The Gamer’s Brain: Exploring Neuroplasticity, Problem Solving, and Balance

An avid gamer and counsellor explores what games can offer our minds and relationships, where moderation matters, and why he is creating Room for Becoming.

As an avid gamer, and someone who has struggled with moderation at points in my life, this topic hits close to home. I love the exploration, the challenge, the stories, and the feeling of finally understanding something that seemed impossible an hour earlier. I also know how easily “one more game” can become a much later night than intended.

As gaming becomes an increasingly familiar part of everyday life, I would like us to have a fuller conversation about it. There is plenty to appreciate: imagination, complex decisions, shared experiences, and the simple pleasure of playing. There are also times when a rewarding pastime starts taking more than we intended to give it.

Both deserve an honest look. I approach this as a counsellor, a gamer, and now someone designing a game of my own.

Neuroplasticity: what happens when we learn through play?

Neuroplasticity describes the brain’s capacity to change in response to experience and learning. Learning a game can involve finding your way through unfamiliar environments, remembering rules, coordinating movements, and adapting to new information. Those are real demands on the brain.

In a study published in Molecular Psychiatry, adults who trained with Super Mario 64 for two months showed increases in grey matter in regions involved in functions including spatial navigation, planning, and motor control, compared with a control group. It is an interesting example of brain changes associated with learning through a game. Read the study by Kühn and colleagues.

That finding needs perspective. A change on a brain scan does not establish that someone has become generally more intelligent, emotionally healthier, or protected against illness. The game, the person, and the skill being practised matter. Neuroplasticity is a feature of learning, rather than a reason to assume that more gaming must be better.

Problem solving and critical thinking

A good game often gives you a problem without immediately giving you the answer. You form a theory, test it, notice what happened, and change your approach. A strategy game might ask you to balance limited resources against competing priorities. A puzzle might require you to abandon an assumption. A difficult encounter might reward patience and observation over simply trying harder.

These are opportunities to practise planning, evaluating information, and learning from feedback within the game. Games can make that process engaging because the consequences are visible and another attempt is often available.

The important research question is how much those improvements carry into other parts of life. A large meta-analysis by Sala, Tatlidil, and Gobet found small or negligible overall effects and no convincing evidence that video game training broadly enhanced cognitive ability. Getting better at a demanding game does not automatically mean becoming better at every kind of thinking. Read the meta-analysis.

For me, the value also lies in the experience itself: being curious, revising an idea, and discovering that a problem has more than one possible solution.

Creativity, imagination, and the freedom to experiment

Some games offer a blank canvas. You build a home, design a city, invent a character, or find an unexpected way around an obstacle. Others invite creativity through storytelling: deciding who your character is, what matters to them, and how they respond when their values are tested.

That gives players room to experiment without every attempt needing to be useful or successful. Something can be strange, ambitious, funny, or unfinished. For adults whose days are organised around responsibilities, that freedom can be part of the appeal.

Different games invite different kinds of creativity. Designing an elaborate structure and following a tightly scripted adventure are different experiences. It makes more sense to ask what a particular game encourages than to treat all gaming as one activity.

Connection, persistence, and enjoyment

For some people, an evening playing together is also an evening spent talking, laughing, cooperating, and maintaining friendships across distance. Online relationships can be meaningful. The quality of the group matters, though: a welcoming team and a hostile lobby offer very different social experiences.

Games can also provide a manageable encounter with frustration. You miss the jump, lose the match, or discover that your plan does not work. Then you get another chance. There can be satisfaction in noticing progress, asking for help, and trying a different approach. Whether that attitude follows us outside the game is something to reflect on rather than assume.

And enjoyment matters in its own right. We do not require every novel, film, or hobby to improve our cognitive performance before allowing ourselves to enjoy it. Wonder, humour, companionship, and a good story can be worthwhile parts of a life.

Why I am making Room for Becoming

My interest in what games can offer has become a passion project: Room for Becoming, a narrative choice game I am designing with my wife, a doctor of clinical psychology. It brings together our professional perspectives, a love of stories, and curiosity about what an interactive experience can invite people to notice.

Set in Auckland, the game puts you in the chair of a fictional therapist. Someone sits opposite you with a complicated life, and you decide how to respond. You might ask a question, reflect a feeling, leave space, or realise that your first understanding was incomplete. The story continues beyond the therapy room, where your character has their own relationships, needs, and choices about how to spend the evening.

We want it to be an engaging story with characters worth knowing. Alongside that, our aim is to introduce mental health and counselling ideas in an accessible way: listening carefully, noticing assumptions, considering another perspective, and recognising that helping someone rarely comes down to finding a perfect sentence.

The player has to make a choice, rather than simply read about one. That creates an opportunity to pause and consider why a response feels right, what it might miss, and how another person could experience it. We hope that curiosity stays with players after a scene ends. Those are design intentions; the game has not been clinically evaluated as a way to improve empathy or mental health.

The characters and storylines are fictional. This is entertainment with opportunities for learning and reflection, rather than personal therapy or a qualification in counselling. As the larger game develops, we are building towards longer character arcs, relationships, and consequences that unfold over time.

The free beta demo is out now and playable in your browser. You can also take a look inside the project on our game page. The demo is an introduction to a fuller game still in development, and feedback will help us shape what comes next.

Why this conversation matters for young men, and for everyone who plays

I particularly want young men to feel welcome in this conversation. For someone who finds it difficult to talk about stress, loneliness, or feeling stuck, a game may offer a familiar place to connect and feel capable. Starting with curiosity about what gaming provides can make a more useful conversation possible.

For a parent, partner, or counsellor, questions such as “Who do you play with?”, “What do you enjoy about it?”, and “How do you feel afterwards?” can tell us more than a judgement about screen time alone.

These experiences are not exclusive to young men. Women, older adults, and people of any gender can find friendship, challenge, comfort, or escape in games. Each person deserves to have their experience understood without assumptions about who a gamer is supposed to be.

When a rewarding pastime starts costing too much

The difficult part is that the same activity can fit well into our lives at one point and become harder to manage at another. A session that leaves you refreshed is different from repeatedly staying up despite exhaustion, cancelling plans you value, spending beyond your means, or feeling unable to stop when you intended to.

Taking a break from a difficult day can be helpful. It becomes worth examining when gaming is the only reliable way to manage feelings, or when the problems waiting outside the game keep growing. The useful question is what gaming gives you, what it costs, and whether you still feel able to choose.

The World Health Organization’s description of gaming disorder focuses on impaired control, gaming taking priority over other activities, and continuing despite harm, with significant disruption to everyday functioning. It also notes that the disorder affects only a small proportion of players. Enjoying games intensely does not, by itself, establish a disorder. Read the WHO explanation.

Some game designs make stopping difficult through daily rewards, limited-time events, or pressure to keep up with a group. Recognising that pull can help us plan around it without turning a struggle with moderation into a judgement about character.

Keeping room for the rest of life

For anyone recognising some of this, a practical starting point is to decide when to finish before opening the game. Choose an endpoint that works with the game’s structure, allow time to wind down before bed, and keep space for movement, relationships, work, and other interests. Notice how different games affect you: some leave you settled; others leave you tense or chasing the next win.

It can also help to ask what you need that evening. Is it company, rest, achievement, stimulation, or relief from something uncomfortable? Gaming may meet part of that need. Having other ways to meet it gives you more choice. If you repeatedly find yourself unable to follow limits you want, counselling can offer space to understand the pattern and work towards change.

I remain an enthusiastic gamer. My own experience with moderation is part of why I care about making room for both the benefits and the costs. I want to enjoy the worlds I explore while staying connected to the life I am building outside them. That balance is also one of the questions running through Room for Becoming: how do we care about what matters to us while leaving space for everything else that matters too?