Playing Shooter Games On Easy Mode Could Actually Harm Your Brain

There are some gamers out there that truly love a challenge – taking on Dark Souls and Bloodborne on a wing and a prayer – but there are also those that prefer the "cakewalk" style of experience, running through a first-person shooter and being able to bounce back from enemy ambushes like they were nothing. But, surprisingly enough, playing that sort of game on easy can actually have an effect on your brain.

A study by scientists from the Universite de Montreal believe that if people play games that don't have any sort of GPS systems for maps, their brain will be able to stand up for more hours of gaming. If everything's turned on for them, though, they may take the easy way out.

The study indicates that fans of first-person shooters, particularly ones in the Armed Forces, could see lessening effects with using pathfinding or waypoint herlpers, and that can actually be a greater risk than playing a much easier game.

This report ended up published in the Molecular Psychiatry journal by lead author Greg West, an associate professor of psychology. In it, he noted that habitual players of action games actually generate less grey matter in their hippocampus (in the brain).

He noted, "Video games have been shown to benefit certain cognitive systems in the brain, mainly related to visual attention and short-term memory. But there is also behavioral evidence that there might be a cost to that, in terms of the impact on the hippocampus."

"That's why we decided to do a full neuro-imaging study, scanning the brains of habitual players of action video games and comparing them to non-players, and what we saw was less gray matter in the hippocampus of habitual players.

"We then followed that up with two longitudinal studies to establish causality, and we found that it was indeed the gaming that led to changes in the brain."

In case you need a technical explanation, the hippocampus helps people orient themselves through remembering past experiences, as well as spatial memory. The caudate nucleus also gets involved, reminding us when it's time to eat, drink, sleep, that sort of thing.

West continued, "If action video games lead to decreases in grey matter in the hippocampus of young adults, caution should be exerted when encouraging their use by children, young adults and older adults to promote cognitive skills such as visual short-term memory and visual attention."

More details on the report can be found over on Forces.net. It's worth a read, especially if you're interested in how certain video game studies work.

So challenge yourself every once in a while, yeah? Maybe not "expert", but at least "hard."