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Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

nida.nih.gov

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Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#151

Post by davidmurdoch »

artur_makly wrote: post #72

my only beef ( as a dad to a 10yr old ) is that at all the game he loves playing are incredibly bloody violent. - Far Cry - Assassin's Creed *exceptions ( Fortnite ) What kind of games do you recommend that can extend his critical thinking while increasing his focus? Lastly, is there a WYSIWYG game creation platform that is high-quality/fidelity? not Minecraft/Roblox. I see him making stuff in the game industry one d…

All the old games still work today. We still play the original Mario on a 1985 Nintendo.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#152

Post by andreygrehov »

andrewmutz wrote: post #35
darkteflon wrote: post #14

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…

What games do you recommend for kids of that age?

Cuphead is absolutely the best game I ever played with my kids. This is one of the only games that allows you to play together with your family/friends offline. No screen split. I haven't seen such a gem for many, many years.

Cuphead is the game that can easily inspire people to become game developers.

Fun fact: the entire game was hand-drawn. The authors took the inspiration from the cartoons of 1930s.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#153

Post by alexchantavy »

ALittleLight wrote: post #110
drooby wrote: post #49

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.

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 mak…

What was the scheme? Buy coal certs at 800 per and sell at 1k?

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#154

Post by mizzao »

Video games prepared me for building a startup.

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

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#155

Post by [deleted] »

imran-iq wrote: post #44
notch656a wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#158

Post by tastysandwich »

Just curious if it accounted for other factors, like socio-economic status?

also of note:

  Further, the 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.
Also surely the type of video game plays a huge role. I can't imagine hours spent killing bots in Unreal Tournament did me much good. But I did learn words like "critical" and "paralysis" from playing Pokemon Yellow.

One thing I do credit to video games - and I'm sure is similar with a large number of HN'ers - is my current career in software engineering. Installing cracks, mods, skins, etc. You learn about the file system, how to edit files, anti-virus software (to check the cracks you downloaded), and how to reinstall Windows XP when the crack turned out to be a virus.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#160

Post by diceduckmonk »

drooby wrote: post #49

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.

> I credit RuneScape with teaching me the value of delayed gratification

I credit RuneScape with teaching me to write Java code to write bots to do the work involved with the delayed gratification.

Then eventually created a GP selling business online.

Also led a PvP clan and ran a PHP forum for it.

The RuneScape metagame was where I acquired real-world software development skills.

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