91–100 of 593 posts
I'm a rabid anti-gamer and I will tell you they are a gateway drug to antiproductivity.
And depression. Seriously there is a significant overlap between people who game daily and anxiety/depression/personality disorders.
Somewhat Tangential: Without any instruction my 2 and 4 year olds know how to turn things into weapons to beat each other with. Like puppies they seem to be testing limits to rough play. What surprised me is what happened when I didn't intervene: a few times the older one completely dominated and got his way. But more often than not the older one displayed empathy and tried to apologize and give kisses and give the y…
> I think kids have more ability to self regulate than we typically treat them as having. This "kids need adult supervision" is a relatively new thing, we used to be sent out to play as kids for HOURS (be home by dinner) and ran the woods and parks or played murderball (soccer with tackling) and other forms of roughhousing, all without serious mayhem. Parents would let us "work it out" if there was a fight.
In one case, it ended up with older boy consistently bullying smaller sibling. By the time parents started to intervene, it was habit and it took months to be stopped. The younger kids still somewhat dislike brother, altrought he treats her much better now.
Other cases I have seen were roughly similar. Work it out may work out may not. But pretty often it amounts to enabling bullies - and even blaming the victim if the victim does not defend itself in perfect magical non noisy calculated way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having grown up in the manner you describe, and being a parent of several young kids - I do find the prospect of them having a similar childhood pretty terrifying. I am forever thankful for a childhood like that - but letting my kids run amok in this day and age for hours brings me a lot of anxiety. It is an interesting paradox that makes me a bit sad. edit: for the record, we have them in wrestling / jiu jitsu - so…
What makes you anxious about it?
Even with statistics about danger being down across the board, in still pretty worried about my kids getting hit by an automobile. The raw statistics are even one area where danger is rising- fatality numbers are back over the mid 90s.
I have noticed that many social science articles posted on Hacker News bring out critical comments about study design, doubts about the strength of the study's conclusions, that kind of thing. This submission, on the other hand, is a link to some kind of gaming news website, which links to an abstract for an article in a Cyberpsychology (?) journal which costs $60 to access, and there is widespread and uncritical agr…
Same reason a study with positive outcomes about coffee/alcohol/gay parenthood/gender reassignment/ are not criticized as much as a study on the same topic that had negative outcomes. We want certain things to be true so we (consciously or not) avoid criticizing studies bolstering what we want to be true and harshly criticize studies we want to be false.
I like to think science always prevails in the end (like with tobacco), but it can take half a century or more to converge on the truth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha! That's a good one. She heard what she wanted to hear, or she was testing out lying. Kids all test out lying around the pre-school age, some of them find it useful and keep doing it.
I'd lean towards the lying part. Her strategy of leveraging higher powers didn't pan out, so she went with plan B of illusion of leveraging higher powers.
I have noticed that many social science articles posted on Hacker News bring out critical comments about study design, doubts about the strength of the study's conclusions, that kind of thing. This submission, on the other hand, is a link to some kind of gaming news website, which links to an abstract for an article in a Cyberpsychology (?) journal which costs $60 to access, and there is widespread and uncritical agr…
Free on sci-hub.
I'll tell you what does make me more aggressive. It's not the content of the video game itself. It's the other players in the multiplayer. I've basically sworn off of multiplayer for well over a decade now, with only vanishingly brief revisits to confirm things are only getting worse.
Indeed, growing up my parents banned Super Smash Bros., because the outcomes of matches would sometimes enrage us so much that we would get into fights in real life. But that's true for more than just multiplayer video games. Sports come to mind. Basically anything involving intense competition and taunting is going to cause a temporary increase in aggressive behavior.
Personally, my take on this is you were seeing and effect; not a cause.
As a kid you MAY have had a common issue expressing loss or disappointment. The game MAY have brought this up, there was always a loser every match. So, your parents MAY have considered this the cause of your inability to properly handle it.
I MAY be wrong. I have no idea about you. But that fits ME perfectly.
I found the thing that brought me out of that was stressful singular competition, fighting, shooting, chess, performance, etc. Things that you excel on your skill not anything you can blame someone else for.
I learned the value in making a plan, executing it, and learning when and why if it didn’t work.
Now as an adult, I find myself more ready to deal with stressful things like dogs fighting on walks, medical emergencies, criminal activity, and things I just see other adults completely lock up on. I think this comes from an inability to process loss and stress.
Why would I want to spend my leisure time experiencing that? How is that entertaining?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/23/the-15-best-vi...
This is only tangentially related, but one thing I find interesting is how video games contributed to us being desensitized to violence. It's funny hearing from my mom about how The Exorcist was terrifying back then, while nowadays it's borderline funny to watch (and not only because of the technology not aging well). Makes me wonder if any studies have been done regarding that.
I wonder if there's a similar "no link" between 'educational' video games and improved education.