11.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 99
He spent his early years in Colorado, where
he says he was “outside all the time,” roaming
the woods with his buddies, looking for fun
and adventure. Starting at age 13, Nate began
filling the same exploratory need with Wo r l d
of Warcraft. Playing as a character named
Bothar the Paladin, he fell in with a group of
gamers who would venture together into the
supernatural lands of Warcraft.
Before long, gaming had completely re-
placed the outdoors. Instead of goofing
around in the woods, he searched for hid-
den jewels in Wa rc ra f t. “It’s similar in the
sense that you don’t know what’s going to
happen,” he explains, shifting in his chair. “I
guess that’s like how, in the wilderness, you
go and find something and you’re like, man,
that’s just so beautiful.”
By Nate’s junior year in high school, he
was skipping nutritious meals for junk food
or eating nothing at all. His 3.5 GPA plum-
meted into the twos, and he finally stopped
going to school.
All this came to a halt one night around
3 A.M. Nate was in his bedroom watch-
ing a Japanese anime series called My Hero
Academia when he got “gooned”—slang for
being bagged by handlers from a wilderness-
therapy program. As his father explained to
him that his problem with gaming had gone
too far, Nate nervously eyed the three men
who were there to escort him away.
“There’s no talking around it,” Nate re-
calls. “They were just like really big guys, very
muscular, and there’s three of them.” After
undergoing three months of treatment in a
woodsy locale outside Bend, Oregon, he was
taken to Serenity to start the rehab process.
There’s plenty of natural beauty to be had
at Serenity. Cash takes me out for a hike on
one of the trails nearby. It’s lovely and peace-
ful, the quiet stillness made more so by a
thick blanket of snow. As we move through
the trees, Cash talks about the psychologi-
cal and physical benefits of being outdoors:
lower stress, elevated mood, increased focus.
AT RESTART, STAFF AND CLIENTS TALKABOUT GAMING LIKE THEY WOULD ANYOTHER ADDICTION. COFOUNDER COSETTERAE TELLS ME ABOUT A 13-YEAR-OLD BOYWHO WAS ""USING"" WORLD OF WARCRAFTA DOZEN HOURS A DAY.put participants through a stressful ten-
minute simulation, asking them to write
about a recent challenging experience while
the sounds of jackhammers and honking
cars played in their headphones. They then
donned virtual-reality headsets and explored
a photorealistic forest, with shrubs, trees,
flowers, and streams. For added immersion,
the scientists misted the testing area with
Forest Breeze air freshener. (Nothing like the
whiff of chemical pine to get you feeling out-
doorsy.) They found that the stress reduction
delivered by the virtual outdoors was simi-
lar to being outside. Though there’s debate
about whether this response happens mainly
because of the novelty of being in virtual re-
ality, Ellard thinks the effects are real.
To get a taste of what VR feels like, I strap
on an Oculus headset to play a rock-climb-
ing game called The Climb, which can make
you feel weak in the knees. I’m looking out
on a sun-dappled rock wall overlooking a
vast and gorgeous simulation inspired by
Halong Bay in Vietnam. I gaze at distant gray
limestone pillars jutting up from turquoise
blue waters. Wispy white clouds drift over-
head; waves lap sandy beaches. Using touch
controllers, I move my hands along the rock
wall, squeezing the trigger to grip and release.
When I make the mistake of looking down
at hundreds of feet of air below me, my brain
tells my body to freak out, and it responds
accordingly—sweat flows from my palms,
my stomach flops.
Earlier this year, neurobiologists at the
University of California at Irvine studied
a group of gamers who played Minecraft,
the popular open-world multiplayer title.
Though the game isn’t photorealistic, it’s
immersive and compelling, and it allows
players to explore and build their own do-
mains—jungles, deserts, forests, and so on—
using Lego-like blocks. The participants in
the study played approximately 45 minutes
a day for two weeks. The researchers con-
cluded that the game improved their hippo-
campal functions, specifically memory per-
formance. “Video games can act as a form of
environmental enrichment in humans,” they
said in a paper that appeared in Frontiers in
Behavioral Neuroscience.
Gregory D. Clemenson, one of the au-
thors, cautions that this does not mean
video games are as nourishing to the mind
as a walk in the park, but they may do more
good than people think. “There’s evidence
that when we explore virtual worlds, we are
using the same processes as when we ex-
plore a real one,” he says.AT THE RANCH, gamers care for three
goats—Tatiana, Rose, and Dammit the Faint-
ing Goat—among other animals. Tending toWhen I ask her if she can imagine a day when
virtual worlds become as compelling as this,
she gasps and says, “The real world cannot
be substituted by a virtual one.”
But, actually, it can.WHILE IT SEEMS strange to think that the
virtual outdoors could substitute for the real
thing, science is beginning to suggest that it
often does. Recent studies have shown that
the same parts of your brain that get stimu-
lated during a hike can get fired up by screen
time in a digital wilderness. Colin Ellard, a
neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo
in Ontario, has studied the phenomenon,
and he says that “when we engage in game
play, certainly with immersive virtual envi-
ronments, we’re probably reproducing a lot
of the same patterns of activity in the brain
that are produced by real environments.”
To understand this, consider the science
on why being outside is good for your brain
in the first place. Using fMRI scans, studies
have shown that when we’re outside taking
in a majestic view, we stimulate the parahip-
pocampal gyrus, a region of the brain that’sa central component of the limbic system.
The euphoric feeling you get in the outdoors
likely comes from opiate receptors inside
the parahippocampal gyrus that flood you
with physiological goodness that’s similar
to what you get from a slice of pizza or a ro-
mantic relationship.
There’s an evolutionary reason for this:
the more stimulated we are by our environ-
ment, the more inclined we are to explore it.
In a 2006 paper for American Scientist, neu-
roscientists Irving Biederman and Edward
A. Vessel wrote that the brain has “informa-
tion-acquisition mechanisms that reward
us for learning about the environment” and
that “such mechanisms would have an evo-
lutionary advantage.”
Ellard and his colleagues wondered
whether a simulated outdoor environment
might also elicit rewards. To test this, they