*Note – this post appears quite popular! I’ve edited it to fix typo’s, and added in more resources. Thank you all for sharing it, I hope it helps some parents relax about gaming.
*Another edit. I added some research that refutes the long-held notion that video game violence translates to violence in real life (and more in 2015!).
In response to a post in a Facebook group, for a Mom who needed to show how learning happens in video games and how they can be beneficial, I started gathering peer-reviewed scientific studies on the benefits of gaming (yeah, I just kinda like doing that stuff!). I knew there were more and more positive articles coming out, but even I was surprised with the sheer volume – at some point soon the positive articles will for sure outweigh the negative fear-mongering articles. You betta believe it!
Video Games foster learning and brain development
Don’t believe me? Well here’s just a few studies I found this morning:
- The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st Century (2007). – Summary – ‘Video game skill correlates with laparoscopic surgical skills.’ – so – surgeons who were better gamers, were better surgeons.
- The effects of video game playing on attention, memory, and executive control (2008) – Summary – Expert gamers (those who game a lot) were better than non-gamers at a number of tasks, including tracking objects at greater speed, better detecting changes to objects stored in their visual short term memory, switched more quickly from one task to another, and mentally rotated objects more efficiently.
- Playing an action video games reduces gender differences in spatial cognition (2013) – Summary – after playing video games, the gender differences in spatial attention and mental rotation were smaller – women benefitted.
- Positive association of video game playing with left frontal cortex thickness in adolescents (2014) – Summary – Kids who played video games for a longer duration had greater cortical thickness (this is a good thing!) in areas of the brain associated with executive control, strategic planning, the execution of eye movements, and allocation of visuo-spatial attention.
And here’s a video about some of that research (which also touches on whether video game violence causes real life violence and/or desensitization – *see below also)… http://video.msnbc.msn.com/the-cycle/50412970/#50412970
Alex Polikowsky also shared links to a number of TED talks and You Tubes on video games and learning: Videos by Constance Steinkuehler Videos by James Paul Gee
Ok. So you’re convinced that playing video games can lead to positive changes in brain development – basically quicker reflexes, better spatial awareness and processing, and problem solving skills…..
Video game violence doesn’t translate to real life violence
I didn’t cover this in my initial post, only very briefly with the video above, and some of the commenters have brought up this aspect of gaming. There are a lot of studies that seem to purport that video games make kids violent in real life – but – as with learning and video games, the tide is turning, and more and more articles are finding no link with video game violence and real life violence…
1. Causal or spurious: Using propensity score matching to detangle the relationship between violent video games and violent behavior (2012) Summary – This study questions the methodology that has been used in previous studies that have linked gaming violence to real life violence, and concludes that strength of evidence supporting a relationship has likely been overestimated.
2. A longitudinal test of video game violence influences on dating and aggression: A 3-year longitudinal study of adolescents (2011) – Summary – this study followed 165 kids over 3 years. It found ‘ exposure to video game violence was not related to any of the negative outcomes.’ Instead, ‘Depression, antisocial personality traits, exposure to family violence and peer influences were the best predictors of aggression-related outcomes.’ And the authors summarise that their study supports a growing body of others that show video game violence does not affect youth aggression.
3. A Plea for Caution: Violent Video Games, the Supreme Court, and the Role of Science (2011) This one is really interesting – Summary – the authors review the evidence for both sides of the arguments on video games – and find that the evidence supporting a relationship is generally spurious. They also compare the current arguments on video games to very similar arguments against comic books in the 1950’s. This is a popular article, with links to research, refuting the idea that gaming can lead to rape.
An article new in 2015: Does Media Violence Predict Societal Violence? It depends on what you look at and when. Journal of Communication. Summarises ‘Videogame consumption is associated with a decline in youth violence rates. Results suggest that societal consumption of media violence is not predictive of increased societal violence rates.’
The author of the above article – Dr Christopher Fergurson, is at Stetson University, a clinical psychologist who has worked extensively with youth offenders – his page has lots of great links to read.
Video games increase hand-eye coordination and can improve eyesight
But you’re still worried, right? What about damage to their eyes?? Well, I hate to dispel your fears (actually, no, I love dispelling your fears!)….but….gamers have better eyesight too….
Video games can burn calories, and there is no real evidence they contribute to make kids fatter!
What about inactivity? If they game all day, they’ll be fat and unfit – right? It took me a while to search out some articles on this. There were plenty of the usual scare-mongering popular articles with quotes from ‘experts’, but real ‘science’ was harder to root out!
Our own experience is that, when they have the room to do so, kids are jumping around like crazy when they are playing games on the Wii, Xbox, PS3, etc. Though this isn’t necessarily true of computer use, as they are sitting for that….
But – I did find this study: Summary – playing video games resulted in increases in various metabolic parameters like heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen consumption. That study linked to a few others with similar results.
This one (which is ooooolllldd!) finds playing ‘Ms Pac Man’ (!!) causes similar physiologic responses to mild-intensity exercise.
While this study compares traditional ‘sedentary’ games with Kinect games like boxing and dance. The Kinect games increased activity levels to equivalent burning 172 calories/hour more than sedentary games.
I guess that’s not surprising if the sedentary games really are ‘sedentary’, which is not the case in our experience at all – i’m pretty sure Kai would burn that many calories playing Kirby’s Adventures!
Similarly it was hard to find scientific papers addressing the concern that gamers are ‘fatter’ than non-gamers. Intuitively I doubted that was true. There are a lot more factors at play in obesity rates than gaming (kind of like the ‘pie’ the woman talks about in the video above)…..and my avid gamer is the polar opposite of obese – we can barely keep weight on him at the moment! One could just as easily say that avid book readers are at risk of obesity, because they are sedentary (more sedentary than a gamer, even on a laptop, I’d wager)….you get my drift!
I did find a study saying ADULT gamers are fatter and depressed, but that is in no way applicable to gaming unschooled kids. On further searching – I did manage to find an old study from 1999 that concludes that TV viewing, but not VCR or video gaming, is associated with obesity in Mexican children.
For one thing – VCR is TV viewing, essentially. So – what the!? And pretty sure those kids aren’t unschooled. Still – it finds no relationship between video games and obesity. I found another, from 2004 – which concludes ‘inactivity may be unfairly implicated in recent epidemiologic trends of overweight and obesity’ and says ‘Relationships between sedentary behavior and health are unlikely to be explained using single markers of inactivity, such as TV viewing or video/computer game use.’ So. No scientific evidence that video games are related to obesity or kids being overweight, and playing video games can actually be equivalent to mild to moderate exercise.
Gamers aren’t weird loners!
Related tangentially to the myth that gamers are fat and sedentary, is the myth that they are also anti-social loners stuck in a basement and have no friends. Sorry to disappoint, but nope!
This recent study (2014) finds the opposite. Gamers who played online, in MMOG’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) like World of Warcraft were in fact very social, and gaming enhanced their social lives.
One of the researchers is quoted here (and I recommend reading that article, as the actual paper is really hard going!) as saying: ‘Gamers aren’t the antisocial basement-dwellers we see in pop culture stereotypes, they’re highly social people. This won’t be a surprise to the gaming community, but it’s worth telling everyone else. Loners are the outliers in gaming, not the norm.”
Of course it’s not a surprise to those of us who embrace gaming. One night here, Kai was Skype/playing Minecraft and Animal Jam with three friends – one in Sydney, one in Arkansas USA and one in England! We’ve made loads of friends through gaming, and even when Kai’s in his room ‘alone’, he’s most often skyping with friends, and thus actually not ‘alone’ at all – but learning new negotiating skills, social skills and cooperating skills. So, you believe gamers aren’t weirdo anti-social loners, but actually highly social, functioning human beings….
Video games are not ‘addictive’, y’all!
But what about addiction – they’ll become addicted!? *Sigh* the ‘addiction’ label. I’m sure we’ve all heard and/or seen people say/write that their kid is ‘addicted’ to video games/iPad/’screens’ etc.
I think, maybe, when people say that, they are just parroting things they’ve heard, and not really actually considering the weight of their words. OF COURSE video games aren’t addicting! Seriously! You can’t compare enjoying playing video games with being addicted to a substance like heroin, or alcohol, or whatever! That is crazy!
Articles like this one, and this one are also all over the internet, freaking out parents and fuelling fears about ‘screen’ addiction. Really, if you want to find more to fuel your fears and doubts, I can’t stop you. BUT! Despite these tabloid, fear-mongering articles, the ‘experts’ disagree – Here…and here – and this is another link leading from the second.
These articles all point to there being no such thing as gaming ‘addiction’. They do however talk about ‘compulsive gaming’ (they don’t define that – I assume gaming at the exclusion of most other things?) being due to pressures from school and/or lack of parental input (the ‘pie’ again, with many factors contributing…).
Neither of those things is relevant to unschooled kids, with parental facilitation and input, who have a whole world of activities to choose from. Stressed school kids are choosing video games (or TV) to escape. Unschooled kids are choosing video games (or TV) because they love them, out of a whole host of other options.
Colleen Prieto recently wrote something wonderful about addiction. The discussion was about food, but the comment relates to video game ‘addiction’ also (I added ‘video game’ in square brackets where it could be substituted for the food idea):
“There are people who steal and lie and hurt other people in order to get money for alcohol and for drugs. There are people who commit crimes in order to feed their very real addiction to cocaine, or vodka, or meth. I have never known of anyone who has committed a crime to feed an addiction to soda, or Twizzlers, or MSG-laden barbecue-flavored potato chips (VIDEO GAMES). I have never heard of a parent who is sick with worry because they do not know where their chip-eating, Pepsi-drinking (VIDEO GAME PLAYING) child is, discovering only later that he had fallen asleep in a park, high on sugar and food-chemicals (VIDEO GAMING). I have never heard of parents getting phone calls because their child is in the hospital after crashing his car while high on red food dye (VIDEO GAMES).’ Colleen went on later to actually talk about video games… ‘It’s sort of like the idea of being addicted to video games – or other such things that just aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination, similar to drugs and alcohol in the effect they truly have on people. Saying a teenager is “Addicted to video games” somehow sounds better to some folks than saying that their particular child really would rather sit inside on the couch by himself playing Tetris or World of Warcraft or such, and the child would really rather *not* go outside and wander the woods or go hang out with other kids or with their neighbors. But is there anything really wrong with a child who prefers to be inside and by himself?’
There was more discussion, essentially about the fact that parents use the ‘addiction’ word to make them feel better about their ‘having to’ limit gaming…. Video games aren’t addicting. Full stop. (or, Period, if you are North American!).
Video games don’t change your kids behaviour, y’all!
People new to unschooling, or having problems letting go of their fears of gaming and TV often say that if they let their kids have unlimited access they get frustrated, angry, argumentative, blah blah blah. Here’s a fact. Video games don’t have magical powers. They can’t control people or behaviour.
Kids get frustrated at video games for sure. If they are stuck on a level, if they are losing. Kai gets just as frustrated if he’s losing at Junior Monopoly or chess! As facilitating parents it’s up to us to help them through that – in our house that means maybe finding a walk-through, so Kai can watch someone go through the level. Or I might suggest he leaves the game for a while if it’s frustrating (he may or may not choose to do that – sometimes just reminding him that’s an option is enough).
Here’s another fact. If you try, subtly or not so subtly, to get your kid away from his computer game he’s in the middle of, or a TV show she is watching, they are going to get pissed off at you. It’s not the game making them pissed off and angry, nor the TV show. It’s you. You are asking them to quit an activity before they are done. While they are in the middle of it. If you were in the middle of a chapter of a great book, totally into it, and someone told you to put it down because you needed to get some ‘outside time’ – would you be pissed off? Just think about that….
*Final note – for those parents who really want to learn more about video games and learning, and support their children’s passions, there is a FREE course available on Coursera. The actual course is done, but all the learning materials are still available to download. I hope to have enough time to get through it after I finish a pile of work! Thanks to Alex for pointing me to it. Go here to find it, and have fun learning about learning!
Thank you for this article! I wrote about that subject too on my blog (in French) and found so much positive informations about video games! My children learn a lot (and me too) in their video games! I feel a little less alone after reading your post! Thank you! :)
Jo, thank you so much for collating and reviewing these articles! I’ll be forwarding your post to a couple of parents who are fearful about some of the very same issues raised here. It’s great to have it all set out so clearly!
Thanks Stephanie and Claire! I woke up this morning to find this post all over the place! I think I need to do a better editing job! I planned to put some photo’s in too – I hope it can help some parents relax about gaming – gaming has brought so much joy and learning to our home :)
Superb!! THANK YOU!!
Fantastic post. After a day with the in- laws I needed this reminder.
The studies you cited are weak. You cite studies in how video games develop the brain positively, and cite a change in cortex, but then completely dismiss that violence, rape, pornogrpahy has an effect on the brain.
Increasing your respiration by 18% is no difference than watching a hotel movie or reading an exciting book. I read the study of a whopping 21 boys, and if you have ever studied exercise there is NO aerobic benefit to those numbers.
I can continue to poke huge holes in your assertions and when I do, I will post the link.
Hi Dawn. I expected someone to point out that I was citing one-sided studies. Yes, I am. That’s because it’s so easy to find the negative, scare-mongering articles about video games – anyone can go and find them if they want to – and if you want to, go ahead – i’m pretty sure you’ll find more of those, and quicker, than I found positive articles.
I wanted to present the opposite side of the coin, for those people interested in finding out about other ideas. This post is for unschoolers who are hoping to find ways to support their childrens love of video games. You are clearly not one of those people, so i’m not sure why you reading or commenting. I’m not denying that there are counter-studies and arguments – indeed – I agree they are in the majority (for now). And yes, I can easily find studies that show that video games don’t cause desensitization, just as easily as you can find studies that say they do.
What is a hotel movie? And I already compared book reading to sedentary video games (when they really are sendentary, which is very rarely). Sample sizes are usually low in such studies – and none of the sample sizes will include unschooled kids.
I also recommend reading and listening to Jane McGonigal:
Pretty powerful and amazing stuff.
Thanks Alex – I couldn’t find the link for Jane’s stuff :)
Thank you!!
-=- but then completely dismiss that violence, rape, pornogrpahy has an effect on the brain.-=-
When a person is playing a video game, there is no violence, there is no rape, and there is no pornography. He’s sitting with a remote control, in his own home. Every time someone tries to suggest that actual violence was caused by someone’s prior videogame playing, I can’t help but suggest that it would have been better for everyone if the offender had been home playing video games.
http://sandradodd.com/violence/
Trauma can be experienced vicariously, Sandra. I’m sure you’re aware of the content of modern video games. Witnessing rape or torture alone can be traumatic for children. Taking part in it through interaction with a “game” certainly makes the experience vicarious, if not completely real.
Of course I doubt that most children taking part in these games will go on to replicate it in their own lives, but to deny that they are not influenced negatively in anyway is either naive or disingenuous.
It is neither naive nor disingenuous. Every argument made against video games was made against other games, books, music, and movies. There have been bans against chess, bowling, and (gasp) women being allowed to use the telephone. This happens every time something fun and popular comes into society. People with PhDs come out of nowhere with sketchy studies that “prove” that the latest craze is either bad for or will turn your child into a homicidal maniac.
I hate games like Grand Theft Auto and told my son how I felt and explained the types of violence found in the game. He chose not to play because he understood why I would be disturbed. Violence and war happen and are real. Games provide an easy way to talk about these things and make sense of a world that doesn’t always make sense. They also provide a wildly safe way to let out aggression.
Yes, there are many flawed studies, bogus arguments and hyperboles criticising video games. Does that prove that games have no possible negative influences, regardless of their content or of the gamer’s age and maturity?
I maintain my argument. If you insist that games that portray torture and rape are unequivocally harmless to anyone who plays them, you are being naive or disingenuous. I hope I’m being clear and concise enough.
-=-Taking part in it through interaction with a “game” certainly makes the experience vicarious, if not completely real.-=-
People playing games (yes games not “games”) are not “taking part in [rape or torture]”! They are playing games. It’s nowhere near “completely real”. It’s not real at all!
-=-I doubt that most children taking part in these games will go on to replicate it in their own lives-=-
Did most children who played ‘cowboys and indians’ go on to replicate those scenes in their lives?
It is play! Children are more likely to be “influenced negatively” by being thwarted in their reasonable desires than by playing games.
You quoted me well, but misunderstood me completely :-)
-=-If you insist that games that portray torture and rape are unequivocally harmless to anyone who plays them, you are being naive or disingenuous.-=-
I don’t think Jo talking about “anyone”. She’s talking about kids who are well-supported, doing what they love. In fact I don’t think Jo mentioned any of those harsh words used in the comment I quoted above either; “insist”, “torture”, “rape”, “unequivocally”…
I agree, but if wasn’t replying to Jo, I was replying to Sandra’s reply to Dawn’s comment. I love many types of video games, but I don’t like bigotry from any side of any discussion. It helps no good cause to stubbornly deny obvious facts like the potential harm of a game for the wrong audience.
Sure, games as a genre aren’t inherently harmful, but why push the argument so far as to say that none of them are? Why be guilty of the same kind of faulty reasoning of which we accuse the “nay-saying fear-mongers”?
I’m just trying to encourage a respectful, open-minded discussion instead of this double-monologue :-)
-=-I’m just trying to encourage a respectful, open-minded discussion instead of this double-monologue :-)-=-
No. You’re being inflammatory. To a discussion of the joys of video gaming for unschooled children who are at home with their parents living gentle, happy lives, you have introduced the terms bigotry, nay-saying fear-mongers, faulty reasoning, torture, rape, violence, and suggesting that through a video game, a child would witness and take place in rape and violence.
We understand you completely. It’s an argument that is used by negative, controlling, reactionary people. If you are making it in response to me, I would like to ask you to stop completely now. This is Jo Isaac’s blog, not mine.
I would say that if you want to argue with me you could join my discussion on facebook, but you already made yourself unwelcome there.
It would be better for your children if you spent this time with them, or perhaps reading Killing Monsters (by Gerard Jones), or Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun! (Pyle and Cunningham).
So basically you don’t disagree with my simple point that some games can be harmful to some children.
I don’t see Sandra or others “stubbornly deny[ing] obvious facts like the potential harm of a game for the wrong audience”. I see them talking about what Jo’s talking about; people doing what they love from among a wide range of happy options. And I see Sandra making the point that the depiction of violence in a game is not violence. And that it would be better for people to be playing with pretend violence than doing real violence.
I don’t know what the “obvious facts” you refer to are, but if it’s not about people who enjoy video games, here is probably not the place to discuss it.
-=-So basically you don’t disagree with my simple point that some games can be harmful to some children.-=-
I have heard that you don’t have any child who plays video games, Nicolas, so you honestly have no business in this discussion. Also, I politely asked you to leave.
Your “simple point” is not based on personal experience. Your “simple point” is antagonistic.
I have not ever seen any child harmed by a video game.
I have seen MANY children harmed by hateful, paranoid, controlling parents. I have seen that since before video games existed. I have seen it in situations involving video games—shaming children, limiting them, giving away expensive systems that the children paid for themselves as punishment. THAT is trauma. THAT harms families. It can destroy the relationship between a parent and child.
I have heard that in court people have tried to blame school shootings on video games. But the aggressors didn’t go and shoot up gaming shops. They didn’t go to the Nintendo headquarters and open fire. It was school they were angry about.
My sons are grown. They are 25 and 28 years old. They played video games since they were babies. One of them went to a junior police academy put on by the city police department. He was 14 years old. He was the best marksman (simulators used for police training and paintball-gun obstacle course). He has never shot a real gun, though he has had opportunities. He has no interest. But he did play Duckhunt, nerf guns, laser tag and paintball before going to the police academy. No one was harmed, not even those pixelated ducks. They lived to fly again.
As far as I have ever seen or heard, neither of my boys has ever been as rude as you have been in this discussion, ever. They are very gentlemanly.
Please leave the discussion, and before your children are old enough to play video games, I hope you will reconsider the way you weigh your information. Reading the two books I linked above would make you a better father, and a better person.
To a parent that is afraid of games and had young kids I suggest you play the games your kids like to play. Most of those parents have really very little knowledge of what video games are like. They may remember playing a little Mario RPG or Pacman but they have not played the wonderful games our kids play today ( Hey I do love Mario RPGs!)
I had no idea and could not understand what the fun was in playing a game that was a First Person shooter until I played Halo and Borderlands. So much fun but not only that there was so many complex actions and decisions I had to learn and do and get better at just to be able to get to level 4! It was amazing to play next to my son and see how fabulous he is and how amazing his skills are. The planning, decision making, fast reading, multitasking, prioritizing and so many other skills he has developed from playing games like that are just a handful of things he learned and there is so much more!
I have done extensive research on Video Games and learning and how it affects our children. More than that I have witness and observed it in my children and I am totally supportive of their game playing.
Penn & Teller on their bulls**t show made a great point about video games. I believe there was a boy on there who loved playing first person shooters…he was given the opportunity to use a real gun..he did and it made him cry…the impact/noise of shooting the gun was immense (not surprisingly). If you really think shooting someone in a game is the same as shooting someone in real life you really need to reassess. It is easy to shoot someone in a game (well if you are good with a controller!) but its not so easy in real life. If you hurt someone in a game you are hurting a made up person….if you were to actually hurt someone in real life you would empathise/connect with that person and feel bad (if you are normal)…anyway either way they certainly feel completely different!
Thanks for the effort you’ve made, Jo, in putting these cool links all in the one spot:) Lew, 14, loves all kinds of games on Xbox and PC. He has a wonderful understanding of what’s real and what’s fantasy. I would imagine most 14 year olds do. He is the gentlest person I know. He is compassionate and caring and loves animals. He’ll be upset if I accidently kill an ant. Yet…da da da daaaaa….he plays ‘violent’ video games.
There’s a lot of fear out there and most of it comes from anti-gamers who have never gamed. Unless you’ve sat with your child while they are playing video games and talked to them and witnessed the wonderful stuff that goes on for them when they are playing and interacting online, I can see why the fear mongering stays. I suggest to any parent of children who love video gaming but are fearful, go and sit and play with them like you would if they were building with lego blocks or brooming match box cars around the floor. See with your own eyes how they react. I think the fear will slowly fade and the love of seeing your child doing something they enjoy will blossom and take over and you’ll end up like me thinking: what the heck was I ever worried about all those years ago?
Oh, and also, just a little sidey thing. Lew used to have a bit of a volatile nature when he was younger. By the age of 8 that pretty much disappeared. Perhaps he became better at communicating his feelings? Perhaps stresses he was feeling at that time were removed? I can’t pin point anything major that changed around that time. What I do know is that it was at this time that we bought him an Xbox and he started gaming. Interesting! I’d love to do a study on that!
Thank you for your post and the links to the research. As a mum with a fairly ‘unfavourable’ view of gaming, I was challenged (in a good way) to read the links and review some of my initial thoughts.
I also appreciate where some of the negative comments are coming from (they are arguments I myself make and have made) although I do think in some instances the point has been missed. Loving parents – home schoolers or otherwise – encourage good decision making and age appropriate choices, including in the area of gaming.
A little common sense and balance goes a long way. Thanks again.
Thank you for your articulate post and great references.
My 10 year old son goes to a Sudbury school, where he can spend his time as he chooses. He spends many hours per week gaming. I think another benefit of gaming is delving so deeply into one interest, focusing on it, and becoming expert at it. We excel at things we are passionate about. What a shame that traditional schools make kids move from subject to subject at set intervals, despite their interests, skills, and readiness.
I think gaming is one of the only areas where all kids (at least to the degree their parents let them) can master and learn an area at their own pace, in their own way, and asking for help only when and needed. They can choose when they want to take on a challenging level or when they want to replay an easier level. They can also choose if they play solo or with others. It’s no surprise to me that many kids are good gamers–when you can choose what, when, and how you learn, it comes easily and is really fun!
“I think gaming is one of the only areas where all kids (at least to the degree their parents let them) can master and learn an area at their own pace, in their own way, and asking for help only when and needed.”
A perfect play/learn experience
Thank you to everyone who is commenting respectfully and sharing their thoughts, especially to the Mom’s sharing their experiences of gaming with their own kids, and Lorinda – thank you – that was exactly my aim – to challenge some of the deep held notions about video games by bringing actual research that refutes it. I am going to edit the post to add a few more studies (one-sided, again!) about video games and violence, because they are really interesting and it seems the discussion has gone that way – and that was an aspect I did, initially, floss over in the post. Thank you all again :)
Here is a great TED talk with Jane McGonigal on how gaming can make a better world:
Recent research seems to suggest that dreams, including bad dreams, play a big part in helping us navigate everyday life and cope with the difficulties we might and do face. Gerard Jones, author of “Killing Monsters – Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence” believes that this is also true of make-believe. An interesting article, written many years ago now, can be found here: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/06/violent-media-good-kids-0.
I did try to shelter my son from the world in his early years. One thing I noticed when I stopped doing that was that his confidence and courage increased tremendously. Not his tendency toward violence, however. If anything he became more even more compassionate – or at least more aware of what he was being compassionate for.
Of course, it seems true, compassion comes with age and experience. But gaming has served him well in providing another safe experience for him to explore, evaluate and learn from – especially with both myself and his dad there for the fun and support. I’m deeply grateful for game designers, researchers, and the creative people who dream up ways to bring us challenges that inevitably lead to people who enjoy playing games becoming better people for their experience.
I love your article, Jo. :-)
This is great Jo! Thanks for writing it :) love all the links that show the positive side of gaming❤️ I see the positives at home and I see in video games another way for people to play together and have fun :)
Hey Davina! I didn’t know you had a blog! And HI!!
What a wonderful collection of research, showing what many of us already know: children who are living unschooling lives free from fearful and arbitrary restrictions on their gaming, and supported by interested, kind parents, thrive!
All four of my unschooled kids (aged 11, 14, 17 & 20) are gamers, to varying degrees. They are also articulate, thoughtful, respectful, fun, interactive, social and kind. No, they are not perfect. Neither am I!
I have observed gaming to be a helpful part of their lives, a release from stress, a thoroughly enjoyable activity, and a springboard to immense learning.
I am currently reading Bad for You, that Sandra mentioned above, and will eventually review it on my blog. I am loving learning about the history of fear mongering as various new forms of media from comics to novels to gaming have become a part of the fabric of our society. The same thing has happened with gaming, but as many unschoolers know and some researchers are now discovering, gaming is, more often than not, good for you! :)
-=-as many unschoolers know and some researchers are now discovering, gaming is, more often than not, good for you! :)-=-
I’m still waiting to hear any evidence that it has ever harmed anyone (other than keeping them from doing well in school, perhaps—as most “research” assumes that school is and should be central to the life of anyone under about 25 years old).
Hi Jo :) the blog is pretty old and I haven’t added to it in a long time ;) to be honest I forgot it was still there :D I should probably go take a look as it may need edits and references, maybe even removal lol love your work :)
Just found you blog, and while I agree to a point, I also agree with the other person you disagreed with (lol). My basis doesn’t take a “study”, it’s my own children. After playing GTA with his step-father, my (then 7 year-old) decided to try and steal my car. True he only put it into reverse and it rolled into a tree because he couldn’t reach the peddles (thank goodness), but still evidence enough for me that the games DO influence childrens’ behavior. I believe it depends on the type of game.
Hi Lottie – yikes to the reversing the car – lucky no-one was hurt. But I think that kind of thing has always happens? There have always been reports of kids trying to drive parents cars for one reason or another, long before there was a GTA video game?
My sister took my dad’s car without asking once and ran into a tree. Pong wasn’t even invented yet.
I drove once without permission a few years before that, and got the car home safely. I wasn’t in the moutain town full of trees. There were no video games.
My son took the car out of gear once, with his little brother in it. They were about 5 and 2. The car rolled down the driveway into the street. We saw them there and put the car back. There weren’t any video games about cars in our house—just Mario jumping up for coins. Video games had nothing to do with any of those things.
Because games are villified, people look for things to blame on games. Deb Lewis wrote something about people blaming television for violence—a similar accusation. http://sandradodd.com/t/violence
A really refreshing take on the influence of computer games and technology on our kids as well as us parents who didn’t grow up in the same realm. One thing I wonder about is that the industry that makes most of these games is still so male dominated – does that influence the content of the games? So many of them are so violence/battle orientated. Does that sound stereotyped? Do stereotypes survive as values are injected into technology. Even though I agree that playing violent games doesn’t necessarily affect people’s behaviour, I would argue that a more diverse influence within the creation of popular games may help to inspire a more diverse attitude amongst us
It is a myth that most video games are violent or battle oriented:
Read this:
Unless you consider games like Plants Vs Zombies , Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds are violent and battle oriented !
And this is a good read about the , yes, male dominated video game industry.
http://littlemissgeek.com/archives/2587
One of the most successful game in the past few years and a global phenomena is Minecraft. Although you can play it in survival mode and also PvP ( player versus player) it is one of the most creative games ever.
If you have not see the documentary about Minecraft and the amazing things people have created on Minecraft you should check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTgmEB0IHcY ( follow his videos)
And so much more!
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