- Video game designer Bennett Foddy's games hack players' neurology to allow them to embody the subjects on the screen.
- Foddy plays with perceptions of sensation to explore how gamers come to "become" the digital characters.
- Research indicates that video games can change how our brains perform and their structural makeup. For instance, enhancing several kinds of focus.
A gaming surge has begun. Since we're all locked in until the end of the coronavirus crisis, these are the games your brain might be craving in the midst of social isolation.
Bennett Foddy’s games
New York video game designer Bennett Foddy's games are about the neurological sorcery in gaming that allows players to embody the subjects on the screen. Foddy's game creations aren't overly intense or for "hard-core gamers". They're light-hearted, addictive, and extremely easy to play. Even for non-gamers. The gaming wizard's latest creation, Get On Top, is a game hidden in Sportsfriends. It uses twin-analog controllers for input with one stick controlling your legs while the other controls your arms. "It's designed to sit with one other person and play for hours," the website explains.
A more sensationalized creation of his, QWOP, is a simple and diabolically addictive game about sprinting down the straightaway of a track that can be played on PC or iPhone. The screen shows a man lined up to race the 100 meter dash, and you must press certain buttons on your keyboard to manipulate his left and right calf and thigh muscles to (hopefully) propel him forward as fast as you can. (A cult classic game, it was even featured on the U.S. version of The Office on the sitcom's season 9 premiere.) In 2012 it was updated so that it could be played with two people at once.
The phenomenology of gaming
In a 2011 piece for WIRED UK, Mark Brown wrote that Foddy's games are about "turning gaming's heavily abstracted and automated actions – like running forward or scaling a perilous cliff face – into brutal simulations of the most intense micromanagement."
For Foddy, it's about playing with perceptions of sensation to explore how gamers come to embody the digital characters in the game.
"When you play a [video game]," Foddy explained to Wired.co.uk in a 2011 piece. "As long as there is a very short time between your formation of an intention to act and something happening on screen, there's a kind of neurological magic which makes you feel like you are the character, rather than just controlling a little guy on a screen."QWOP is unique in that it does this by making a "deliberate disconnect between your intentions and the character's actions."
Another of Foddy's games, GIRP, enhances the experience of embodiment. The game, whose hero is a rock climber, turns your keyboard into a cliff face. The player needs to finger-tip grip the keyboard as if he or she is white-knuckle clinging to a cliff. In this way, when you play this game you phenomenologically become the daring climber as your consciousness moves through the electronic space in the virtual reality of the game.
Foddy, who has researched addiction at Oxford, designed GIRP to hijack the neurological reward-system by allowing players to set their own achievable goals in the game. WIRED's Brown described GIRP as "maddeningly compulsive."
How video games affect the brain
Research indicates that video games can change how our brains perform and their structural makeup. For instance, studies have shown that video game players display enhancements in several types of attention such as sustained attention (the ability to focus on an activity over a long period of time), divided attention (focusing on multiple pieces of information at once), and selective attention (the process of focusing on a particular object in the environment for a certain period of time). Moreover, the areas of the brain that play a role in attention are more efficient in video game players as compared with non-gamers. Gamers also don't require as much activiationt to stay focused on demanding tasks.
There is also evidence that demonstrates that gaming the size and competence of regions of the brain that are responsible for visuospatial skills, or an individual's ability to identify visual and spatial relationships among objects. For example, hitting a ball zooming towards you with a baseball bat before it smacks you in the face. Some research has even shown that video games that require players think spatially can increase the gray matter in the right hippocampus.
So go ahead and game the plague away. You can find Foddy's games for free here.
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