The bowed-head tribe: are mobile games good for us?

I came across a photo essay on QQ Games today that made me think. Flip through the gallery below; I haven’t bothered to translate the captions but I think it’ll be pretty clear what the overall theme is here.

The author of the original piece calls this generation the “bowed-head tribe”, so named because they’re always crouched over their phones, oblivious to the outside world. That’s not to say that mobile gaming (or mobile use in general) is necessarily anti-social; as you can see from some of the photos there are people sharing their mobile experiences with others in real life, and of course you can also play mobile games online. In a survey of Chinese mobile gamers, nearly half of them said that being able to play with friends was the most important feature a game could have.

And of course, I should say at the outset that I love mobile games. Of course I like some of them better than others, but I spend a lot of time playing mobile games.

That said, I do worry about the effect it might be having on our brains that whenever we have a few free minutes, we pull out a mobile phone. Heck, these days we often do it even when we don’t have free time. But I began to wonder about the effects of this when I realized there was something odd about the way I was taking showers.

Yup, this kind of shower.

OK, I probably need to explain that further.

I like to take fairly long showers. It’s not really an intentional thing, to be honest. I don’t like wasting water. But somehow, when I get in there and the hot water starts coming down, I just zone out. And I haven’t tried that hard to change this pattern of behavior because for the past few years when I’m in the shower, I’ve been having epiphanies or ideas just come to me out of nowhere. It’s like some kind of magical inspiration zone. A fair number of my article topics come to me in the shower. In fact, the concept and design for a website that eventually became Games in Asia — the site you’re reading right now — came to me while I was in the shower.

And the thing is, these epiphanies aren’t just happening in the shower by coincidence. At first I thought it was just the hot water, but it isn’t. It’s that the shower — one of the last places that’s free of screens in modern life — is free of distraction. It’s downtime; true downtime, the kind of downtime that your brain uses to process events and analyze things.

This is your brain on distraction.

It turns out that that kind of downtime is pretty important. Several studies have shown that the brain uses downtime to help process your life, and this facilitates learning. The more distractions you have during the day, the less time your brain has to process things, and the less you’re learning from the life you experience. Of course, sleep is also important for processing life experiences, and none of this is as simple as I’m making it sound. But the bottom line is that your brain can really only focus on one thing at a time, so if you’re playing mobile games every time you get a spare second, your brain never really gets a breather.

And let’s be honest, mobile games are a huge distraction. In fact, they are a distraction first and foremost. Console and PC games are often sort of a scheduled experience for me; for example, tonight I’m planning to try out the Blade & Soul beta and tomorrow night I’m going to play X-Com: Enemy Within with a friend. But I never schedule mobile games that way. I just take out the phone if I’ve got a minute or two of free time. On the bus, waiting in line, even siting around the dinner table. Mobile games are carefully designed for exactly this sort of play style. But the problem is that playing them that way, my brain really never gets a break.

This is, of course, an issue of self-control; it isn’t the fault of mobile games and the issue wouldn’t be solved by banning them. But I do think that when we talk about gaming addiction, or the effects that games can have on the brain, we should be thinking about more than just the people who spent 23 hours a day grinding MMORPGs. Many of us live fairly regular lives and play mobile games in what would seem to be moderation. But I wondering what ideas, what “shower epiphanies”, we might be robbing ourselves of by not putting Peggle down a little bit more often and give our brains a little rest. Even if that makes the bus ride home a bit more boring.