Episode 7: You Always Take Yourself With You

Mark is Professor of Psychology at UWL, and his research is about the traffic between a person and a virtual world. He borrows a line from a French travel writer whose name he can't recall: the problem with travel is that you always have to take yourself along with you. That is his answer to whether people become someone else online. You are always, in some sense, the same person. The behavioural tendencies that come from your personality and your upbringing just happen, and they are very difficult to change — that is the whole reason cognitive behavioural therapy is hard work, and why one of its founders reckoned you have to do the new thing seventy times before anything shifts. But you can play a different role, and that is where it gets interesting. His better metaphor is not a window into the psyche but a semi-permeable membrane. He can't carry a physical object into a game and he can't take gold out of one. He can take his experiences out. Some of the participants in his most recent study told him the question was beside the point: I'm simply role-playing this character, I'm driving it through this world, nothing it does has any effect on me. That, he says, is simply wrong. That is just denial. We are all affected by our actions — maybe only a little, but it does change us. The part most likely to surprise you is about love. His interest in this started as a piece of research on a single-player game he had played himself, and finished it thinking he had actually cared about some of those characters, and about what happened to them. When he went and asked other players, they reported very strong emotional attachments — comparable, on the measures, to feelings of enduring love. He is careful about what that does and doesn't mean, and he has a validated scale for it, developed by a couple of researchers in North America, which shows there are broadly different ways people relate to the character they play. There is a sharp aside here that lands harder in 2026 than it would have five years ago. Asked whether these virtual relationships are sycophantic — whether the appeal is a companion who never rejects you — he says the opposite. The characters in these games are far from sycophantic. Some of them take an instant dislike to you. Some are polite, some are surly; they cover the range of human relationships. He thinks the interactions people have with game characters are less sycophantic than the ones they report having with AI chatbots, where the model shapes itself around your beliefs and your way of talking until you are both inside a bubble. He doesn't think that is psychologically healthy. Then the practical turn. Is any of this rehearsal for real life? Absolutely, he says. Games are inclusive and diverse, you can be whatever you want to be, and you can experiment with behaviour, with choices and with your own sexuality in a completely safe space. He likes single-player games as psychological laboratories for exactly that reason. And the strongest evidence that it works is not from his lab at all: the None in Three group, spread across Teesside and Huddersfield, builds simple point-and-click games co-designed with the children who play them, aimed at cutting intimate partner violence and domestic abuse. The UK version is about coercive control — how children learn to spot what controlling behaviour actually looks like — and the group has shown you can measurably increase a player's understanding of what now counts as domestic abuse. The counterweight is the last honest thing he says. There are two stories about what happens when we act out our darker impulses somewhere consequence-free. One is that you let it out and you are fine. The other is that you desensitise yourself, and by practising it you become more confident you could do it for real. Two ways of describing the same behaviour, with opposite consequences. He doesn't know of any work that settles it. He doesn't pretend to. Also in this episode: why "gaming disorder" is in the WHO's ICD-11 but "internet gaming disorder" is only a condition of interest in the DSM, and why behavioural addiction is not the same as chemical dependency; what games won't let you do, and whether that's a moral decision or just protecting the plot; how you run this research ethically when your participants are recruited from a subreddit with three million subscribers and some of them think the whole question is frivolous; why the study's data and materials sit on the Open Science Framework for anyone to pull apart; and the three things that make anyone attractive to anyone — friendliness, sexiness and utility — and whether they hold up inside a game.