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July 20, 2005
Video Games Make You Smarter
There is a good article in the July issue of Discover Magazine (you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing online) about how video games makes people smarter by teaching problem solving skills, patience, and creative thinking along with increasing their perceptiveness and visual acuity. The story talked about studies done by neurologists and other scientists that show how gamers brains function more efficiently and that repeated playing of games ranging from Tetris to Medal of Honor increases everything from reaction time when solving puzzles and increased reading speed to tolerance of distraction under stressful situations. The most interesting tidbit of the article was that arthroscopic surgeons who play at least 3 hours of video games a week have an error rate 37% lower than that of non-gamers. Gamers were also found to be more social and better able to interact with other people than non-gamers. Some of the studies also controlled for the possibility that smart people might be attracted to video games.
The U.S. Army has known about the usefulness of video games for a while and has taken advantage of video games as a way to train soldiers and even uses a video game (Americas Army) to help sort out potential recruits. Unfortunately video games still get a lot of bad press, often from people who have never played the games being criticized or who have little experience or first hand knowledge of games. A good example of this is the recent experience of John Davison who was invited onto the TV show The Big Idea on the pretext of talking about things like gaming communities and the future of games, but instead the show was about how horrible and violent all video games are.
I was introduced as pretty much the bad guy who thinks this doesn't have an effect on kids, and...well...things just deteriorated from there. I tried to discuss the ratings system, I tried to talk about how the majority of games are sold at Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy, and how they all take the ratings system very seriously...but this isn't what the show was supposed to be about. Donny had an agenda. "All games are violent" was his proclamation, and nothing was going to sway him. We weren't here to test a hypothesis. While this was happening, the director kept nagging me through the earpiece to "jump in and talk about what you're here to talk about." I was pissed. "That's not what the show appears to be about, darling."As we cut to the first break in the live taping, more guests were being lined up including Columbine student Brooks Brown and his parents. This was looking like a full on ambush...so I got up and left. I'd been set up as an apologist for videogames, and with the obvious agenda it was clear that neither I, nor anything I represent was going to come out of it unscathed. Deutsch wasn't interested in discussing the efforts of the ESA or the ESRB, or the fact that the rating system has been commended by numerous organizations, he was simply interested in demonizing an entire segment of entertainment.
Posted by Pete at July 20, 2005 10:45 AM
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