Abstract
This study sought to determine whether playing a “serious” interactive digital game (IDG) – the Re-Mission videogame for cancer patients – activates mesolimbic neural circuits associated with incentive motivation, and if so, whether such effects stem from the participatory aspects of interactive gameplay, or from the complex sensory/perceptual engagement generated by its dynamic event-stream. Healthy undergraduates were randomized to groups in which they were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) as they either actively played Re-Mission or as they passively observed a gameplay audio-visual stream generated by a yoked active group subject. Onset of interactive game play robustly activated mesolimbic projection regions including the caudate nucleus and nucleus accumbens, as well as a subregion of the parahippocampal gyrus. During interactive gameplay, subjects showed extended activation of the thalamus, anterior insula, putamen, and motor-related regions, accompanied by decreased activation in parietal and medial prefrontal cortex. Offset of interactive gameplay activated the anterior insula and anterior cingulate. Between-group comparisons of within-subject contrasts confirmed that mesolimbic activation was significantly more pronounced in the active playgroup than in the passive exposure control group. Individual difference analyses also found the magnitude of parahippocampal activation following gameplay onset to correlate with positive attitudes toward chemotherapy assessed both at the end of the scanning session and at an unannounced one-month follow-up. These findings suggest that IDG-induced activation of reward-related mesolimbic neural circuits stems primarily from participatory engagement in gameplay (interactivity), rather than from the effects of vivid and dynamic sensory stimulation.
Highlights
Play represents a distinctive behavioral repertoire that is both highly rewarding and evolutionarily conserved [1]. ‘‘Serious games’’ seek to promote positive changes in attitudes and behavior by leveraging fundamental neural processes engaged by play [2,3,4,5,6]
Fifty-seven healthy undergraduates were each randomized to one of two experimental groups and scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) as they either actively played the cancer-related Re-Mission videogame for seven bouts of 60 sec separated by six rest pauses of variable 10–30 sec duration (‘‘active play’’ group; Supporting Information Video 1) or passively observed a gameplay audio-visual stream generated by a yoked active group player (‘‘passive exposure’’ group)
The ReMission videogame has previously been found to enhance psychological and medical treatment-related behavioral outcomes in young people being treated for cancer [7,8], and the present data show that playing Re-Mission can markedly activate neural circuits implicated in reward
Summary
Play represents a distinctive behavioral repertoire that is both highly rewarding and evolutionarily conserved [1]. ‘‘Serious games’’ seek to promote positive changes in attitudes and behavior by leveraging fundamental neural processes engaged by play [2,3,4,5,6]. One theoretical perspective suggests that the distinctive motivational impact of IDG play is a consequence of processing the complex, dynamic, and multi-modal sensory stream of events generated by interactive games [3,13,14] This account likens the IDG experience to other vivid, dynamic, emotionally engaging, multi-modal perceptual stimuli (e.g., audio-visual entertainment, stories, etc.) that have been found to enhance motivation, learning, and memory [14]. An alternative perspective suggests that the distinctive neural responses to IDG play stem not from the mere observation of a dynamic event stream, but rather rom the player’s personal participation in shaping that dynamic event stream [3,13] Under this hypothesis, the neural responses to IDG play differ qualitatively from those evoked by other highly vivid, dynamic, and emotionally engaging stimuli that do not involve the behavioral participation of the observer (e.g., non-interactive audio-visual entertainment)
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