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Also we really shouldn’t be using drug metaphors in general when talking about games.
This and the title seems disingenuous to me. A dopamine rush or hit is not a drug metaphor but a reference to body chemistry in response to something that happens in a game.
Please correct me if I’m wrong
Dopaminergic neurons are more related to learning than feeling good.
There are some extra-synaptic neuro messenger molecules like enkephalin that reduce pain and increase feel-good but they hit opioid receptors and they are boring peptides so they don’t get TED talks.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/dopamine-the-pathway-to-pleasure
I’m a little confused. I had always read about dopamine as “the reward chemical” like in the link.
I imagine things are more complicated than that like you alluded to but I had always seen it written as a key part of the brain’s reward system and so makes sense to mention in the context of rewards in games.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that anything “rewarding” doesn’t necessarily affect dopamine chemistry the way we used to talk about regarding game mechanics. After all, I’m not an expert in neurobiology, it might very well be the case that “dopamine rush” is a meme that simply takes a vague intuition of “dopamine is related to feeling of reward in the brain” to the absolute just for the sake of convenience of rhetoric device. But in reality, those things are more nuanced than that. There are many other neurotransmitters, neuromediators and in general things involved in brain signalling like serotonine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc, many of which are involved together in any “rewarding game situation” and interact in complex ways. To try to put it in more simple terms, the way you killed a bunch of goblins, the music that was on background, the scenery and palette, and the chest you open that they were guarding, affects dozens upon dozens of neuromediators that all interplay together in complex ways and form your experience, the way you feel, and gamers usually just ignore all that, focus only on the chest part and say “dopamine”. While in reality even the chest part alone isn’t just dopamine, and reward circuitry also isn’t just dopamine alone, and experiencing it is different depending on what you experience before/after and in parallel, and so on. What I didn’t like about the article is that it’s not about this topic at all and barely mentions it, basically there is a single sentence on it, but it’s used for the sake of clickbait title.
