Our Brains Keep Our Friends Close and Enemies Closer

Frank Lanz, director of NYU’s game center, opened a summit on eSports last night with an speech on why he is drawn to competitive video gaming, and one of his points was the intimacy that emerges between competitors. “You try to see the world through their eyes,” he said. Even when the goal is victory or elimination of the opponent, there is still something shared and something created when two players are dueling at the highest level.

Sharply rebuking stereotypes about game designers, a study published Wednesday proved that Lanz might be a very perceptive and astute human observer. The relationship and intimacy that’s created through competing via a video game can be observed on a physiological level. What’s more, the more competitive the gaming becomes, the more in sync the players’ brains and emotions become.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland observed people’s brains via EEGs while they played Hedgemaze—a turn-based game where players control a team of hedgehogs that are firing ballistics at another team of hedgehogs (it’s the open-source version of Worms, if you’re familiar). The players alternated between playing cooperatively and playing against each other.

The choice of turn-based game—where only one player plays at a time—was to test whether physiological linkage can exist without simultaneous action. Researchers in Sweden found that the heartbeats of choir members beat in unison as they sang, which they attributed to the coordinated breathing of the choir. But what if people aren’t doing the same thing at the same time? There’s no reason to breath in sync if you’re moving your hedgehogs separately (as the saying goes).

As players played, researchers found that they showed similar facial expressions, emotions, and brainwaves at similar times. As the players moved from cooperative play to more competitive the effect intensified.

This might seem a little counterintuitive—why would our brains keep our friends close and enemies closer? The study speculates that it could be an adaptive strategy:

In a competitive, social situation, a player trying to win may more vigilantly attend the (in-game and out-game) actions of the other player (e.g., to ensure that one will react at least equally well in a corresponding situation). This enhanced vigilance may evoke similar mental models in the players, thereby resulting in increased physiological linkage.

At the eSports summit, in preparation for a massive Red Bull-sponsored Starcraft Tournament, Lanz said that this deep competition and anticipation of another’s moves and thinking is in fact a type of empathy. It's easy to lose sight of that in a game like Starcraft, where one player is sending swarming armies against the other in a buzzing hoard, but credit goes to Lanz for feeling intuitively what science later demonstrated. But then of course he's insightful; he's a gamer.