Crash Bandicoot taught me to stay away from the voodoo.™
Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
201–210 of 332 posts
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#202I’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.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#203Yes, just do not forgett to have the kid do some sport and be active, that helps as well.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#204How much time do your 4-5 year-olds spend playing video games on a daily / weekly / monthly basis?
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#205I 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 Age of Empires 2 for teaching me about managing an economy and medieval history. I credit Age of Wonders for teaching me what strategy really means.
Lots of other great games helped me build my English skills, most of all The Legacy of Kain series.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#206I played a lot of video games as a kid because that's what other kids did. Probably taught me some logic skills, but I would've traded it for a real childhood and social skills. Self-exploring coding was far more educational anyway. Card/board games are a good in-between with a social component and without the mindless or consumerist aspect of some video games. My wife and I decided our kids won't have video games at…
> my wife and I decided our kids won't have video games. We'll see how it goes. I think you kid would feel excluded in school, when everyone is playing together online and talking about the latest games.
Is this such a strong component of the American teenager identity? I know exactly one person here (Southern Europe) who plays videogames and nobody talked about it. Sports, music, fashion, movies, politics: that were the things that could make you or break you in high school.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#207I 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.
Some games do but I've seen people roam aimlessly in FPS~ games (say assassin's creed, GTA), without even much fun, to the point I was questionning the potential benefits.
Later in life I also realized how 'real life' is a lot subtler than it appear. Using a weapon, being far out in the woods, crafting tools .. which are all things I did in video games but had no relation to the real life versions.
Makes me curious to try runescape though
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#208Careful 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.
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is... A bold choice depending on the kids age...
though I guess they'll be better trained for when they tackle dark souls...
Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children
#210I 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 Age of Empires 2 for teaching me about managing an economy and medieval history. I credit Age of Wonders for teaching me what strategy really means. Lots of other great games helped me build my English skills, most of all The Legacy of Kain series.
And Age of Wonders taught me that building a Wonder always let's you win. But I also yet have to find an opportunity to use it. Maybe I will build one in my garden and WIN!!!! I just need a 1000 wood, 1000 Food, 1000 Gold!!!