You want to give me surgery? Well, perhaps. How many hours do you spend playing video games per week, Doctor, uhh, mmm (looks for a nametag)...
As is usual, after I spend years of hard thought coming up with a theory , Discover comes out a few months later and takes all the credit.
Man, I love Discover magazine, and this month's issue is no exception. Uh, in fact, it's exceptionally interesting. Can I do that?
Today I learned: video games can make you smarter, more socially confident, better than the average deaf person at seeing, and even a better laparoscopic surgeon than that bum Dr. Bandelstein who's killing your clan's Halo2 ranking because he's always letting down his guarde defensively during classic ctf matches. Or so Discover reports may be the case, July 2005, Your Brain on Video Games. Here's part of it.
Here's some interesting quotes (pgs. 39-43):
A host of new studies suggest that video games build rather than diminish cognitive skills.
We had a hard time finding kids who were bad at school but good at games.
...as you get older, you kind of rest on your laurels: You learn certain patterns, you know your field, and you get a lot of experience. But (video gaming) requires you to think in a new way. I saw that the excitement of this is the challenge and the difficulty and the new learning.
...gaming might be mentally enriching.
...cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience...gaming (may) excercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it's challenging.
...successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think.
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The article looks at one other thing before it asks the most important question, whether or not the skills honed in video gaming can translate into the real world.* Yes, so before that the concept "regime of competence" enters the scene. This has something to do with how Tetris starts slowly until you learn what you are doing and then progressively gets harder. Same thing in Winning Eleven, and same reason both games are addictive. The article touches on dopamine activity during gameplay but clearly explains that this chemical is not a reward in itself but is always present during times of discovery and learning. Video gaming is the only form of entertainment that really constantly relies on the regime of competence. As the article points out, movies do not start with basic ideas of plot and then progress to more complex ones, nor do books start out using the most basic words, etc. Anyway, if this is an addiction it seems like the best of one. No one complains that Mom is 'addicted' to doing laundry and the dishes. Of course if she spent eight hours a day doing them, and never got to cooking...
Moving on. So one guy figured people born deaf would have better visual skills than those not. It did not turn out this way after testing. However, a test on himself showed that his skills were off the charts. He figured it was because he was good at video games. True this, or so it would seem after many kinds of testing. It also was recorded that people raised their skills in his visual tests after they played video games for a few months. So they can help anyone. It seems, "The evidence was overwhelming: Games were literally making people perceive the world more clearly." (pg41)
It also seems Steven Johnson, the Discover writer, imagines semi:colons everywhere he goes.
It also turned out that those surgeons made 37% less errors than their "nongaming peers," because of "improved hand-eye coordination and depth perception." (pg42)
This may or may not be surprising. The article reminds us that the U.S. military has long used a type of video gaming for its pilots and other soldiers to prepare them for real life warfare.
The article also mentions World of Warcraft and The Sims 2 as top brain games. Johnson himself recounts a situation where he was teaching his 7 year old nephew how to play SimCity 2000. He says he was "just giving him a tour of the city (he'd) built. But he was absorbing the rules nonetheless." (pg43) At one point he showed his nephew a part of town that was not doing so well, when his nephew looked at him and said, "'I think you need to lower your industrial tax rates.' He said it as calmly and as confidently as if he were saying, 'I think we need to shoot the bad guy.'" (pg.43)
I liked that last quote. I can just imagine a parent getting wigged out by the tone with which her son may be overheard saying to his brother, 'you gotta kill those guys first before you kill that big one. noooo! use your flame thrower!'
My situation with video gaming was different when I said it was saving my life. I meant the competition on XBox live. My friends in the same room as me were depending on my creative quick thinking and my hand-eye dexterity to be better than my opponent across the internet. But he wasn't really far away. I could hear his voice laughing at us and mocking us as his team took a big lead. I watched his character squat down on my dead teammates, furthering my anger and frustration. Often I felt like I felt when I was in the blocks waiting for the gun to start a 200m race at a track meet. Bang! We'd come back and win and finally start talking back a little trash talk all amidst thier bellyaching and claims that we'd cheated. Other people depending on me has always and in all facets of my life made me perform better and longer. (This has nothing to do with Viagra) It gives me the motivation to stay alert and try harder. This is how they helped me out of a bad situation or apathy.
People may ask, 'how can you get worked up over a video game?' But that's like asking how one can get caught up in competition. It's ping-pong, it's chess, it's basketball or highjumping, but can be for those that don't have the physical ability to do those sports but always dreamed of doing them. As games' graphics and physics progress, every young boy and girl will have the ability to watch their most creative dreams come true. And the best part about it is, it will take a lot of hard work on their part. A lot of thinking, patience and practice. And this is what makes it rewarding. This is what makes it better than just imagining it. This is why people try to learn how to write what they think instead of just think it. In my case, at least. So as long as you make sure your kids get some real excercise you shouldn't feel guilty about buying them the new XBox 360 as a birthday reward.
Hah! I'd actually say that most people I know don't like video games anymore, not because they're too mature for them and have grown out of that phase, but because the games have gotten too hard over the years for them to get any fun out of them. When a friend comes to my house if they really want to try to play Winning Eleven I realize that I have a lot of explaining to do. It took me a couple of months to be able to master or even utilize most of the controls. And there aren't even that many.
Here ends the lesson.
*a paraphrasing too close to the sentence on pg41. Discover, July 2005.
Man, I love Discover magazine, and this month's issue is no exception. Uh, in fact, it's exceptionally interesting. Can I do that?
Today I learned: video games can make you smarter, more socially confident, better than the average deaf person at seeing, and even a better laparoscopic surgeon than that bum Dr. Bandelstein who's killing your clan's Halo2 ranking because he's always letting down his guarde defensively during classic ctf matches. Or so Discover reports may be the case, July 2005, Your Brain on Video Games. Here's part of it.
Here's some interesting quotes (pgs. 39-43):
A host of new studies suggest that video games build rather than diminish cognitive skills.
We had a hard time finding kids who were bad at school but good at games.
...as you get older, you kind of rest on your laurels: You learn certain patterns, you know your field, and you get a lot of experience. But (video gaming) requires you to think in a new way. I saw that the excitement of this is the challenge and the difficulty and the new learning.
...gaming might be mentally enriching.
...cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience...gaming (may) excercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it's challenging.
...successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The article looks at one other thing before it asks the most important question, whether or not the skills honed in video gaming can translate into the real world.* Yes, so before that the concept "regime of competence" enters the scene. This has something to do with how Tetris starts slowly until you learn what you are doing and then progressively gets harder. Same thing in Winning Eleven, and same reason both games are addictive. The article touches on dopamine activity during gameplay but clearly explains that this chemical is not a reward in itself but is always present during times of discovery and learning. Video gaming is the only form of entertainment that really constantly relies on the regime of competence. As the article points out, movies do not start with basic ideas of plot and then progress to more complex ones, nor do books start out using the most basic words, etc. Anyway, if this is an addiction it seems like the best of one. No one complains that Mom is 'addicted' to doing laundry and the dishes. Of course if she spent eight hours a day doing them, and never got to cooking...
Moving on. So one guy figured people born deaf would have better visual skills than those not. It did not turn out this way after testing. However, a test on himself showed that his skills were off the charts. He figured it was because he was good at video games. True this, or so it would seem after many kinds of testing. It also was recorded that people raised their skills in his visual tests after they played video games for a few months. So they can help anyone. It seems, "The evidence was overwhelming: Games were literally making people perceive the world more clearly." (pg41)
It also seems Steven Johnson, the Discover writer, imagines semi:colons everywhere he goes.
It also turned out that those surgeons made 37% less errors than their "nongaming peers," because of "improved hand-eye coordination and depth perception." (pg42)
This may or may not be surprising. The article reminds us that the U.S. military has long used a type of video gaming for its pilots and other soldiers to prepare them for real life warfare.
The article also mentions World of Warcraft and The Sims 2 as top brain games. Johnson himself recounts a situation where he was teaching his 7 year old nephew how to play SimCity 2000. He says he was "just giving him a tour of the city (he'd) built. But he was absorbing the rules nonetheless." (pg43) At one point he showed his nephew a part of town that was not doing so well, when his nephew looked at him and said, "'I think you need to lower your industrial tax rates.' He said it as calmly and as confidently as if he were saying, 'I think we need to shoot the bad guy.'" (pg.43)
I liked that last quote. I can just imagine a parent getting wigged out by the tone with which her son may be overheard saying to his brother, 'you gotta kill those guys first before you kill that big one. noooo! use your flame thrower!'
My situation with video gaming was different when I said it was saving my life. I meant the competition on XBox live. My friends in the same room as me were depending on my creative quick thinking and my hand-eye dexterity to be better than my opponent across the internet. But he wasn't really far away. I could hear his voice laughing at us and mocking us as his team took a big lead. I watched his character squat down on my dead teammates, furthering my anger and frustration. Often I felt like I felt when I was in the blocks waiting for the gun to start a 200m race at a track meet. Bang! We'd come back and win and finally start talking back a little trash talk all amidst thier bellyaching and claims that we'd cheated. Other people depending on me has always and in all facets of my life made me perform better and longer. (This has nothing to do with Viagra) It gives me the motivation to stay alert and try harder. This is how they helped me out of a bad situation or apathy.
People may ask, 'how can you get worked up over a video game?' But that's like asking how one can get caught up in competition. It's ping-pong, it's chess, it's basketball or highjumping, but can be for those that don't have the physical ability to do those sports but always dreamed of doing them. As games' graphics and physics progress, every young boy and girl will have the ability to watch their most creative dreams come true. And the best part about it is, it will take a lot of hard work on their part. A lot of thinking, patience and practice. And this is what makes it rewarding. This is what makes it better than just imagining it. This is why people try to learn how to write what they think instead of just think it. In my case, at least. So as long as you make sure your kids get some real excercise you shouldn't feel guilty about buying them the new XBox 360 as a birthday reward.
Hah! I'd actually say that most people I know don't like video games anymore, not because they're too mature for them and have grown out of that phase, but because the games have gotten too hard over the years for them to get any fun out of them. When a friend comes to my house if they really want to try to play Winning Eleven I realize that I have a lot of explaining to do. It took me a couple of months to be able to master or even utilize most of the controls. And there aren't even that many.
Here ends the lesson.
*a paraphrasing too close to the sentence on pg41. Discover, July 2005.
on a whim, chad was marco @ 5:36 PM
3 $BlogItemCommentCount$:
At 9:54 AM,
ClickNathan said…
That's an interesting assumption. I think I quit playing video games on a daily basis because they got to be too easy. Or too common anyway. There are just too many "Doom" "GTA" and "Let's build and race our cars" games out there.
That's why I stuck with Nintendo for so long, because games like MarioParty or Donkey Kongo were at least trying new things. Or WarioWare, that was the first really good, new idea for a game in a long time.
There is too much emphasis on graphics and reality these days and not enough on the physical aspects of game play.
Perhaps that trend is reversing a bit though, maybe I'll find out when I get the XBox 360.
I always realized that video games probably didn't "rot your brain" as the basis for every parent's analysis of this situation was derived in the idea that TV rots your brain. I can understand that. Maybe not if you're watching something like Futurama or the movie Garden State or anything else with intelligent stimulation that gets you involved with thinking about the plot as opposed to realizing that "Okay, the power rangers fight this little guy, then he gets big and starts winning, then they get big and really start winning, cut to Zed and he gives us a life lesson while the robot says something quirky." The interaction you get with video games, just like with the Internet, make both of those mediums far more valuable than anything mom is likely to watch on Lifetime.
I've even thought that books, to a degree, are more like TV than interactivity. With books you do get to imagine what's being described, but you're still just sitting there, occassionally turning a page. I always wondered if Charles Ingalls would have said "Laura, it's Saturday, go outside and quit rotting your brain with that book."
Books may have only become a "healthy" thing to do after the early 1900s grandparents began growing older and watching the kids watching TV, a nostalgia thing...
At 7:01 PM,
chad was marco said…
hahahahahah...ha! there, i think that's the correct amount. i probably should have used caps.
yeah, games do all seem to have the same ideas. but to me, a good game could come in any genre. it really depends on the games, what was it called, 'regime of competence' or something. winning eleven is just another sports game. but it isn't because the skills you learn allow you to move to the next level. this is similar in madden also, but i think there's a difference. in madden there is far too much going on that you DON't control and that's why so many controllers get broken over that game. and why you don't feel as rewarded as you do when you learn this game...and CONQUER IT!!!
At 9:04 AM,
ClickNathan said…
I see.
I was playing San Andreas last night, the first time I was on a video game system in at least a month, but a good 4 or 5 months since my last serious addiction with a game (Mario Kart for GameCube)...
It was frustrating. Trying to move the little crosshairs was the worst part. But it's not the industries fault, just PlayStation, and maybe just RockStar in general. What's the point of having an analog joystick if everything moves in increments?
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