As part of my explorations on how methylphenidate (MPH) changes my perception, I explored what it is like to play video games on this drug. I should add that I do not condone taking MPH for the sole purpose of improving your performance in video games as this would be quite frivolous. My own usage pattern is also a bit different from the standard approach of taking this drug all day, every day. Normally, I need some justification to take MPH, and if there is none, I may go days without it. However, as I get about five hours out of a 10mg pill, I frequently have some time left over after the productive work is done. This is the context of this article.

My gaming habits are surely quite unlike the median gamer’s of today. I almost exclusively play 1990s arcade games and tend to get quite deeply into them. These games offer brief experiences, but very challenging ones. You get a condensed experience, often lasting no more than 15 minutes. A good analogy is jazz improvisation or, in the case of games with a very low margin of errors, practicing a piece of classical music. I play games somewhat regularly. The game I play right now I can complete quite consistently, but not at a level I am happy with yet as every mistake, however small, negatively affects my run, without there being a chance to really recover. Concretely, I currently practice the default track in Rave Racer and have not yet completed it in first place. Just completing it, given the time limit, is a significant challenge already. I normally come in somewhere between positions two and four.

If you subject yourself to playing a game in which every small mistake you make feels like slap in the face then you quickly learn how much punishment you can take. Without MPH, two bad runs in sequence are normally enough to end my gaming session, and this is probably for the better. Quite frankly, I can get annoyed if I mess up a run, in particular if, which is the standard situation, my mistakes are not due to errors I actively made but due to the CPU drivers messing with my run. There is an element of chance and sometimes they behave in ways different than you anticipated. Gaming on MPH is a different experience, however. Most importantly, there is a qualitative difference. You are much more immersed in the game. I notice this in particular when I am playing racing games, speeding down the track at over 200 km/h. Essentially, you have tunnel vision. I also seem to perform more consistently on MPH. I have not spent that much time playing games on MPH to make any strong claims, but so far, my best results are not on MPH. My current perception, however, is that with MPH the variance in performance is noticeably smaller.

I am able to react better to dynamic events in a game on MPH. Here we are talking about small fractions of a second, but this can make a lot of difference in a game as difficult as Ridge Racer or Rave Racer. This is directly reflected in the quantitative results, i.e. lap times. In preparation of this article, I played a bit of Rave Racer on MPH earlier. In fact, this was the first time I had played it on MPH. I was amazed when I noticed details that were always there but I never had paid attention to them. For instance, the game renders helicopters that fly around the track. The in-game justification is that the race is filmed from these helicopters. Without MPH, I am so focused on the track and the cars that I had not noticed them. This is just like the well-known invisible-gorilla experiment. Of course, now that I have primed you for the video below, you will notice the helicopters. But probably you will agree that you need to carefully pay attention to notice them, and also that it seems quite non-trivial to pay attention to both the sky and the road at the same time.

This video is comparable to my current performance, by the way. My best time is about 100 ms better. As you could see, this guy makes basically no mistake, yet only comes in second. On a side note, he is using the red car, which makes driving easier as its body is both shorter and narrower than the body of the blue default car. A consequence is that you have a bigger margin of error when drifting where contact with a wall or road barrier drastically lowers your speed. You can only get the red car via making a change in the operator menu. I play arcade games on default settings as I assume that this is the way the designers wanted them to be played.

An unexpected aspect was that I found it easier to end a gaming session on MPH. This sounds a lot worse than it is, but when I have a run that is close to a personal best, I tend to play one or two more runs to see if I can set a new personal record. Similarly, if a run has gone especially poorly, my initial reaction is normally to play another one or two runs to end my gaming session on a higher note. Still, I rarely exceed a playtime of one hour at a time, and often it is lower. On MPH, in contrast, I have a weaker visceral reaction to games. I find them more captivating while playing but I nonetheless find it trivial to just stop playing, regardless the outcome of the last run. This is an effect of the shifting cone of attention, as described in an article I wrote a while ago, which is linked to above.

I think it is not at all a stretch that your performance in demanding video games will improve on MPH. This should particularly hold true for games with narrow margins of error that place very high demands on mechanical execution. This seems to apply to all of the main classic arcade genres, though, i.e. fighting, racing, and light-gun games, and most likely also to other genres like bullet-hell shooting games and rhythm games. There are some slow-moving genres where the effect of MPH is probably less pronounced. I am in particular thinking of beat ’em ups like Double Dragon and Final Fight or action-puzzle games like Puyo Puyo or Tetris.