Emotions at the Service of Gaming

Last week, I was invited by the campus gaming club to talk to members about emotion regulation in the service of gaming. What a great group of enthusiastic and interested students! These folks already are up to speed on concepts like flow (Csikszentmihalyi) and breathing techniques to manage strong emotions during challenging games. Some new items they might not have thought about were how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and other areas of the brain can work in concert to maintain sharp focus and energy but at the same time keep emotions from getting overloaded to the point that it impacts play. Here’s the presentation.