gamers, after all, spend on average 80 percent of the time failing when they play their favorite games.12 Without the dopamine rush during game play, surely they would give up much sooner. But the high level of dopamine in the reward circuitry ensures that gamers stay focused, motivated, and determined to succeed. Meanwhile, thanks to the faster learning that occurs with continuous dopamine release, gamers are more likely to improve their skills and eventually achieve their goals.
No wonder frequent gamers work so hard, hour after hour, at their favorite games. Their brains are being primed for increased self-efficacy with every move they make. Scientists know that dopamine is released every time we anticipate feedback from a goal-oriented action—whether in daily life or in games. We get a rush of excitement to find out how we did. It just so happens that when we play video games, we take so many goal-oriented actions, so quickly, and get such immediate feedback, that the dopamine rush is as powerful as amphetamine drugs.
It’s not always beneficial to be optimistic and determined. In some contexts, a predisposition to try harder for more unlikely or difficult rewards can be counterproductive or even pathological—particularly when greater effort is unlikely to actually help. When it comes to gambling, for example, where luck is more of a factor than hard work, this mindset can lead to terrible consequences. Or in the case of a dopamine rush created by a drug like cocaine or nicotine, extreme motivation to achieve a reward (more of the drug) can lead to a dangerous discounting of the health costs involved with actually getting what we want.
But in many more everyday contexts, especially where hard work is likely to produce better results—such as trying to learn something new, completing a difficult assignment, training for a sport, rehabilitating from an injury, or even just trying to pull ourselves out of depression—a neurological bias toward effortful action can produce powerful and positive results.
But does the dopamine rush translate from video games to real-life challenges and problem solving? Do games rewire our brains to be more motivated and work harder only when we’re playing? Or can we translate our increased ambition and self-efficacy to the rest of our lives?
Researchers have found that frequent video gamers do indeed put more effort into difficult problem solving outside their favorite games. One recent study showed that gamers exhibited “a dispositional need to complete difficult tasks” and “the desire to exhibit high standards of performance in the face of frustration.”13 When given a series of easy puzzles to solve and difficult puzzles to solve, frequent game players spent significantly more time on the difficult puzzles. Infrequent players, on the other hand, gave up much faster and showed less interest in mastering the challenging task. Overall, the researchers reported, gamers showed much higher persistence and perseverance. They showed a habitual thirst for challenge and a striving to succeed even under difficult circumstances.
What accounts for this trait development? Previous studies (not on video games) show that individuals who engage successfully in any task requiring high effort will continue to extend high effort in future tasks. Working hard and then achieving our goal primes us—neurologically, with more dopamine—to work harder. It’s the same biochemical process of addiction, but it’s a virtuous rather than a vicious cycle.
As a result of these findings, scientists have proposed that higher dopamine levels in the brain may actually be the most important driver of a solid work ethic.14 This is a crucial rethinking of one of the most universally valued and admired character strengths. Work ethic is not a moral virtue that can be cultivated simply by wanting to be a better person. It’s actually a biochemical condition that can be fostered, purposefully, through activity that increases dopamine levels in the brain. This explains precisely how challenging video games—like Re-Mission—could prime us to tackle other everyday challenges with higher effort and more determination.
Adding further evidence to this theory, another recent study suggests that frequent video gamers’ brains are indeed changed in a long-term way by the heightened dopamine response. A team of twenty-five scientists from Germany, Belgium, France, the U.K., and Canada reported together that frequent gamers—defined as people who play at least nine hours a week on average—have higher gray matter volume in the “left ventral striatum,” part of the reward-processing area of the brain.15 More gray matter, in general, means that the brain is bigger and more powerful. More gray matter in the left ventral striatum, in particular, means you have more cognitive resources to devote to motivation, determination, optimism, and learning.
It’s possible that people who are naturally more motivated by challenge and who are better learners are more attracted to video games—rather than video games increasing these strengths over time. However, most neuroscientists who study games believe this is not the case. They attribute differences between the brains of frequent and infrequent game players to neuroplasticity, or the ability of the brain to rewire itself and strengthen different regions based on frequent activity.16 Daphne Bavelier, Ph.D., and her cognitive neuroscience laboratory at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, for example, have been studying the effect of action video games on brain plasticity and learning. After more than a decade of research, she believes that games lead to significant neural reorganization, resulting in increased attention, faster decision making, and more effective learning.17 Indeed, Dr. Bavelier has identified video games as potentially the single most effective intervention for increasing neuroplasticity in adults.18
Judy Willis, M.D., is another neuroscientist who believes in the power of games to rewire players’ brains for the better. A former chief resident at UCLA’s neurology clinic, she spent fifteen years seeing patients in her own pediatric neurology practice. Today she works with schools and educators to teach cognitive habits that lead to lifelong success and psychological well-being. Her primary strategy: provide students with daily experiences of self-efficacy, including frequent video game play.
“Neurons that fire together, wire together,” she likes to say, quoting one of the basic principles of neuroscience.19 The more you repeat a thought pattern, the stronger the neural networks that drive it become. And the stronger the neural networks, the more likely you are to repeat that thought pattern in the future. The pattern becomes easier to access, with neurons firing up to one hundred times faster—and because the patterns are repeated so often, the neural networks are less vulnerable to cognitive decline over time.
This means that the self-efficacy we experience when we play games frequently is not just a belief, according to Dr. Willis. It’s a way of thinking that is hardwired into the brain—a result of repeated activation of specific neurological circuits that train the brain to be motivated by challenge, rewarded by feedback, and more resilient in the face of temporary failure. “This is why nothing builds a success mindset faster or more effectively than video games,” Dr. Willis told me. “When you have constant opportunities to try different strategies and get feedback, you get more frequent and more intense bursts of dopamine. Not only do you get minute-to-minute pleasure, but the mindset starts changing in long-term ways. Your brain starts looking at things that weren’t achievable before and starts to think they might be achievable with a little effort. It expects to learn and improve and eventually succeed, because that’s what it’s used to doing.
“When you’re constantly experiencing successful goal achievement,” she explains, “your brain’s cost-benefit analysis changes entirely. You can overrule your brain’s default mode that wants you to avoid wasting energy on difficult tasks or challenging goals. Your brain adapts to seek out more challenge, to be less afraid of failure, and to be more resilient in the face of setbacks.”
Fifteen
