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Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

nida.nih.gov

271–280 of 332 posts

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

#271
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'm happy you got all of that from video-games and in no way I'm advocating against video games for everyone. But, in my life, I credit sports for everything you said. With the added benefit of a healthy neurology and biology in general. Something video games - and the digital world, as a whole - have been demonstrated to be detrimental. I mean, by serious studies.

Studies don’t investigate something as complex as the total impact of video games or anything else in all contexts.

You get individual studies of the impact in terms of say specific reflexes or some aspect of depression for some subset of games, but you would need a comprehensive set of studies for every single context to build a holistic picture which we simply don’t have.

Occasionally it’s enough to find major downsides such as with smoking’s really negative health impacts and say it’s not worth it. But for most things, including video games, there isn’t a single overwhelming downside just some negatives and other positives.

People want a black and white world where they can say “_ is good/bad,” but in the real world meat, carbs, video games etc isn’t that simple they are good and bad at the same time. Many people would be better off by reducing meat and carb consumption but that doesn’t mean a worldwide ban on consuming them is a good idea.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What games do you recommend for kids of that age?

My two kids have enjoyed the iPad game Inventioneers, about making zany Rube Goldberg devices out of a wide variety of objects. The recent puzzle game Railbound is fun, with some very tricky puzzles. * * * Instead of video games though, let me highly recommend the physical logic puzzle games by the company SmartGames, most of which are excellent. Raf Peeters, one of their puzzle designers, has a nice website with som…

Wow, I love those Raf Peeters games! More than one of them will end up under the Christmas tree for sure.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> I'm more so curious on what your first counterpoints in your mind would be Just some anec-data. I did not have any consoles growing up simply because we could not afford them. Eventually we got a single very old very slow machine that was shared among the family. I know a few other people in the same situation (usually 1st/2nd generation immigrants). Thus in my mind, video games are luxury products, which are not a…

A $500 PC/gaming laptop and pirated games can occupy a kid for thousands of hours over a course of years. Sure, it requires an up-front investment, but in terms of dollars per hour it's hard to beat.

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

#275
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'm happy you got all of that from video-games and in no way I'm advocating against video games for everyone. But, in my life, I credit sports for everything you said. With the added benefit of a healthy neurology and biology in general. Something video games - and the digital world, as a whole - have been demonstrated to be detrimental. I mean, by serious studies.

Are you including “basic economics” in the list of things sports taught you? Curious how that would be learned.

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

#276
post #5

Of course. Most video games force you to make decisions at a fairly rapid pace with ever changing information. It's like chess on steroids.

Most of them don't have the depth of chess, though. It's more like working in McDonalds.

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

#278
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should credit your parents with allowing you to have so much free time and good nutrition.

Or in most cases, it's parental neglect with both parents working full-time jobs with barely enough time to take care of themselves?

From what do you infer "in most cases"? What are your statistics?

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

#279

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.

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#280

Huh, my immediate assumption was income played a huge role but the video game cohort had poorer parents. 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.

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.

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