Abstract James Gulledge

Video Games Enable Novel Ways to Perceive

A distinctive feature of video games and interactive media generally is that virtual environments offer unique opportunities for perceivers to make repeated, rapid discriminations of a certain type—with the game often providing feedback as to the correctness or incorrectness of those discriminations. The uniform discriminatory opportunities and feedback provided by video games has two affects on gamers’ perceptual experiences. First, unlike with non-interactive media like movies (or at least a single movie taken in isolation), playing a video game causes one to perceptually experience the world differently over time. Second, unlike with non-interactive media, there is reason to think that some of the illusory environmental representations associated with playing a video game will eventually cease to be illusory in certain respects--or at least become helpful in other ways.

These two effects flow from the ability of the systems underlying perceptual experience to learn. The evidence from cognitive psychology is for the existence of (at least) one of three phenomena: (i) the synchronic cognitive penetration of perceptual experience, (ii) the diachronic cognitive penetration of perceptual experience, or (iii) perceptual learning. Each phenomenon is a way stored information in the minds of subjects can helpfully and flexibly affect the nature of their perceptual experience—a way for perceptual experience to learn. Evidence for the existence of either cognitive penetration or perceptual learning suggests that being able to make repeated, rapid discriminations of a certain type—especially in a way reinforced with feedback (as to the correctness or incorrectness of the discriminations)—helpfully and flexibly alters the way the environment is represented in perceptual experience.

So, we should expect that the opportunities provided by video games for perceivers to make repeated, rapid discriminations of a certain type that is often reinforced with feedback will both (i) lead perceptual-experiential representations to change over time and (ii) change in such a way that the subject becomes better able to correctly perform the interactions associated with playing the game. Incorrectly perceptually experiencing a virtual environment as a mountain, for instance, may at first tend to cause certain unhelpful thoughts or actions relative to performance of the tasks of the game. With the right practice, however, we should expect that game-caused illusory perceptual-experiential representations of mountains will lose this unhelpful tendency—instead coming to aid subjects in more accurately performing the tasks of the game. Because non-interactive media like movies do not provide opportunities for viewers to make repeated, rapid discriminations of a certain type, nor for viewers to do so while receiving feedback, we should expect that this is not true of movies, television, etc.