But what about exposing the brain to hours of fun and entertainment? That certainly may take a toll on kids adjusting to society when everything goes offline.
Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
101–110 of 332 posts
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Video games are like the cheapest way to keep a kid busy for low income working parents Source on that? Video games (console or pc) is very expensive and not something low income folks can generally afford for their kids.
Different person here and I'm also not going to provide external information, only more perspective and I'm more so curious on what your first counterpoints in your mind would be, absent any source:
Video games are the cheapest form of paid entertainment for the amount of time that a single purchase occupies.
Despite their audience being extremely price sensitive (which has nothing to do with socioeconomics, just consumer expectations), all stakeholders recognize this and extract value in other ways.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#103I 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.
Maybe, but games in general have actually gotten a lot more complex and difficult over the years. Look at any long-running series (e.g. Super Mario Bros, COD, Street Fighter), the newer games have more and more mechanics, and they are competing against newer franchises with the same complexity. Also look at the popularity of Elden Ring, rougelikes and other "hard mode" games. Even some F2P games like Clash of Clans have a surprising amount of complexity, some of it being the alternate currencies and addictive mechanics they use to get people to spend more.
You may still be right about games not impacting cognition the same, as the complexity has shifted from mastering and creatively utilizing simple mechanics into learning convoluted ones. Also, older games were much less likely to have "easy mode" and there were no online guides, you had to figure out everything yourself. But even some modern games are like this (except for the "no online" part): "retro" and "indie" games like Slay the Spire and Celeste.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, video games can definitely end up being an unhealthy coping mechanism used to avoid addressing your real life issues. That said they are probably on balance a better coping mechanism than some of the other popular ones out there (Alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling) but definitely worth keeping an eye on. Especially because video games aren't restricted for children like all those others things are (at least in theor…
Why unhealthy? I've been using games as a coping mechanism for stress and personal issues for about twenty years and as far as I can tell I'm reasonably healthy. Most people my age that are clearly unhealthy it's because of drugs, alcohol or weight issues, not videogames. I'm somewhat prone to stress, and I find taking a few days off to play games helps in recovering from burnout, while something like travelling whic…
You sound healthy! but you probably know someone who's unhealthily using them to cope and resorting to video games instead of life. some people take a few days off and forget to get back on
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#105Careful 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.
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...
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#106I 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.
I think the reward systems have evolved differently than the gameplay systems. The reward systems are addictive but the gameplay has improved in a way that I think is more cognitively demanding. Puzzle games can be more creative with their puzzles, FPS games can add elements like a compass and ping systems, RPGs have these amazingly well written and told stories.
Games these days definitely have the same sense of challenge (if not more, looking at you Soulslikes), even if losing still gets you a loot box.
There was an interesting study done on children that talks about rewarding them for activities they like [1], and how it makes them start to dislike them which. It’s old (1973) but I’ve noticed some of the fatigue myself in the MMOs I play.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281453299_Undermini...
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#107This isn't strictly about cognitive performance, but Diablo II taught me more about negotiation than anything I ever learned in school. You could also probably make the argument that it's one of the most stark examples of how diverse teams are more resilient to adversity.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#108Since 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 wou…
> a limit of 10 minutes per day.
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.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#109Try a bunch of shit until it works is how you beat video games. Sometimes distressingly similar to what I do at work.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#110I 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.
I learned one of the most valuable lessons of my life from RuneScape. My brother and I, playing for years, had amassed something like 100k gold between the two of us. We wanted more gold and were reading a guide online about to get it. The guide recommended a simple process of buying and selling coal in a kind of arbitrage trade. My brother and I were torn if we should try it, reasoning that if it were so easy to make money then everyone would do it. But, on the other hand, the guide seemed like it should work.
In the end, we just followed the guide, and it worked exactly as promised. In literally a day we 10x'd our RuneScape gold to well over a million and had basically unlimited funds from running the coal trading arbitrage the guide described for as long as we played the game.
It's hard for me to put this lesson into words exactly - but it's something like if something seems like it should work explore it and find out if it does. But also something like "Don't discount something for being too obvious." This has helped me in my career where it seemed like there were obvious opportunities for something that were in front of me so I just did the obvious thing and wound up getting richly rewarded for it. This kind of idea was on my mind in most of major life decisions too.