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00:00:01
Future of The Dopamine Slot Machine - and two requests!
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Andrew, a father of two and lifelong gamer, teams up with Brandon, a consumer psychologist and ex-pro video game coach, to cover video games, the way they are designed and how these design decisions impact the children that play them.
https://www.change.org/p/we-ask-our-prime-minister-to-request-an-urgent-review-of-mobile-phones-in-schools-guidance
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czdv3jq1pnyo
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:11
Andrew Wilmot
Good morning, good day, good evening, whenever you are, or welcome to the Dopamine Slot Machine. I'm your host, Andrew, a dad of two and a lifelong gamer. And this is a bit of weird episode to be doing, weird topic to be talking about, because little bit meta, we're talking about the podcast itself.
00:00:30
Andrew Wilmot
So I've received a couple of messages over the past month because we haven't put out an episode a while. And might have noticed that Brandon has been appearing less and less on the podcast.
00:00:47
Andrew Wilmot
So Brandon is taking little step back, he will still be involved, still appear some episodes as and when he can but due to other commitments he's really struggling to appear on this show as much as either of us would like.
Podcast Evolution and Guest Invitations
00:01:01
Andrew Wilmot
He will still be assisting me in the background He's an incredibly busy man and we've been so blessed to have him for this. He's been an absolute inspiration for myself and I can't wait to get him back on this podcast again.
00:01:17
Andrew Wilmot
So the Snapchat episode will be going out on Wednesday. Well, at least I'll be recording it on Wednesday. Maybe I'll even edit it and publish it on Wednesday. We'll see. Wouldn't that be something?
00:01:29
Andrew Wilmot
And he did 90% the research for that. that that So again, thank you so much, Brandon. and so the real question is what are we going to be doing next? So the, the original pitch, the original idea for this, messaged Brandon. was like, look, let me tell you about smartphone free childhood, because this is such an alignment of your interests and, and mine at the moment.
00:01:55
Andrew Wilmot
And I wanted to have that synergy between parent, game of myself and somebody who is an academic, or at least was an academic. um think Brandon would be mildly annoyed at me calling him an academic just because of how far behind those working academia are in terms of this sort of choice psychology and how you cultivate addictive behaviour compared to the people who are working in industry.
00:02:28
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway, so what's next? I will still be giving my thoughts, semi-educated thoughts as
Listener Feedback and Safer Digital Spaces
00:02:35
Andrew Wilmot
they are. will still be covering games, games that I like, games that I dislike, games that your children will be playing and games that you may never have heard of but should be aware of.
00:02:46
Andrew Wilmot
But apart from that, we want some guests. I keep using we. I don't have a production team. I have a brand and to bounce questions off of. And as I said, I bounce questions off him very frequently.
00:02:58
Andrew Wilmot
But we want some guests. So firstly, I'm invited for experts from any related fields. So it could be those in education, healthcare professionals, entertainers, anybody.
00:03:13
Andrew Wilmot
But also, I want to hear from some parents. want hear from our listeners. I want to hear from parents whose children play games to talk with us about their children's experience playing those games, what they play, and those parents' own knowledge of video games.
00:03:29
Andrew Wilmot
I want to hear a little bit about how perhaps this podcast has impacted you. Now, I have heard from a number of you. I've had people message me actually asking, hey, I didn't realise how bad Roblox was before.
00:03:44
Andrew Wilmot
What can I do here? And the suggestion for me has always been to identify the need that Roblox is fulfilling, which often is that digital third space, and identify a mutually agreeable, safer option, which has normally been Minecraft.
00:04:01
Andrew Wilmot
But would love to get people who perhaps have listened to this podcast for a while, who enjoy what we do, Let's get you on the show. Let's talk about the games your children play.
00:04:14
Andrew Wilmot
Let's look at them together. In terms of how you can do that, I'm fairly active in the various smartphone-free childhood groups.
00:04:25
Andrew Wilmot
But additionally, you can reach me at thedopamineslockmachine at gmail.com or through any of our social media channels.
Petitions and Digital Awareness in Schools
00:04:35
Andrew Wilmot
So if you do want to join, perhaps the only real prerequisite is that you have, I mean, I'm not expecting production quality recording equipment here, but a semi-decent microphone.
00:04:52
Andrew Wilmot
You will be able to test that beforehand be able to have a conversation a In terms of what I would expect from those who do want to appear, it'll be a a conversation before recording and then the actual recording itself.
00:05:08
Andrew Wilmot
So i i don't want to ambush anybody with anything that is absolutely not the intention, ah but just to avoid the possibility of anything like that,
00:05:20
Andrew Wilmot
I think it's very good to have a sort of pre-discussion about topics beforehand. I am not media expert. I am not media trained. I've appeared on the radio and TV a couple of times, but to be honest, this is the most experience I've got with media in my entire
00:05:38
Andrew Wilmot
Now, that aside, I also wanted to give a shout out to a petition I've seen. So I tend to be a little bit cynical, actually, generally of petitions, of the GovUK official petition sites, because all that tends to get... i don't think any of them have actually affected real change.
00:05:58
Andrew Wilmot
And change.org is just a charity company. It's a charity, right? That... hosts petitions and most of those just go into the ether.
00:06:10
Andrew Wilmot
The only petition I've ever actually raised myself was ah to try and get my favourite local takeaway at university to start delivering. That said, there is a petition going round, which is we ask our Prime Minister to request an urgent review of mobile phones in schools guidance.
00:06:29
Andrew Wilmot
And I want to promote this for two reasons. One, it is frankly brilliantly written. It's written by Katie Moore in Northampton. Go read it yourself.
00:06:40
Andrew Wilmot
It is a fantastic summary of what is needed, why it's needed, and unlike so many petitions are just sort of raised as an e-jerk response to something, now this is artfully done.
00:06:54
Andrew Wilmot
And secondly... because believe it is actually going to be handed into Downing Street itself. However, for that to really be effective, for us to get time of day from the government on it, we need 10,000 verified signatures. We're at 5,919.
00:07:12
Andrew Wilmot
Now, of the hundreds of thousands now of parents who've signed the ah ah smartphone free pact, to only get 6,000 this is um And I appreciate that it's had a lot less in the way of visibility than the parent pact.
00:07:33
Andrew Wilmot
But, you know, we've got over 2000 people who have signed the parent pact just endorse it. And I've just looked up now, as of right this moment, take this with a pinch of salt, because I believe it's being reworked. So the figures might be a little bit all over the place.
00:07:47
Andrew Wilmot
I have heard other... regions, other areas mentioned that they've seen their figures drop and rise again. And that has perhaps been a little bit inaccurate. But right now, 150,000. Well, 149,000, but we'll round it up. We'll round it up. By the time you listen to this, hopefully it's 150,000.
Smartphone Addiction and Nighttime Use
00:08:07
Andrew Wilmot
I will link it in the episode description. Please go sign it. Please go read it. It was brilliant.
00:08:15
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I also read an article today about parents who are buying their young children vapes. It's in the BBC. So parents who are doing the one thing they thought they would never do in an attempt to have some control over her children's vaping habits, they've resorted to buying the vapes themselves.
00:08:35
Andrew Wilmot
Now, putting aside This is an issue. There's one specific section in this which really jumped out to me because there's a lot of what we are talking about about smartphones.
00:08:49
Andrew Wilmot
And actually, for me, it's part of the reason why the obsession about asking children who have smartphones and if a child has a smartphone and they've got unrestricted access to it, they are addicted to it.
00:09:04
Andrew Wilmot
90%, I'm addicted to my smartphone, you're probably addicted to your smartphone. Children who don't have a fraction of the self-control we do, whose brains haven't wired to be able to have that self-control, If they have a smartphone, they're addicted.
00:09:15
Andrew Wilmot
You can't ask addicts whether or not they should have access to the thing they're addicted to. Anyway, so I'm just going to quote from this article from a professor, Rachel Isber, who works at the UK's first and NHS vaping clinic for children.
00:09:28
Andrew Wilmot
She's saying some young people are sleeping with vapes under their pillows so they can get a nicotine hit in the middle of the night and their addiction can be so strong they quote, micro withdrawals in school.
00:09:42
Andrew Wilmot
So just to comment on that alone, young people sleeping with vapes under their pillows so they get a nicotine hit in the middle of the night. too If your teen has a mobile phone and it's not restricted and it's in their room, they will be doing the same.
00:09:57
Andrew Wilmot
did the same. I did the same. old am I? I did the same, that was a strange moment, I did the same 15 years ago when apps weren't nearly so addictively designed.
00:10:09
Andrew Wilmot
Hell, I did the same five years ago as an adult. I have been guilty of doing that more recently than that, and more recently than I care to admit.
00:10:21
Andrew Wilmot
And the addiction can be so strong that they experience micro-withdrawals in school. So, We talk a lot about smartphone bans in school and the different types of them and how out of sight, out of mind just isn't a workable model because even though if it's within reach of you, it's taking up cognitive load and we see children who are regularly just going to the toilets and missing large portions of their lessons just so that can check their phone.
00:10:49
Andrew Wilmot
Exactly what she's talking about here, getting that hit in the middle of the night is behaviour that we see Children exhibit with smartphones. I'm going to on slightly. They are consuming nicotine so frequently that they begin to feel anxious if they don't have it, even for the length of a double maths lesson, for example.
00:11:08
Andrew Wilmot
They then think they need the vape to reduce the anxiety, she explains, but it is nicotine withdrawal that is causing those feelings in the first place. That is exactly what's happening with smartphones in schools. And when we go and ask, there's this, I get the importance of trying to include young voices in decisions that impact them, but we need to start off from the footing that an entire generation basically everybody younger than myself, I was 12 when the iPhone was released, is probably suffering to some degree ah ah smartphone addiction.
00:11:47
Andrew Wilmot
That needs to be the starting place for any
Understanding Digital Attraction and Episode Conclusion
00:11:49
Andrew Wilmot
discussions that engage them here. And we we are asking the addicts to give up their fix when we start including them in the conversation.
00:11:59
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I'm not saying don't get to their voices, we cannot be taking them at face value here for the same reason that we cannot be taking the ah ah children who think they need the vape to reduce their anxiety at face value.
00:12:16
Andrew Wilmot
We hear a lot about school refusal and actually it's been one of the pushbacks that we've had from some schools saying, well, if we ban smartphones, some children will refuse to come in out of anxiety.
00:12:28
Andrew Wilmot
That should be such a major red flag about what is actually causing the anxiety. It's difficult to think of anything more profound than that, right?
00:12:39
Andrew Wilmot
and so outside of this, there is ah ah starting to be a lot of good movement in denormalizing smartphones for children.
00:12:50
Andrew Wilmot
What I am worried about is that the same movement isn't applying to video games. I don't really see it as a net positive if a child goes from TikTok on their phone to Roblox on their tablet.
00:13:12
Andrew Wilmot
We need to be looking at this holistically. We need to be understanding the wider digital environments and the way they're interacting with them. know, getting even more holistic than that, we need to be looking at the play spaces that are available to children and looking at both the push and the pull factors.
00:13:28
Andrew Wilmot
Why are children being pushed into these completely inappropriate and unsafe digital third spaces? And what are the ways in which these inappropriate and unsafe digital third spaces are pulling them on?
00:13:42
Andrew Wilmot
So, relatively short episode today. i just wanted to touch in and explain a a little bit about the direction the podcast is going, whilst also so being to able confirm that the Snapchat episode is finally coming out. We've worked hard on it.
00:13:58
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway, if you or your family or anybody you know has been impacted by the issues that have been discussed in this episode, or if you want to appear on the podcast... please get in touch, be it at the DopamineSlockMachine at gmail.com or via our social media links, which will posted in the episode description.
00:14:15
Andrew Wilmot
We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to have you on. And that's it for me. This has been the Dopamine Slot Machine. Thank you and see you soon.