Excessive Gaming Could Result In Involuntary Actions

They say that having too much of a good thing could be bad. Do you agree with that particular assessment? Apparently, there is a new research which was conducted to show that playing games (video games in this context) for long periods of time could end up in involuntary actions, which is the result of “automatic” impulses acted out. Apparently, there were some gamers who reported of involuntary movement of fingers and arms, with the possibility of verbal outbursts thrown into the mix. The scientists over at Nottingham Trent University’s International Gaming Research Unit worked with a bunch of respondents, of whom the latter claimed that they had experienced brief dissociations as well as felt sudden urges to perform in-game actions in selective bursts of time.

Some gamers even looked for “gamepads in the air”, and also had unusual reactions to real-life objects, including ducking at CCTV cameras. Apart from that, there were also others who approached game-associated objects “with the intention to shoot them with a non-existing gun”. There was also a different study conducted by the same group of researchers in January this year, showing how gamers who played for hours tend to have a higher occurrence of hallucinations. It was not mentioned in the source just for how long one had to play before experiencing such hallucinations or involuntary actions, but it sounds like a pretty good reason to drop the gamepad and take a break.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Science