I came across a Slashdot article today (diverted from this original piece of writing) about how being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes due to excessive stimulii and we need to be around nature to recover from this.

Being from the country originally, I always find a brief break in an area with a bit of nature does wonders for relaxing me, and I try to get up to the country whenever I can.  However if you want anecdotal discussion about whether or not this is accurate, Slashdot has plenty of that (as per usual).  What I’m more interested in is tying it back  to the chosen relaxation methods for the modern generation, which are based on electronic distractions.

I’m a gamer and rabid internet user, and these things are used as forms of relaxation after work.  However, are they really relaxing?  Are they merely trading the tiring stimulus of a work day in the city for an evening of information overload via the internet or an excessive rush of stimulus from an action game on the PS3 or 360?

Let me concentrate on gaming.  We all say that we use gaming as a leisure activity, and that we wind down after work with a quick bash on Ridge Racer or a session on GTA4.  You’ve already spent a day negotiating the commute into work or school, then a day full of not only work stimulus but all that exists outside that zone in the form of traffic, pedestrians, tasks that need to be done in your lunch break and specific timings of places you need to be and things you need to do.  You then negotiate the same trip home, dealing with traffic, pedestrians, public transport foibles and the like.

Then you connect to the gaming world and experience exactly the same stimulus via the screen.

Consider GTA4 as an example.  It’s a sandbox, a virtual world set in a moving lively city.  It has places you need to be, people you need to meet (and kill) and stressful situations.  It simulates a city and cities are in theory bad for your brain.  Load up either of the Gears of War games or a modern FPS and they’re starting to look lifelike while also throwing you into an excessively stressful situation.  Lots and lots of stimulus for an already tired brain.  Lets not even get into the social dynamics involved with raiding in WoW and the stress that can provide.

Perhaps as games have increased in complexity, they’ve come to more closely approach the stimulus levels provided by life in a bustling city.  More polygonal objects being thrown around in game, more people on the street in the city.  More activity in the background in game, more engineered distractions in the city.  More time limits in game, more time constraints in the city.

So, is it just a consideration of modern gaming or is it gaming in general that places similar stresses on the brain?  I think it’s pretty clear that gaming has always been designed to provide excessive stimulus (take Contra or Robotron as examples).  Human beings enjoy the stimulus, but it has never been designed around relaxation but focused on the goal of entertainment.  Now that gaming is ubiquitous and a chosen leisure activity for a large proportion of the population, is it really providing the relaxation that we need given that cities are presumably causing us to have tired, run down brains.

So, a couple of further musings to end this on.  Firstly, is there or can there ever be a truly relaxing game?  Not one to blow off steam with, but one to relax the mind and alleviate the “city brain hurt”?

Secondly, given this article and the way most of us live our lives, being city dwellers in thrall to electrical entertainment, do any of us ever really relax apart from when we’re asleep?