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June 14, 2006
Video Games Make You Smarter
Here is a good column by Brian C. Anderson in the Wall Street Journal a while back about how video games make you smarter:
A few weeks ago, Sony and Nintendo both revealed their newest video-game systems to great fanfare, complete with slicker graphics and motion sensors. But not everyone was pleased. An increasingly noisy chorus of critics charge that the video-game industry--whose receipts now top the Hollywood box office--threatens to transform American kids into drooling zombies or out-and-out sociopaths. "We're trying to keep children away from R-rated violent movies that last 90 minutes," grumbles conservative media critic Brent Bozell, "but in too many basements and kids' bedrooms in America, children are role-playing murderers for hours on end, ad infinitum."Raunchy, blood-soaked video games, unleashing "a silent epidemic of media desensitization," are "stealing the innocence of our children," agrees Hillary Clinton. That's why she and fellow senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh have introduced legislation to regulate the video-game industry, codifying its voluntary rating system and making it a federal crime for retailers to sell or rent inappropriate games to minors. Even the latest edition of Dr. Spock's famous guide to childrearing deems gaming a "colossal waste of time" at best, anger-stoking at worst.
Note that none of the law makers mention that as the amount of time kids and teenagers have spent playing violent video games has increased over the past decade the amount of actual violence by kids and teenagers has plummeted. Anderson continues below by noting that video games are far more mentally stimulating than TV and are comparable to playing chess for hours on end. Most non-gamers realize do not realize how hard the better and usually more popular video games are. We are not talking Pong. I doubt Hillary Clinton or Evan Bayh could make it very far through X-Men Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse (mentioned below) without giving up from the mental difficulty of it.
Video games can also exercise the brain in remarkable ways. I recently spent (too) many late-night hours working my way through X-Men: Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse, a game I ostensibly bought for my kids. Figuring out how to deploy a particular grouping of heroes (each of whom has special powers and weaknesses); using trial and error and hunches to learn the game's rules and solve its puzzles; weighing short-term and long-term goals--the experience was mentally exhausting and, when my team finally beat the Apocalypse, exhilarating.Technology writer Steven Johnson likens the intellectual process at work in video gaming to "the basic procedure of the scientific method." True, I might have better used my time reading Phillip Roth's new novel, but as mind-aerobics this exercise surely beat watching the tube. As for my kids navigating the game, wouldn't it be comparable with their playing chess for hours?
A growing number of innovators recognize the intellectual benefits of gaming and seek to use video games for educational or therapeutic ends. The Serious Games Initiative, USA Today recently reported, got its start in 2002, when the U.S. Army released America's Army, a free online game that allows players to "live" the Army. More than five million people have registered to play. Venture capital and philanthropic dollars are now pouring into Serious Games projects in health care, mathematics and government and corporate training. One encouraging early result is Free Dive, a game that distracts children suffering from chronic pain or undergoing painful operations in real life with a calming underwater virtual reality.
I am working my way through X-Men Legends II myself and although it is not the most challanging game I have played, it is definitely more mentally challanging than TV and even many books I have read lately.
Previous gaming post.
Posted by Pete at June 14, 2006 11:22 AM
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