Despite gamers’ eager protest, apparent loopholes in advocating for violent video games attract a lot of attention. 

On June 25th, 2023, another mass shooting occurred in Kansas City,  Missouri, taking the lives of 3 innocent civilians. 

On the same day, about 800 miles away in Missouri City, Texas, a teenager fell victim to a shooting in broad daylight. 

As the nation scrambles to get to the root of these mass shootings, violent video games have often come into the spotlight once again, rehashing the debate over its effects.  

Young and old gamers are all eager to champion video games that can improve various aspects of one's life by increasing cognitive function, social skills, and more. 

In an interview by Ross Pomeroy from Big Think, Heather Newman, a huge video game supporter, stated,  “Video games are highly engaging, regularly social, and often mentally challenging, potentially improving work performance while providing a needed respite from work itself.”. 

Indeed there may be some truth to how playing video games could be of some advantage.

However, these gamers are unaware of the loopholes in their reasons supporting the positive effects of playing video games. 

Though video games could indeed help to improve the cognitive function of the player,  according to Sarah E. Donohue, a researcher at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Neurobiology at Duke University,  video games only improve the cognitive functions of the player if the players’ cognitive functions are below average. 

Therefore, it will not benefit the majority of people who have average or above-average cognitive skills.  

While some video games today are multiplayer activities where participants coordinate efforts to raid a dungeon or build a community with friends, gamers are usually alone in their rooms, forgoing any actual human contact for hours. In severe cases, video game addiction is strongly associated with depression and antisocial behaviors. 

According to Anat Shoshani in Volume 114 of  Computers in Human Behavior, 2021, excessive gaming inevitably leads the player to have less empathy and more aggression.

Even with the benefit of the doubt given to those in favor of playing video games, there is still an inconspicuous yet more detrimental effect of gaming that must not be overlooked: growing tolerance to higher levels of dopamine. 

As individuals seek more stimulating activities, such as playing video games, they become desensitized to dopamine, a pleasure hormone, resulting in a loss of motivation for all other activities and life. 

According to research published in Scientific American, James Olds and his team connected electrodes to rats’ brains to measure the release of dopamine whenever they pulled on a lever. 

This experiment led to the rats repeatedly pulling the lever with no rest to receive its dopamine reward.  

Eventually, the rats ended up starving themselves and passed out from exhaustion. 

In the following experiment, the dopamine receptors were restricted, causing the rats to have no motivation to eat, move, or even mate. 

Sadly, the rat would only eat when the food was directly placed in its mouth. 

This result demonstrates how bewitching dopamine can be so that even survival becomes meaningless to these rats. 

There is a parallel between the levers in the rat experiment and the video games for humans. 

The rats that pulled the lever in order to receive dopamine rewards directly represent gamers that engage in violent video games to feed their dopamine receptors.

Too often, gamers dismiss any actual human contact and have little regard for their health in exchange for playing high dopamine-inducing games. 

Under the influence of dopamine, humans are likely to act just as foolishly as the rats in the experiment.  

Just like rats, when people become intoxicated by high levels of dopamine over a long period of time, they become lethargic in all other aspects of life. 

Easily obtainable sources of dopamine, such as video games and social media, are enjoyable because of the dopamine spikes. 

However, as one becomes more indulged in a dopamine spike, followed by a dopamine crash, their dopamine baseline is elevated, leaving them craving higher dopamine doses. 

Unfortunately, anything that falls short of this would be considered dull and unworthy of one's attention. 

Dopamine is essential yet very dangerous. 

As people are constantly exposed to dopamine-inducing activities, they must be on guard to maintain a healthy level of dopamine baseline.  

The majority of the world is constantly getting fed with dopamine without their knowledge of the damage it poses. 

After becoming aware of how gaming can make one lethargic about activities they once enjoyed, gamers can do a dopamine detox to bring their dopamine tolerance level to normal and enjoy the more straightforward pleasure of life once again. 

Ethan Chung
Grade 10 
BIS