The brand-new journal Mindfulness has an article by Jayne Gackenbach and Jonathan Bown about "mindfulness and video game play." Gackenbach has been doing research on video games and mental states, and she and Bown administered a combination of surveys about gaming practices and mindfulness to a group that included casual (low-end) gamers– the sorts who occasionally play online poker, say– and hard-core (high-end) gamers– members of World of Warcraft clans, for example. Their conclusions?

we found tentative support for our major hypothesis that some types of mindfulness are associated with gaming. Immersion (or absorption) is an individual difference variable while presence and game genre (i.e., aggressive types) are a situational variables which may mediate the mindfulness–gamer association…. gaming can be a type of meditative practice (Gackenbach 2008b), that due to the absorption needed in meditation, and thus present in some formulations of mindfulness, we expect video game play to also be associated with mindfulness through the mediating variables of immersion/absorption and presence.

More specifically, they found differences in levels of mindfulness among hard-core gamers and casual gamers, and by genre:

Three broad categories of genre were identified from these responses: Hard Core Games, Sport Games, and Casual Games. While low- and high-end gamer groups fell into each type of genre preference, the largest group was for the Hard Core Game genre, i.e., first person shooter, role playing, or strategy. Hard core video game genre preference was associated with immersion, presence, and situationally specific mindfulness.

The obvious problem with this entire project is that it reduces "mindfulness" to a set of psychological states, rather than seeing it as a practice that has various spiritual and therapeutic benefits. More broadly, though, that mistake brilliantly parallels an issue with video games that I've encountered in my thinking about contemplative computing. Video games, people worry, are immersion without enlightenment. Like the bad guys in The Karate Kid who study martial arts at the Cobra Kai dojo so they can more efficiently kick Ralph Macchio's ass rather than develop inner strength and balance, video games are all about technique divorced from a moral framework.

This has, I think, been intentional. As I've noted earlier, video gamers are quite familiar with the idea of flow, but carved the description of flow away from the larger project of understanding happiness; further, they divorced game flow from the rest of life. When Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues were studying flow in the 1970s and 1980s, video games were relatively new, and many of the people they interviewed– pastoralists in the Italian mountains, survivors of World War II or Soviet prison camps, surgeons, mountain-climbers, et al– weren't likely to be gamers. There are physical limits to how long you can free-climb or perform surgery; it's harder to have moutaineering bleed into ordinary life. In contrast, it may be easier for the gaming experience to compete with, and substitute for, regular life; and if that's so, it's harder to make the link– either as a researcher, or as a player– between learning how to enter flow states in games, and learning how to do so in life. Csikszentmihalyi's insights, combined with personal computers (and then LANs, etc.) made it possible to divorce flow from the rest of life, commoditize it, and market to it. I'm just surprised we don't talk about a "flow economy." (Yet.)

Another significant difference may have to do with the relationship one creates between games (or any activity that promotes flow) and the rest of life. One of the classic ways to pursue mindfulness is through meditation, though adepts note that you can be mindful doing lots of different things; but for most practitioners, meditation is something you do to learn skills that you can apply everywhere. While the act of meditation (or even a retreat) is itsself very different from the regular flow of daily life, most teachers don't help students meditate as a form of escape; they want you to learn how to deal better with the world. If, in contrast, you play games as a form of escape, it's going to be harder to transfer whatever you learn in the game world to the rest of the world.

Now, Gackenbach and Bown used a mindfulness survey that asked general questions about mindfulness in everyday life, rather than tested mindfulness just within games, so they would argue that what they're measuring is a broader impact, rather than a state that players only enter when they pick up a joystick. But that the survey itself is mainly about mental states and reactions to problems, rather than about how one approaches the world. Liking cold showers doesn't make you a Stoic.