We sat down to research all the information on video games and their positive and negative impact on the developing minds of our children and we have this: no conclusion.
The reasons are many. First, the video gaming industry is now a powerful economic force on a par with Hollywood's mighty movie industry. This means that the industry employs a lot of people, pays investors a lot in dividends and it pumps out information that may or may not be propaganda. In fact, it is difficult to find fact from fiction when researching the video gaming industry. We recommend that careful sleuths determine who funded the study or report du jour before trumpeting the good or evil found therein.
Second, there is a well documented generational divide between youngsters that play video games (almost all of whom are under the age of forty) and those severely impaired by age like me (I'm darned near 52!). Actually, because I played life and death video games for 20 continuous years while I was in the U.S. Navy, putting simulated torpedoes into enemy submarines or shooting down computer generated hostile aircraft and missiles, I largely recuse myself from the "normal" anti-video-game over 40 crowd.
So let's just consider this a preliminary finding of fact, as far as we can determine, on video gaming.
In November, 2006, the University of Indiana completed an interesting study on the parts of the human brain most engaged while playing activity-based or violent video games.
The men and women, doctors all, who conducted this study are trying to determine what goes on in the adolescent mind while the player is participating in a video game.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain function, the Medical School of IU found that adolescents who had played violent video games exhibited more brain activity in a region thought to be important for emotional arousal and less activity in a brain region associated with executive functions. Executive functions are those activities that support the ability to plan, shift, control and direct one's thoughts, ideas and behavior. Call this the "self behavior and thought" part of the brain.
"Our study indicates that playing a certain type of violent video game may have different short-term effects on brain function than playing an exciting but nonviolent game," principal study investigator Dr. Vincent Mathews said.
The group that played the nonviolent game exhibited more mental stimulation or activation in the prefrontal portions of the brain. The prefrontal lobes are believed to control inhibition, concentration and self-control. The non-violent game players also showed less activation in the area involved in emotional arousal.
"This data differs from our earlier studies because in this study adolescents were randomly assigned to play either a violent or a nonviolent game," said William Kronenberger, associate professor of psychology at the IUSM Department of Psychiatry. "Therefore, we can attribute the difference between the groups specifically to the type of game played. Earlier studies showed a correlation between media violence exposure and brain functioning, but we did not actually manipulate the teens' exposure to media violence in those earlier studies."
Future studies to better understand the duration and meaning of the relationship between media violence exposure and brain function are planned.
We have a raft of questions like "What exactly constitutes a violent video game?" We are sure the video game industry will lead the way in defining this hot topic so as not to impede sales.
So parents beware: what we do know is that while playing violent video games a lot is going on in your child's arousal part of his or her brain while the "thought" section of the brain is, well, turned off. Sounds a little like what drugs and alcohol do for the brain. Other than that, have a ball!
We'll leave smart readers to form their own conclusions on this and we highly recommend searching the internet using your favorite system for more information.
We seek your learned input on this. Personal attacks and vulgraities, as is my normal rule, will be ignored and not commened upon. We are seeking to learn here not to engage on gladatorial combat. Save that for another writer, please.
We have continued to read about video gaming and there is much still to be looked into. We did find credible souces who have written that:
--Young people do, in fact, become addicted to video games.
--China has started its first video game addiction treatment center.
--The exact impact of video gaming on the human brain is the subject of many studies by many factions.
You've got. Other research on violent video games has shown that kids who routinely play violent video games are far more likely to engage in acts of violence. They are also far less likely to help someone who is need as opposed to kids who don't play such games. These games appeal to the older parts of the brain known as the limbic system and as such have addictive like effects. They also tend to turn off the frontal lobes, or more precisely, the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The game which draws my particular ire at the moment is the so-called "Christian" violent video game of Left Behind. Things are truly despicible when "Christians" are promoting a game that induces violent, addictive behavior.
by
Richard Mathis (130 articles, 110 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 120 comments)
on Friday, December 29, 2006 at 8:39:22 AM
To Rickmath: Suggest you go to the link in the comment above
The Writing is on The Wall:
Computer Games Rot the Brain
By Boris Johnson
The Telegragh (London, UK)
December 28, 2006
It's the snarl that gives the game away. It's the sobbing and the shrieking and the horrible pleading - that's how you know your children are undergoing a sudden narcotic withdrawal. As the strobing colours die away and the screen goes black, you listen to the wail of protest from the offspring and you know that you have just turned off their drug, and you know that, to a greater or lesser extent, they are addicts.Some children have it bad. Some are miraculously unaffected. But millions of seven- to 15-year-olds are hooked, especially boys, and it is time someone had the guts to stand up, cross the room and just say no to Nintendo. It is time to garrotte the Game Boy and paralyse the PlayStation, and it is about time, as a society, that we admitted the catastrophic effect these blasted gizmos are having on the literacy and the prospects of young males.
It was among the first acts of the Labour Government to institute a universal "literacy" hour in primary schools; and yet, in the six years following 1997, the numbers of young children who said that they didn't like reading rose from 23 per cent to 35 per cent. In spite of all our cash and effort, the surveys increasingly show that children (especially boys) regard reading as a chore, something that needs to be accomplished for the sake of passing tests, not as a joy in itself.
It is a disaster, and I refuse to believe that these hypnotic little machines are innocent.
We demand that teachers provide our children with reading skills; we expect the schools to fill them with a love of books; and yet at home we let them slump in front of the consoles. We get on with our hedonistic 21st-century lives while in some other room the nippers are bleeping and zapping in speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore.
They sit for so long that their souls seem to have been sucked down the cathode ray tube.They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious.
These machines teach them nothing. They stimulate no ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory - though some of them may cunningly pretend to be educational. I have just watched an 11-year-old play a game that looked fairly historical, on the packet.
Your average guilt-ridden parent might assume that it taught the child something about the Vikings and medieval siege warfare. Phooey!
The red soldiers robotically slaughtered the white soldiers, and then they did it again, that was it. Everything was programmed, spoon-fed, immediate - and endlessly showering the player with undeserved praise, richly congratulating him for his bogus massacres. The more addictive these games are to the male mind, the more difficult it is to persuade boys to read books; and that is why it is no comfort that Britain has more computer games per household than any other EU country, and, even though they are wince-makingly expensive, an amazing 89 per cent of British households with children now boast a games console, with distribution right across the socio-economic groups.Every child must have one, and what we fail to grasp is that these possessions are not so much an index of wealth as a cause of ignorance and underachievement and, yes, poverty.
It hardly matters how much cash we pour into reading in schools if there is no culture of reading at home; and the consequences of this failure to read can be seen throughout the education system. Huge numbers are still leaving primary school in a state of functional illiteracy, with 44 per cent unable either to read, write or do basic sums.B y the age of 14, there are still 40 per cent whose literacy or numeracy is not up to the expected standard, and a large proportion of the effort at Further Education colleges (about 20 per cent) is devoted to remedial reading and writing.
Even at university, there are now terrifying numbers of students who cannot express themselves in the kind of clear, logical English required for an essay, and in many important respects if you can't write, you can't think.
The Royal Literary Fund has, in the past few years, done a wonderful job of establishing Writing Fellows at our universities, offering therapy for those who can't put their thoughts on paper; and yet the fund admits that the scale of the problem is quite beyond its abilities.It is a shock, arriving at university, and being asked to compose an essay of a couple of thousand words, and then discovering that you can't do it; and this demoralisation is a major cause of dropping-out. It's not that the students lack the brains; the raw circuitry is better than ever. It's the software that's the problem. They have not been properly programmed, because they have not read enough.
The only way to learn to write is to be forced time and again to articulate your own thoughts in your own words, and you haven't a hope of doing this if you haven't read enough to absorb the basic elements of vocabulary, grammar, rhythm, style and structure; and young males in particular won't read enough if we continually capitulate and let them fritter their lives away in front of these drivelling machines.
Gordon Brown proposed in his Pre-Budget Report to spend £2,000 per head on improving the reading of six-year-old boys. That is all well and good, especially when you consider that the cost of remedial English in secondary school soars to £50,000 per head. But it would be cheaper and possibly more effective if we all - politicians, parents, whoever - had the nerve to crack down on this electronic opiate.
So I say now: stop just lying there in your post-Christmas state of crapulous indifference. Get up off the sofa. Can the DVD of Desperate Housewives, and go to where your children are sitting in auto-lobotomy in front of the console. Summon up all your strength, all your courage. Steel yourself for the screams and yank out that plug.And if they still kick up a fuss, then get out the sledgehammer and strike a blow for literacy.
by
John E. Carey (207 articles, 0 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 106 comments)
on Friday, December 29, 2006 at 8:45:43 AM
How about showing the charred corpses on TV? How about Hef? How about promoting war on every corner? How about lying so much that we now have lies on the molecular levels? How about celebration of the hanging(!) of the individual after the cangaroo court? How about Waco, TX? How about 650000 REAL dead? How about our genuinely autistic leader with evil malice in mind (most of the autistic people are at least harmless)?
Mr. Carey seemed not to have grown up with Video games. But so far judging by his articles his brain had not become particularly advanced... This is nothing personal. I agree that videogames are bad. But those are the least of our worries. Ask Hef. He knows.
by
Mark Sashine (53 articles, 19 quicklinks, 249 diaries, 3571 comments)
on Friday, December 29, 2006 at 11:41:48 AM
I'm the mother of a 15 year-old gamer. He is quite literate; in fact, he built up his vocabulary from reading video game magazines geared to teenagers when he was about 7. He's also very politically astute; he keeps up with several liberal blogs daily and reads non-fiction. Since he was very young, he has saved his own money to upgrade his equipment and buy games. He does not like military games; in fact, he likes world-building games where he controls all aspects of civilization.
I'm a college English professor, so he was 'doomed' to be literate, but I also made sure to stay apprised of what games my kid was playing and when. In fact, since young kids do get so easily addicted, it is their parents' job and responsibility to supervise video gaming.
For a different perspective on games I recommend James Paul Gee's 'What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy.'
by
Debbie Scally (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 60 comments)
on Friday, December 29, 2006 at 11:47:21 PM
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