What Video Games Teach Us?

Attention-getting games

A good video game is challenging, fun, and complex, says Gee. It usually takes 50 to 60 hours of intense concentration to complete one. Even children who cannot sit quietly at school can spend hours trying to find a video game or a computer game.

"Children diagnosed with ADHD because they cannot pay attention will play 9 hours of direct computer games," Gee said. "The game focuses on looking at how the school is not doing."

The attractive power of video games may be in their interactive body. Players don’t just sit and watch. They will take part in the action and solve problems. Some games allow players to make changes to the game, allowing for new opportunities.

And children who play computer games often learn more about computers than their parents do. "Children today are indigenous to a culture where their parents are immigrants," Gee said.

In his 2 to 3 years of studying social influences in video games, Gee has seen many young athletes become computer science majors in college. One child even ended up as a teaching assistant during his first year because school computer lessons were so easy for him.

Screen reading

Video games can also enhance your reading skills too. For example, in the game Animal Crossing, actors become characters living in a city full of animals. In the course of the game, you can buy a house, move from city to city, go to museums, do some ordinary things. All this time, he is taking notes on other players and talking to animals. Because children are interested in the game, they often learn at a higher level than their grade, even if they say they don't like reading.

Games can stimulate new interests. After playing a play called Age of Mythology, Gee says, children (like her 8-year-old son) often start looking for fairy tales in a library or joining online chat groups about fairy tale characters. History can live on a player who participates in a game.

Even violent sports have a positive side, Gee said. "Grand Theft Auto 3 is not there to shoot people," he said. When the game starts, your character has just been released from prison. It would help if you found out how to make a living, but the only people you know are criminals. Along the way, you may be fighting or killing people, but you don't have to.

“The game is to give you a choice palette,” Gee said. He says that athletes must deal with behavioral problems, develop social relationships, and solve challenging problems that can work in real life. "How could it be a compelling game if you could only make the right choice?"

Improved skills

Video games can also help to improve your visual skills. That is what researchers at the University of Rochester in New York recently discovered.

In the study, regular athletes between the ages of 18 and 23 were better at monitoring what was happening around them than those who did not often play or did not play at all. They could track many things at a time. And they were quick to pick things up in a crowded place.

"More and more the fact that action video games can be useful," said Rochester neuroscientist Daphne Bavelier, "our findings are surprising because they show that learning resulting from playing video games happens very quickly and often without the experience of playing."

The researchers said that research could lead to better ways to train soldiers or treat people with attention deficits, although they warned against taking that point too seriously.

Bavelier says, "We certainly do not mean to convey the message that children can play video games instead of doing homework!"