
Ghent University researchers studied teen gamers’ brains — and compared them to gamblers’. Photo by Flickr user eyeSPIVE.
In dozens of studies, scientists have speculated about what’s going on in kids’ brains when they are playing video games. Numerous studies have attempted to give us this information, but with no solid results. Recently, researchers at Ghent University in Belgium took a direct approach: they rounded up 154 14-year-olds who play video games, and put them in an MRI machine to check things out.
What they found was interesting: teens who play plenty of video games have an enlarged portion of their brain associated with rewards. This portion, called the ventral striatum, is also often larger in gamblers and others who engage in compulsive behavior.
Of course, we don’t know for sure whether playing video games enlarges this part of the brain, or whether people whose brains are more developed in this area tend to gravitate toward gaming. To find that out, you’d have to take a bunch of non-gamers, make them play video games for years, and see if that portion of their brain got bigger. And it’s hard to get permission from parents to subject kids to potentially brain-altering activities. In a scientific context, anyway.
You would think that during such a study, the scientists would put kids in the MRI machine while they were playing video games to track, you know, how their brains looked.
They didn’t. They had the kids play two games in which they made bets on certain outcomes. In other words, they made them gamble.
So they started with the idea that video gaming might be somehow related to addiction or compulsive behavior, similar to gambling. They picked a bunch of kids who play video games, made them gamble, and — lo and behold — found that their brains were like gamblers’ brains!
Anyone else see the problem here?
Then you get headlines like:
“Children who love video games have brains like gamblers.”
“Study: Video games may change brain”
At least the LA Times didn’t join in the hysteria: “Frequent gamers have brain differences, study finds.” There, was that so hard?
What are parents to think, reading these headlines? They probably picture their kids pulling the lever on a slot machine or doubling down at the poker table, losing everything they have. But there are so many other studies suggesting the benefits of video games — and then there are the numerous stories from players themselves. Do gamblers talk endlessly about how gambling saved their lives? Some might. But it seems unfair to compare the two pastimes, even if there are a few similarities there. It’s certainly unfair to study gamers’ brains — but make them gamble while you do it.
Until we study their brains while they are playing video games, we aren’t getting anywhere.


