How do video games affect us? Filmmaker Scott Simonsen investigated the good and bad and what grandmas and third graders have in common when they get behind a console
As a single parent, filmmaker and business owner, Scott Simonsen’s life is already packed with duties. But the last two years of his life were changed by a small, involuntary act – one that unfolded just outside his field of view as he worked from his desk at home.
Simonsen was working at his computer. His son, Kai, in third grade at the time, was engrossed in a Super Mario World game. “Unfortunately as a parent we all fall into those traps of saying ‘Here, you play a little bit and I’ll work a little bit,’” he says. “I looked over and I just saw him having a meltdown.”
His son’s face was twisted, boiling over with frustration; Simonsen had no idea that his young son was capable of such emotion. He was shocked. He shut off his computer and walked over to his son.
“Just the look in his eyes was just…he had an expression on his face and an anger that was much different than anything I’d seen before,” Simonson recalls.
That moment, witnessing his son engulfed in rage, was when dominoes started to tip over, eventually rolling into motion what would become his latest passion project, the documentary “Anatomy of a Gamer.”
Like many California transplants, Simonsen and his former wife came to the Golden State 13 years ago with designs on getting into film – in his case, becoming a screenwriter. And like many California dreamers, he had a fall-back plan, something to devote his time to (and to make money with) between creative projects: Blue Train Tutoring, a Hermosa Beach-based company focusing on more than just test preparation, but on getting students ready for the world of higher education, including school selection, designing course loads and helping parents understand financial aid options.
“Basically, it’s an A to Z thing,” Simonsen says. “We were able to do more than other companies that were doing bare bones test prep.”
While Blue Train flourished, Simonsen kept up his dream of working in film by writing. In 2006 he earned a prestigious Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his screenplay “Tides of Summer.”
As Simonsen puts it, “It’s the Academy’s way to choose the best storytellers in the world who haven’t broken into Hollywood yet.” His award put him in contact with numerous agents, producers and managers, putting him in a position to make some money exercising his creative brain while Blue Train ran alongside him.
Then Simonsen’s son flipped out during a Nintendo gaming session.
“I had always been a little bit uncertain about video games because I myself am not a gamer and so I said, ’Hey, stop this.’ I turned off the game and had a pretty angry reaction at first. Then, I sat there for a while and started having an open communication and asked ‘What’s going on? Why are you so upset?’ And he couldn’t even articulate it. And I said, ‘You know what? Let’s figure out what’s actually happening.’”
That sent the two down a week’s-long wormhole . It began with watching YouTube videos of angry gamers destroying their computers then continued onto stories of suicide, death and neglect caused by gaming addiction.
“It was the conversation,” Simonsen recalls, discussing both the dark sides of gaming and the spots of hope that he found through his continued research: improvements in dexterity and reflexes, increases in happiness and mental health and, most surprising to Simonsen, the potential to expand one’s worldview.
Looking through lenses provided by narrative-driven games such as “Gone Home” or “Papers, Please,” the latter of which sets up the player as a customs agent in a fictional post-Soviet state, “can kind of challenge our brains and make us more understanding of different experiences,” Simonsen says. “Introducing [Kai] to all those different things and doing it together and exploring the research has been rewarding, because it’s not just been me lecturing, it’s been learning alongside him. It’s taught me a lot about how amazing games are, too.”
Originally, Simonsen put that research into pitch meetings with producers, angling to create a screenplay centered around the life of a gamer “like ‘The Last Starfighter,’ or something like that,” he says. Then, he realized that he was “getting too cerebral with it,” and that, ultimately, he wanted to delve into the hard science behind the effects of gaming.
“What we were trying to make into a screenplay fell to the side, and it just really became about contacting [researchers], because it felt like there was a lot of information out there, and it didn’t seem like it was given any context or any framework with other types of research,” he says
Simonsen began recruiting high school students as research assistants, meeting with them on weekends for coffee and bagels. He brought on fellow filmmaking educators, tutors at Blue Train, to work alongside him and with their help, created a Facebook group that totals more than 8,000 “likes” and asks discussion-sparking questions of its community. He set up a crowdfunding project to raise funds and publicity for the documentary, though he admits that’s now going to take a backseat to more traditional capital-raising ventures. And most importantly, he began curating a panel of experts as interview subjects for the documentary, including Victoria Beck, who studies the effects of gaming and perceptions toward women, and Lorraine Freel, a therapist whose practice has been effective in helping those whose lives have been negatively affected by addictions to gaming.
Another expert is Jason Allaire, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University, and a researcher in the effects of aging and cognition. A gamer since grad school (“which is the worst time to start gaming,” he says) Allaire began focusing on the effects of video games on older adults for a few reasons: He was granted tenure, thus giving him the freedom to research new subjects (and also to get paid to play video games, he jokes); he was fascinated by the way playing video games taxed his mind, though they’re widely considered to be a strictly recreational activity; and, he says, due to an experience he’d shared with his late grandmother.
“My grandmother was always interested in everything that I did,” he said. One afternoon, he was gaming and she asked what he was playing: the wildly-popular online game, World of Warcraft. Struck by inspiration, he built a gaming pc with the best psu cables to use, and made a character for her to play, sharing her name and even tinkering to make the avatar look like her. At first, he says, she was reticent. “But about four hours later she was still playing, like ‘This is so much fun! I haven’t had to use my brain so much in so long!’” he remembers. “’Should I go kill that wolf? I have to kill 10 more wolves!’ and I was like ‘Yeah, go kill that wolf!’”
The benefits of wolf-slaying aside, what Allaird has learned is that staying cognitively challenged is the key to retaining brain function as you get older.
“It’s to use games as a tool to make those cognitive abilities stronger or better so they don’t get weak – or quite as weak – with old age,” he says.
“Our research has found that playing different kinds of games can make people think a bit faster to improve their spatial abilities.”
Yet he cautions against the idea that companies such as Lumosity, which makes its bread and butter based off of the idea that their brain-training games can make users more intelligent, are truly doing their customers a service.
“My criticisms are that these companies have basically gamified cognitive tests; you can give someone a list of 10 or 20 words and, initially, you might be able to remember five,” he says. “They’ve gamified that and teach you a strategy to remember more words, so you end up remembering seven or eight or nine or 10. But that’s because you’re getting a lot of practice on those tests, You’re not necessarily improving the ability, but improving the skill to play that test.”
Simonsen says his documentary’s heart is based on empirically-driven science.
“To me, it’s not about cheering on gamers or groups that are against gamers,” he says. “I’m interested in looking at these games just as the title, ‘Anatomy of a Gamer’ says: How does playing games affect your brains and bodies? When topics start to stretch too far away from the spinal cord of the thesis, we don’t go any further.”
Still, Simonsen admits he does have something of an agenda.
“First,” he says, “is to introduce the world to what gaming does to us, good and bad. The second would be to help gamers get a healthy understanding of what is a good amount of gaming or bad amount of gaming, or to give gamers themselves an insight into being more healthy,” both physically and mentally.
“We want to create a nexus that enables people to spark a dialogue on that core information we’re talking about. Do parts of adolescent boys’ brains shrink if they play violent games before maturation? Do people with dementia get back to working memory by playing some of these games? Making people being inspired and informed at the same time, that’s the goal,” Simonsen says.
“Games aren’t going away, so why not give people a pinhole view into a healthy understanding of it?”
For more information about Anatomy of a Gamer, visit facebook.com/anatomyofagamer or email anatomyofagamer@gmail.com.
