neowin.net

Momentarily, I did think it could.

For the past few days, I have committed most of my time to the world of MMORPG. Leaving aside the fact that I was procrastinating in face of the two exams looming on the horizon, I was able to maintain an appreciable amount of general and specialised reading. However, when I started to compose a short response on this board, I found myself at a loss for expressions. After I successfully amalgamated the fragments of vocabulary and literary cohesion, the results were sadly not very different from something of an inchoate attempt at coherence. It struck me that I haven't written anything constructive for a while: my recent writing was symptomatic of a rudimentary form of literature.

Like most humans, I instantly associated this debacle to my excessive gaming. To illustrate the point, whenever I started to formulate a sentence, my mind quickly dissolved into a void where thoughts were scarce while the images of the game I played were abundant. Added to the detriment was the chase for the right words in the right context. At the time of writing this blog entry, I sometimes still feel the vacuous mind of yesterday.

Habitually, I sat down and pondered about the other possibilities. It dawned on me after a few laborious minutes of mental analysis: the fact that I haven't reinforced my writing through practice. It was quite amusing when that conclusion arose, partly because I quickly blamed the gaming instead of my lack of commitment to refining my writing skills, partly because I equally moved to establish a more direct, plausible causation of my dilemma.

"More direct and plausible" because a neurological function improves with habituation. The absence of reinforcement drives the system downwards and eventually eliminates the signals that sustain the function. In this case, it is the ordered, logical and highly coherent writing that I failed to endorse by virtue of negligence. The activity of gaming in itself is an indirect cause as it favours the absence of practice. In a sense, it is acceptable to say that online gaming can impair my literary aptitude but a precise treatment of the situation is manifested in "lack of practice due to online gaming impairs my writing ability".

Nevertheless, it is an awful simplification of the scenario. I do find it probable that online gaming can act in a way to diminish my writing capacity. While the game itself provides a chat box which I love to spam, most of the game relies on visual and motor coordination. What this could do (I think) is avert my neurological mode from expressive literature such as writing to a visual art form such as examining the animated images and its related elements. It is tempting to hypothesise that one's brain assumes a certain mode when an imposing task is presented. With the habituation theory, I could say that the prolonged exposure to the visual art dominates the region of my brain that is responsible for switching on the appropriate pathway in order to meet a specific task. Thus, when writing is called into demand, the system is slow to act because of the residual commands of the visual art mode. How this might work at the molecular level is beyond me and as far as I know, no one has fully worked out the underlying mechanism of the formation of percepts and concepts.

But it is an interesting thought. Perhaps someone has explored this idea already, as in the case of naturalistic pantheism which I happened to conceive on my own a while back only to find out it's a century old concept.

Have a nice day~
(and don't forget to set the alarm if you have work the next day)