I credit RuneScape with teaching me the value of delayed gratification and basic economics. I credit competitive Halo 3 with teaching me team building and strategy skills. I credit StarCraft with training my mind to travel at warp speed.
Honestly. My video game experience was instrumental to my success so far in life. This is not surprising to me.
My son started playing games (with me) at 4 yo (partly because we were all locked indoors for months on end).
Anecdotally - and providing you use some discretion as to choice of game - I’ve found it absolutely fascinating to watch both the pace of development of problem-solving skills, and some of the frankly astounding leaps of logic and intuition young kids are capable of. I vividly remember one rock-moving puzzle in Breath of the Wild that had me stumped until he piped up with a proposal that turned out to be the correct solution. Fascinating stuff.
I'll add the classic comment here: "correlation does not mean causation".
Maybe it's the kids with better cognitive performance that like videogame better. I wouldn't find that unlikely considering it's more mentally stimulating than other "real-world" activities.
Also, I personally learned to code by writing bots for an MMORPG, so I definitely owe my career to videogames.
"researchers stress that this cross-sectional study does not allow for cause-and-effect analyses, and that it could be that children who are good at these types of cognitive tasks may choose to play video games."
Video games are more mentally stimulating than non-screen-based activities (building a fort, catching animals, reading a book)? People with better cognitive performance prefer more external mental stimulation? I didn't know any of that.
Your classic comment certainly stands, though. It could easily be that e.g. the large gender difference between the gamer and non-gamer groups alone can account for the difference. Many likely confounders aren't mentioned in the study at all.
But whether or not there's causation involved, this study tells us precious little about gaming and "cognitive performance" in general, since the stop-signal and n-back tasks they used have obvious connections to gaming but very little relevance to most other areas of cognitive functioning (of course kids who play video games for hours every day will probably respond quicker to which way an arrow on a computer screen is pointing).
Plus I am not sure that this is "better" cognitive performance, vs just "different". Perhaps kids who don't play video games are better at e.g. music? The article doesn't go into that.
Likewise I am not sure that video games are necessarily more stimulating that other real-world activities. Sure there are lots of boring things we make kids do, but there are also other joyful things that they really like too which are "real world" (adventure playgrounds, lego, swimming parks etc)
Causality also doesn't need to be unidirectional. Perhaps cognitive performance has an impact on video gaming, but video gaming likely also has some impact on cognitive performance.
I owe my career to World of Warcraft. Started running my own server in 2008 when the burning crusade was released on my ADSL connection for friends, then I started "scripting" shit in C++ (server software is a good framework (CMaNGOS)), so while it was compiled in it wasn't really like writing C++, never had to think about ownership, threading, lifetimes etc...
Eventually I stared messing about more inside the framework, now I work as an SRE for a streaming service. Never pursued software development as I thought I was too stupid, and now pay would be too shite as a junior dev :)
In a sense Blizzard entertainment just happened to "save my life" (I'm certain I would have a dogshit life without this, many reasons).
I think more games should embrace modding like Blizzard games do/did with maps, workshops (while not being minecraft).
Always amusing when I see yet another person who started their coding journey writing RuneScape bots, seems like a really common path within a certain demographic.
(I'm assuming RuneScape here because it was the largest bot community I was aware of but I suppose there could be others)
I had an access to personal computers in my school after classes, most of the time we were gaming. After some time teacher said that games are not allowed anymore except ones we wrote ourselves. That's how my software engineer career started.
Maybe it is more of a gender difference. I have yet to encounter a boy who doesn't like some kind of videogame but not so for girls...
But this would mean that intelligence in not distributed equally among gender.
I would also add that it's impossible to find direct causation in psychology or sociology because it's impossible to have all the variables when it comes to humans. So this is the best we can get.
Careful now. Self-assortment into those who don't play at all and those who play at least three hours per day? There's good reasons to think those weren't otherwise equivalent populations in the first place. I'm buying "associated" but any sort of claims about effects from the games are going to have to come from elsewhere.
There are enough signals in this paper to warrant caution, although the paper has a careful title, as well as abstract. I congratulate authors with that, but it hasn't stopped this crowd from overinterpreting the results.
First, they don't measure general "cognitive performance," they measure something very specific, this one: https://www.cambridgecognition.com/cantab/cognitive-tests/me.... That task is very close to video gaming. I know of another study that shows that FPS gamers have a somewhat better peripheral vision. It makes sense that playing games improves reaction time and control on some tasks.
Second, the difference between gamers and non-gamers on this task is very small: 299ms vs 307ms. That's really far below any interesting effect. Effects in fMRI are not interesting: it is unknown what a larger signal in a certain area means. You cannot draw conclusions from it.
Third, the statistical logic is the classic NHST with all its problems. They even commit the error of drawing conclusions from lack of significance.
Fourth, they don't give specifics, but potential confounds were modelled with some linear modelling. It's highly unlikely that the effects of those external factors are linear, and there aren't many of them. There are however some really large difference between the groups (parental income, sex, and watching video/streaming).
Concluding, there's no reason to suppose the effect must be attributed to video gaming, and certainly not that it is positive for general cognitive performance.
Would you assume the same thing about playing a musical instrument or playing a sport? What is playing video games except practicing cognitive performance? It works spatial reasoning, logic, dexterity, problem solving, reactions, etc.
One thing I remember from childhood is playing console games at houses of friends who owned consoles. They would be masters of the game and I would pick up a controller and from lack of experience feel completely lost and useless at the game and lose interest quickly. There's seems like there would be a self selection where those who can fall into the learned behavior of the game/reward cycle (console or phone easy access) can get lost in it for quite a time barring supervision. The study itself also mentions confounding things like higher percentage of gamers in study being male (so maybe gender plays a larger role than chance), weird memory effects like the video gamers being better for a short time at start of testing but falling off rapidly versus non gamers being able to continue at a higher level. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
It’s true that correlation isn’t causation but I think, in moderation, games do improve cognitive skills. If it becomes something the kid does all the time, then I think the lack of balance does more harm than good. Moderation is all things.
I dont understand what you're getting at. What are the "reasons to think" that the populations are not equivalent? The study controlled for parental income, sex, age, BMI, IQ.
I’d be a very different person without games when I was young. Got me into programming, thinking beyond my immediate reality… etc. More stimulation is probably good for development, that’s how pathways form, I have been told.
Call me armchair “points out the obvious parts then gets pessimistic guy,” but we’ll likely never actually know if it’s a correlation in the time period that’s more consistent with like… the nutritional availability and parenting habits. Or for that matter The Osbornes going off the air?
I suspect that a lot of our policy actions must be suspiciously based on suspicions until we make a major breakthrough in neurology or statistical analysis. Do what works for now.
Seems like brains that are engaged have better outcomes than passive ones, let’s do that for now!
Discarding all the moderate users seems like a design flaw. A possible effect on cognition is a fairly natural question for regression.
Maybe you saw it in the text but, "This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommend that videogaming time be limited to one to two hours per day for older children."
The thought process I can sort of imagine is that the tests are fairly costly and the hypothesis they're testing is that more play than the official recommended limit should decidedly give detectable impairments to cognition. (Seems they could have rejected that, if they'd had comparable groups in the first place. Now I'm not sure what it says)
This appears to be the study, though I'm not entirely sure [1] and it reads:
Screen Time Survey
This threshold was selected because it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommends that video-gaming time be limited to 1 to 2 hours per day for older children.
Video games are like the cheapest way to keep a kid busy for low income working parents. I guess they could send the kids outside but people nowadays start asking questions if a kid is caught outside while single mom is working for 3 hours or something.
Given infinite money I think many of those parents would send the kid with nanny if needed or whatever to organized sports, piano classes, etc.
It would be natural to do so since you assume in these time-reported things that people are not precise about the actual amount. If someone will report (x-1,x+1) h then it makes sense to just bucket into low and high so that, if there is an effect, it is initially apparent.
Why does everyone assume consoles? PC gaming is still a thing. And a study published now would have been done before gaming video cards became unaffordable.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t read the article but I learned a lot from video games and by extend the internet when I was a kid.
It thought me that if you work on something, you will get better at it, and you will be rewarded. This is not the case for a lot of other things in the life of a teenager. If you work hard at school you aren’t really rewarded, you just have to pass (binary outcome) and if you do an extra project it’s not like you get extra points. If you take a student job, you don’t get a raise when do a good job, you just get more work. If it wasn’t for video games the lessons I would have learned was that you should do the bare minimum not to fail/get fired. Which is a really sad attitude to have.
> This is not the case for a lot of other things in the life of a teenager. If you work hard at school you aren’t really rewarded, you just have to pass (binary outcome) and if you do an extra project it’s not like you get extra points.
Thank you for saying this. The point itself is something I knew and concluded on my own, but the way you phrased it made me realize that, as a parent, it will be my job to provide a structure on top of school, that rewards my kids somewhat proportionally to effort. As opposed to parents giving near-binary (5+ is good, 4 is meh, 3 sucks, 2 or below and the belt is out) rewards otherwise uncorrelated with effort, which was my experience as a kid, as well as others in my cohort I talked about this with.
My son (6) is allowed to only play one game. https://play0ad.com/. It has been a surreal experience. He is able to gather resources, launch campaigns, build cities, he now creates complex strategies to defeat the enemy (me). The game has great LAN game play so we can attack each other . The next step, he wants to know "how do we change this?" Code.
I wonder if the industry incentives have shifted and if it impacts these cognitive benefits.
Games changed a lot over the past two decades and I am not quite sure they preserve the same sense of challenge, opting for quick rewards and addictive mechanics.
Video gaming is massively better than mindless "content" watching because it has the perception-thinking-action feedback loop. On the other hand, I have little hope about gaming in the today's society: the pressure to make money will select the most addictive type of gaming that's going to be even worse than mindless watching (slot machines in casino?)
Btw, what does "associated with better outcomes" really mean? It means that in a large sample of lab rats, 10% demonstrated a sudden spike of activity, 40% didn't react and 50% slided into depression. The study gave each outcome a score and found that the average score is slightly positive, so readers are encouraged to think that all the lab rats had this outcome. After the study got completed, those 10% of the rats got suicidal and died within a week, but studying that was outside the scope of the study.
I didn't learn anything from hours of Counter-strike, half-life, flight sims (ok this taught me some aviation trivia) as a teenager. I deeply regret these hours, as I could have spent them outdoors hiking, rock climbing, running. Maybe even talking to girls and building better social skills.
Each game was a set of unfamiliar rules that I'd have to learn quickly and optimize decently well against. Once I got good enough to reach the upper echelons of a game, I'd get bored and do the same with a new one. Repeat with dozens of different games, and it's very similar to the feeling of all the new unfamiliar things one has to learn in building a company.
Plus, the game that generates the closest feeling to building a startup as a whole has been Civilization :-)
They separated these children into two groups, those who reported playing no video games at all and those who reported playing video games for three hours per day or more.
So what happened to the 50% of total children that were somewhere between 0 and 3 hours per days of games? Were they discarded or rounded into one those two groups, because that leaves a huge gap in the middle?
My 5 year old makes redstone machines. His ability to navigate a minecraft world is ridiculously good. When I was 5 I was desperately trying to get over the first pit in Super Mario Bros.
Nictone has been known to cause nootropic effects, yet it results in long term damage and dependence. Considering the gaming industry is big money (just like big tobacco, big weed, big sugar, and big infinite scroll), I would take any study like this with a boulder of salt.
Video games might improve cognitive abilities, but they also cheat the reward centers of your brain and offer the feeling of success while achieving none.
A Stanford professor was teaching a seminar on engagement (engagement is a euphemism for addiction). He has a pretty choice quote: "You will play my game thinking you're getting better and better, but you will just be playing longer and longer."
Games can be a force for good, but the average game company is not optimizing for cognitive performance, they are optimizing for engagement (or loot boxes), the lack of alignment coupled with capitalist investment into games seems hazardous to the positive qualities they can have.
I remember reading a paper that there's a strong association between spatial reasoning and performance in math.
This made intuitive sense to me given that there is some overlap between manipulating objects in a 2D or 3D space and visualizing a math problem whether numeric or geometric.
I find it hard to believe that typical video game puzzles can help increase cognitive performance, but plausible that training spatial recognition might help train the same regions of the brain we use for math.
Even the basic mechanics: teaching math to my kids when they were young was purely a visual exercise of moving groups of things (coins, Cheerios, M&M's) around.
Since I see we're using this as an excuse for general video-gaming-and-parenting discussion... I'm currently very conflicted about video games for my son (7). He loves them but mom hates them and insists on a limit of 10 minutes per day.
I am not sure she is wrong. I played a lot of games as a kid and I probably could have done better things with my time. Not that I got any guidance as to what those better things would have been, but still.
At the same time, it seems like a lot of dads are bonding with their boys by playing games, and I wonder if I am missing out.
I honestly laughed at this. This is like limiting movie time to 5 minutes per day.
The way we do it in our house... the kids have an hour of tablet time doing whatever they want. Games, tv shows, movies, whatever. When the hour is up, its up.
Beyond that, we do have a nintendo switch, but that's for family video game time. I don't mind the singular switch/tv we have as much as the tablets, because since we have only 1 it requires 3 kids 7 & under to negotiate with eachother. But if you only have 1 kid that can change the game.
Someday I do plan to get them all desktop PCs. I have friends with similarly aged kids and they have family Minecraft and Valheim servers. Sounds like a lot of fun to me. My nephew recently went to college and he keeps in touch with his high school friends in part via a minecraft server he runs.
> He loves them but mom hates them and insists on a limit of 10 minutes per day.
Come on this is ridiculous! 10 minutes is nothing!.
Maybe 2 or 3 hours, but 10 minutes? It will take him a full year to finish the first part of a game!, and will never allow him to discover games with depth and stories(my favorites), so he is going to play quick mobile games, which IMO are the worst.
> I am not sure she is wrong. I played a lot of games as a kid and I probably could have done better things with my time. Not that I got any guidance as to what those better things would have been, but still.
Games in my experience are a gateway to most of tech, for example my first interaction with networks and servers was when trying to create a Minecraft server to play with my friends.
Like everything, doing it moderation is the best, I think 2 or 3 hours would be fitting(not that I had them personally),
But please make sure there is actually something else for him to do, because otherwise he is going to spend the whole day waiting for these three hours.
> At the same time, it seems like a lot of dads are bonding with their boys by playing games, and I wonder if I am missing out.
Probably, your kid is also missing out on playing with his friends online.
To this day gaming is one of the biggest ways to keep in touch with remote people for me.
I grew up as a heavy gamer, and it became my identity.
I absolutely got addicted to games and I still struggle with functioning in daily life without trying to go back and play 1-2 hours of games each night for the dopamine hit.
More importantly, I missed out on actual real life experiences throughout my childhood all the way till I was 28.
I let me kids play games now, but as long as it doesn't overtake more useful activities (reading, going out, playground, socializing with friends, swimming, biking)
In your situation I would give him an hour per day (10 minutes is a very short amount of time to do anything fun or see progress in most games) then monitor the outcome based on your previous baseline , does he ask for extra time when its time to call it quit, do you see a negative outcome on his grades, focus and desire to play outside or with other toys, etc. Then simply cut back if you see any downsides with 1 hour per day. You should definitely play with him during that time if you can, it is a great way to bond with your son and try to change the activity during the week, like play lego with him instead of gaming and see what will be his reaction when a video game is no longer involved.
Video games are always good in moderation and there are definitely some great games for kids, exploring with him when searching for a new game will teach you a lot about about why he’s drawn to such and such game and this way you may be able to find other hobbies outside of gaming which are related to his interests.
[+] [-] drooby|3 years ago|reply
Honestly. My video game experience was instrumental to my success so far in life. This is not surprising to me.
[+] [-] darkteflon|3 years ago|reply
Anecdotally - and providing you use some discretion as to choice of game - I’ve found it absolutely fascinating to watch both the pace of development of problem-solving skills, and some of the frankly astounding leaps of logic and intuition young kids are capable of. I vividly remember one rock-moving puzzle in Breath of the Wild that had me stumped until he piped up with a proposal that turned out to be the correct solution. Fascinating stuff.
[+] [-] maartn|3 years ago|reply
Let me guess.... The kids who were experienced in responding to visual cues on computer screens scored better (－‸ლ)
[+] [-] lucasfcosta|3 years ago|reply
Maybe it's the kids with better cognitive performance that like videogame better. I wouldn't find that unlikely considering it's more mentally stimulating than other "real-world" activities.
Also, I personally learned to code by writing bots for an MMORPG, so I definitely owe my career to videogames.
[+] [-] fangorn|3 years ago|reply
"researchers stress that this cross-sectional study does not allow for cause-and-effect analyses, and that it could be that children who are good at these types of cognitive tasks may choose to play video games."
[+] [-] corsac|3 years ago|reply
Your classic comment certainly stands, though. It could easily be that e.g. the large gender difference between the gamer and non-gamer groups alone can account for the difference. Many likely confounders aren't mentioned in the study at all.
But whether or not there's causation involved, this study tells us precious little about gaming and "cognitive performance" in general, since the stop-signal and n-back tasks they used have obvious connections to gaming but very little relevance to most other areas of cognitive functioning (of course kids who play video games for hours every day will probably respond quicker to which way an arrow on a computer screen is pointing).
[+] [-] mattlondon|3 years ago|reply
Plus I am not sure that this is "better" cognitive performance, vs just "different". Perhaps kids who don't play video games are better at e.g. music? The article doesn't go into that.
Likewise I am not sure that video games are necessarily more stimulating that other real-world activities. Sure there are lots of boring things we make kids do, but there are also other joyful things that they really like too which are "real world" (adventure playgrounds, lego, swimming parks etc)
[+] [-] tmalsburg2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Akronymus|3 years ago|reply
I absolutely think that it's your PoV that's correct rather than the articles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjYy4Ksy1E
[+] [-] lillecarl|3 years ago|reply
Eventually I stared messing about more inside the framework, now I work as an SRE for a streaming service. Never pursued software development as I thought I was too stupid, and now pay would be too shite as a junior dev :)
In a sense Blizzard entertainment just happened to "save my life" (I'm certain I would have a dogshit life without this, many reasons).
I think more games should embrace modding like Blizzard games do/did with maps, workshops (while not being minecraft).
[+] [-] dpatterbee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SergeAx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Silverback_VII|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theclansman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] etiam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|3 years ago|reply
First, they don't measure general "cognitive performance," they measure something very specific, this one: https://www.cambridgecognition.com/cantab/cognitive-tests/me.... That task is very close to video gaming. I know of another study that shows that FPS gamers have a somewhat better peripheral vision. It makes sense that playing games improves reaction time and control on some tasks.
Second, the difference between gamers and non-gamers on this task is very small: 299ms vs 307ms. That's really far below any interesting effect. Effects in fMRI are not interesting: it is unknown what a larger signal in a certain area means. You cannot draw conclusions from it.
Third, the statistical logic is the classic NHST with all its problems. They even commit the error of drawing conclusions from lack of significance.
Fourth, they don't give specifics, but potential confounds were modelled with some linear modelling. It's highly unlikely that the effects of those external factors are linear, and there aren't many of them. There are however some really large difference between the groups (parental income, sex, and watching video/streaming).
Concluding, there's no reason to suppose the effect must be attributed to video gaming, and certainly not that it is positive for general cognitive performance.
[+] [-] rednerrus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jb_s|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenwoo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marmot777|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b33j0r|3 years ago|reply
Call me armchair “points out the obvious parts then gets pessimistic guy,” but we’ll likely never actually know if it’s a correlation in the time period that’s more consistent with like… the nutritional availability and parenting habits. Or for that matter The Osbornes going off the air?
I suspect that a lot of our policy actions must be suspiciously based on suspicions until we make a major breakthrough in neurology or statistical analysis. Do what works for now.
Seems like brains that are engaged have better outcomes than passive ones, let’s do that for now!
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|3 years ago|reply
The gender difference is huge though, the nongaming cohort had 288 males and 840 females while the gaming cohort had 372 males and 307 females.
Also, I'm a bit confused why they just dumped anyone with between one and three hours of videogame playing a day.
[+] [-] etiam|3 years ago|reply
Maybe you saw it in the text but, "This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommend that videogaming time be limited to one to two hours per day for older children."
The thought process I can sort of imagine is that the tests are fairly costly and the hypothesis they're testing is that more play than the official recommended limit should decidedly give detectable impairments to cognition. (Seems they could have rejected that, if they'd had comparable groups in the first place. Now I'm not sure what it says)
[+] [-] shric|3 years ago|reply
Screen Time Survey
This threshold was selected because it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommends that video-gaming time be limited to 1 to 2 hours per day for older children.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
[+] [-] notch656a|3 years ago|reply
Given infinite money I think many of those parents would send the kid with nanny if needed or whatever to organized sports, piano classes, etc.
[+] [-] renewiltord|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cwizard|3 years ago|reply
It thought me that if you work on something, you will get better at it, and you will be rewarded. This is not the case for a lot of other things in the life of a teenager. If you work hard at school you aren’t really rewarded, you just have to pass (binary outcome) and if you do an extra project it’s not like you get extra points. If you take a student job, you don’t get a raise when do a good job, you just get more work. If it wasn’t for video games the lessons I would have learned was that you should do the bare minimum not to fail/get fired. Which is a really sad attitude to have.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|3 years ago|reply
Thank you for saying this. The point itself is something I knew and concluded on my own, but the way you phrased it made me realize that, as a parent, it will be my job to provide a structure on top of school, that rewards my kids somewhat proportionally to effort. As opposed to parents giving near-binary (5+ is good, 4 is meh, 3 sucks, 2 or below and the belt is out) rewards otherwise uncorrelated with effort, which was my experience as a kid, as well as others in my cohort I talked about this with.
[+] [-] ransom1538|3 years ago|reply
Compare this to watching tiktok?
[+] [-] gchamonlive|3 years ago|reply
Games changed a lot over the past two decades and I am not quite sure they preserve the same sense of challenge, opting for quick rewards and addictive mechanics.
[+] [-] akomtu|3 years ago|reply
Btw, what does "associated with better outcomes" really mean? It means that in a large sample of lab rats, 10% demonstrated a sudden spike of activity, 40% didn't react and 50% slided into depression. The study gave each outcome a score and found that the average score is slightly positive, so readers are encouraged to think that all the lab rats had this outcome. After the study got completed, those 10% of the rats got suicidal and died within a week, but studying that was outside the scope of the study.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badpun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] red75prime|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carabiner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mizzao|3 years ago|reply
Each game was a set of unfamiliar rules that I'd have to learn quickly and optimize decently well against. Once I got good enough to reach the upper echelons of a game, I'd get bored and do the same with a new one. Repeat with dozens of different games, and it's very similar to the feeling of all the new unfamiliar things one has to learn in building a company.
Plus, the game that generates the closest feeling to building a startup as a whole has been Civilization :-)
And, it turns out ideas from games can be useful in products too: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/tech-trees
[+] [-] treis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0asd|3 years ago|reply
So what happened to the 50% of total children that were somewhere between 0 and 3 hours per days of games? Were they discarded or rounded into one those two groups, because that leaves a huge gap in the middle?
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hayst4ck|3 years ago|reply
Video games might improve cognitive abilities, but they also cheat the reward centers of your brain and offer the feeling of success while achieving none.
A Stanford professor was teaching a seminar on engagement (engagement is a euphemism for addiction). He has a pretty choice quote: "You will play my game thinking you're getting better and better, but you will just be playing longer and longer."
Games can be a force for good, but the average game company is not optimizing for cognitive performance, they are optimizing for engagement (or loot boxes), the lack of alignment coupled with capitalist investment into games seems hazardous to the positive qualities they can have.
[+] [-] CharlieDigital|3 years ago|reply
This made intuitive sense to me given that there is some overlap between manipulating objects in a 2D or 3D space and visualizing a math problem whether numeric or geometric.
I find it hard to believe that typical video game puzzles can help increase cognitive performance, but plausible that training spatial recognition might help train the same regions of the brain we use for math.
Even the basic mechanics: teaching math to my kids when they were young was purely a visual exercise of moving groups of things (coins, Cheerios, M&M's) around.
[+] [-] dymk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
I am not sure she is wrong. I played a lot of games as a kid and I probably could have done better things with my time. Not that I got any guidance as to what those better things would have been, but still.
At the same time, it seems like a lot of dads are bonding with their boys by playing games, and I wonder if I am missing out.
I just don't know what to think.
[+] [-] bcrosby95|3 years ago|reply
I honestly laughed at this. This is like limiting movie time to 5 minutes per day.
The way we do it in our house... the kids have an hour of tablet time doing whatever they want. Games, tv shows, movies, whatever. When the hour is up, its up.
Beyond that, we do have a nintendo switch, but that's for family video game time. I don't mind the singular switch/tv we have as much as the tablets, because since we have only 1 it requires 3 kids 7 & under to negotiate with eachother. But if you only have 1 kid that can change the game.
Someday I do plan to get them all desktop PCs. I have friends with similarly aged kids and they have family Minecraft and Valheim servers. Sounds like a lot of fun to me. My nephew recently went to college and he keeps in touch with his high school friends in part via a minecraft server he runs.
[+] [-] jacooper|3 years ago|reply
Come on this is ridiculous! 10 minutes is nothing!.
Maybe 2 or 3 hours, but 10 minutes? It will take him a full year to finish the first part of a game!, and will never allow him to discover games with depth and stories(my favorites), so he is going to play quick mobile games, which IMO are the worst.
> I am not sure she is wrong. I played a lot of games as a kid and I probably could have done better things with my time. Not that I got any guidance as to what those better things would have been, but still.
Games in my experience are a gateway to most of tech, for example my first interaction with networks and servers was when trying to create a Minecraft server to play with my friends.
Like everything, doing it moderation is the best, I think 2 or 3 hours would be fitting(not that I had them personally),
But please make sure there is actually something else for him to do, because otherwise he is going to spend the whole day waiting for these three hours.
> At the same time, it seems like a lot of dads are bonding with their boys by playing games, and I wonder if I am missing out.
Probably, your kid is also missing out on playing with his friends online.
To this day gaming is one of the biggest ways to keep in touch with remote people for me.
But that's just my own opinion.
[+] [-] technovader|3 years ago|reply
I absolutely got addicted to games and I still struggle with functioning in daily life without trying to go back and play 1-2 hours of games each night for the dopamine hit.
More importantly, I missed out on actual real life experiences throughout my childhood all the way till I was 28.
I let me kids play games now, but as long as it doesn't overtake more useful activities (reading, going out, playground, socializing with friends, swimming, biking)
[+] [-] Globz|3 years ago|reply
Video games are always good in moderation and there are definitely some great games for kids, exploring with him when searching for a new game will teach you a lot about about why he’s drawn to such and such game and this way you may be able to find other hobbies outside of gaming which are related to his interests.