Posts filed under 'Popular Perception'
Tony Long at the venerable Wired tackled the issue of video game addiction today. The topic ain’t dead.
But the article strikes me as a little naïve. Saying that “the answer lies in education, enlightenment and—in the case of video games, at least—a little physical and mental exertion” is all well and good, but will a visit to the batting cage and a trip to Carneigie Hall really do the trick?
It’s sort of like yelling “eat less” at people with overeating disorders. Sure, that’s where they need to go, but they can’t just do it in one step.
Tony’s right, though, that video games are problems for different people to the degree that they’re problems for different people. Some people’s lives are being ruined or damaged with (not by) video games.
If you know you have a problem, seek help. If you know someone who has a problem, intervene. I am trilled that people are talking about video game addiction as a real (if unclassified) problem, rather than using “addictive” as a marketing slogan.
But I shudder when I hear people talking about further regulation. The rating system is enough. Let’s not forget what Prohibition got us!
July 5th, 2007
I learned via Gaming Today that the Federation of American Scientists (founded by Manhattan Project scientists committed to ethical pursuits) actually believes kids should play more video games!
They write that video games “can teach higher-order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation, and execution, and adaptation to rapid change. With many technology companies farming out lower-level work to countries where employees come more cheaply, these are the sort of skills American students will need to possess once they hit the workforce.”
Note that FAS are developing three “serious games,” including one called Immune Attack. I think the game looks a bit too serious and educational and not quite enough fun and educational.
I’m not sure kids actually need more video game time. But I do think gaming is less of a worry than parents think, has the potential to be very useful, and at the very leasts is something people can relax about at least a little bit.
July 4th, 2007
The good folks at the University of Michigan (publishing in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine) have revealed the amazing fact that playing video games can cut down on homework time. You can find more readable summaries on almost every news web site out there (here’s one at random), although they tend to put spin and interpretation on the story.
The fact that video games interfere with homework is not news. Everyone knows there are lots of people who play too much and don’t get real-life things done.
While I think kids who read 30% less than they would otherwise are missing out, I’m not too worried about kids taking time away from homework to do some modest gameplay. Evidence abounds that kids today have too much homework (as well as too many structured activities thrust upon them by parents who want to overachieve through them and make up for being uninvolved). In fact, not too long ago NPR hosted a four-part series on the topic!
In the end, the study is horribly flawed. Using surveys from about 1,500 kids (not a bad number), it examines time spent on one weekday and one weekend day, which is simply not enough information to go on. Some folks cram all their homework into a quarter of the time and still get good grades. And we all know that getting good grades on homework correlates only poorly to actual intelligence, learning, and life preparedness—key things that the study didn’t examine at all.
It wouldn’t be even a little bit surprising to find that, on average, gamers actually perform better in school, on intelligence tests, and in life.
I’m certainly not advocating for an “unschooling” approach, allowing kids to play video games for eighteen hours a day if they’re so inclined. Good parent—and kids themselves, for that matter—know when video game playing is interfering with other parts of life. By all means, take steps to make sure that doesn’t happen! Set limits if necessary.
But don’t discount even entertainment-oriented video games as stellar learning tools, either. Passion for anything challenging is a passion for learning.
July 3rd, 2007
Games are the best (and second-most effective) education tools available.
Slate had an article yesterday on educational video games that I think serves as a pretty good high-level survey of the ongoing discussion right now, especially since it pointed to Koster’s key point from some time ago that adding an artificial incentive to perform an educational activity isn’t very effective but requiring learning in order to achieve a genuinely interesting goal does. (Koster responds directly to Slate’s article here.)
Here are two things I know:
- People will go way out of their way to acquire skills and learn things that help them achieve a goal that interests them and that they perceive as achievable.
- When people are motivated to learn something for such goals, they learn it faster and more efficiently than they will under any other circumstance (except in cases where survival is at stake, in which case they may achieve an even greater efficiency).
In other words, when people understand why learning something is worth their while—when they recognize for themselves the reward—they have all the motivation they need. Thus self-motivated, they will learn more rapidly than they ever would in a classroom or at a parent’s insistence.
I know a dozen people whose vocabulary exceeded their own parents’ (though with a geekier slant) thanks to Gary Gygax’s sesquipedalianism.
I knew a boy, something of a slacker, who rapidly learned the fundamentals of programming when he got caught up in a game in which you could tweak the code of your virtual robot to increase its chances in fights. (Alas, I don’t remember the name of the game.)
To make a video game—or any game, for that matter—that is effectively educational, the designer or design team has to focus on two key elements: goals and obstacles.
This is, of course, exactly what any halfway decent game designer already does. MMOs, for example, primarily focus on power-acquisition goals that are just fun enough to justify the obstacle of spending more time playing the game. The goals have to be satisfying, however arbitrary, and the obstacles have to be just challenging enough that people don’t think they can’t surmount them but do feel a sense of accomplishment when they do. A series of increasingly difficult obstacles centered on a theme, ubiquitous in all game design, is the right approach.
But to be educational, the obstacles have to require something more than just dedication or quicker button-pushing. Some RPGs (such as some of the Ultima games) require a little bit of language acquisition in order to complete them.
I’m willing to bet that a child (or grown-up for that matter) could get the benefit of six years of class-learning in a foreign language in the course of about two months of regular gameplay in an immersive single-player spy-based roleplaying adventure game in which acquiring the actual skill to learn the language was essential to completing the game and the mini-goals along the way provided the tools to do so. Early goals would require demonstrable skill in simple vocabulary and easy phrases. Later goals would hone in on those subtle points of a language that can trip a non-native speaker up, punishing sloppy and quick reading with setbacks and rewarding fluency with access to better in-game skills and tools and, ultimately, the final parts of the story.
The game could offer language instruction directly, in the form of mini-games or simulated classroom learning, but also reward language fluency acquired outside the game. If people find they learn faster on their own, they’re free to do so, but if they enjoy the in-game learning, that’s available too.
A couple of months after the game’s release (if the game is done right), high schoolers across the country would be chattering in French during study hall.
(I’m not an expert on the economics of the game industry, but I’m willing to bet that an A-list game of this sort sold at $50 would be able to make far more money than a language-learning program sold at $150)
Am I crazy? I know I’d drop fifty bucks on a well-written game like that in a nanosecond. Not because I’d finally learn French, but because I’d like a damn good, immersive spy-themed adventure-RPG set in the period after World War II. (Base it on Tim Powers’s incredible Declare
to get some good supernatural elements, and I’ll spend $150!)
June 28th, 2007
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