Summer Gaming

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how computer games show us how capable the human body is when the gameplay takes place under challenging conditions.

Playing computer games is a very demanding activity. Depending on the genre of the game, players are challenged to make fast decisions, to immediately react to events, to monitor several task-relevant information at once, and to generally stay focussed. These requirements are also found in highly demanding professions like airplane pilots and rescuers working in any kind of emergency response service.

While gaming takes place in a safe environment allowing for an experimental learning as even death is reversible, the real world professions provide no room for errors. As a result, a constant training and frequent assessment of one’s performance is critical to ensure a high degree of safety. This especially becomes crucial when the environmental conditions strongly divert from the norm. In such a case, it often is very impressive to realize what the human body is capable of.

Although not working in one of these professions, I can observe this phenomenon every year during the summer. With the ongoing climate change, each new summer is more demanding than the last one. This year, the summer only took a few breaks since May. Hence, I am challenged to create Let’s Play videos under very hot conditions (36 C and more) for quite some time. Still, I am all the time surprised that I manage to correctly analyze the gaming action and simultaneously provide a decent commentary.

This can be explained with gaming flow, a state of mind when the player is completely immersed in the gameplay. While being in flow, the awareness for the surrounding world and even the own body is directed towards the gaming action. As a result, the demanding heat is no longer recognized as a disturbing factor.

More importantly, this observation shows that the human body can even work under very challenging conditions when we are in the right mindset and fully focussed on a specific activity.