I don't know, I think a great number of previous video game players have grown up and become functional humans given the majority of children in the last few generations will have played videos games for entertainment in one fashion or another. There's always outliers who will have problems of course, but that doesn't mean it's bad for the rest.
I feel like I have the opposites of an addictive personality. I enjoy playing games but I struggle to stay interested in any game for more than 10 hours and then I need a few months to reset and play it again. The only thing I have become addicted to is Hacker News and reddit. Arguably worse for you than games, for reddit at least.
I grew up in South Korea where kids are placed under immense academic stress and gaming is an established mainstream culture. In the last two decades or so, the instances of kids and adults suffering from severe gaming addiction have become increasingly common.
The issue is exacerbated by the fact that more gaming companies are embracing loot boxes, pay-to-win schemes, and other parlor tricks to not only keep the players addicted but to also extract as much cash as possible from its captive audience. When hearing the stories of people whose lives were ruined by video games, it's hard not to draw the similarities with gambling addicts who poured their entire life savings into casinos. Except the casinos now exist in the pockets of 14 year olds, accessible at all times.
I'm a long time gamer and a hobby game dev myself. I very much dislike the tendency for media to overstate the harms of gaming, but the reality is that gaming in its current form can be a very dangerous thing to become addicted to.
From personal experience I do agree that video games can be used as a form of distraction and escapism. but I think teaching mental awareness and moderation could change it from distraction to relaxation.
Yea, video games can definitely end up being an unhealthy coping mechanism used to avoid addressing your real life issues. That said they are probably on balance a better coping mechanism than some of the other popular ones out there (Alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling) but definitely worth keeping an eye on. Especially because video games aren't restricted for children like all those others things are (at least in theory).
Gambling is roughly described as gaming with higher stakes, IMO. My totally unqualified, unsubstantiated guess would be the average gambler has higher cognitive performance than the average video game player. A dumb gambler goes broke sooner or later, which doesn't make them all quit but it does make some of them quit, which I would wager causes a selective effect towards the smarter ones.
Have you been to a casino? 95% of Blackjack players aren't even playing basic strategy, something that takes a single day to learn. Instead, mid-rank players in popular online games like Valorant and Overwatch 2 are quite formidable multi-level thinkers.
But what percentage of those people are playing as anything other than a lark? I might go to the casino one time every three years. I can guarantee I am utilizing a sub optimal strategy
Why unhealthy? I've been using games as a coping mechanism for stress and personal issues for about twenty years and as far as I can tell I'm reasonably healthy. Most people my age that are clearly unhealthy it's because of drugs, alcohol or weight issues, not videogames. I'm somewhat prone to stress, and I find taking a few days off to play games helps in recovering from burnout, while something like travelling which helps some people, stresses me out.
You sound healthy! but you probably know someone who's unhealthily using them to cope and resorting to video games instead of life. some people take a few days off and forget to get back on
English is not my first language so maybe that's why it's strange to me to call something unhealthy that doesn't cause health issues. I could understand calling videogames "problematic" or "antisocial", but unhealthy seems a bit of a loaded term because I often shut myself in and forget about the rest of the world playing videogames and it rather improves my health. It's the stress that I find unhealthy, causing me eye strain, irritability and other problems. Meanwhile playing games helps, doesn't require a lot of time and effort, it's cheap, reliable and I enjoy it, so even if I know that sometimes I'm being antisocial and prioritising it over socialising with friends for example I still do it.
Isn't the memorization just a required to play competetively at all? At highest level of chess, memoryzation is a given and it's about brain power and creativity.
Part of the whole Hans Neimann cheating scandal is that he played too close to optimal as measures by his correlation to a computer. So no, it seems mostly to be about drilling positions with solvers and playing faithfully to that.
I played chess competitively as a kid, before chess programs were very strong or widely available. We memorized maybe 4 moves in and that's it. After that it was all strategy, creativity, etc... Nowadays they're doing far more work with solvers and it's pretty much taken the strategy out of it. Which is why Go is increasing in popularity. Competitive gaming probably as well.
Careful 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.
Would you assume the same thing about playing a musical instrument or playing a sport? What is playing video games except practicing cognitive performance? It works spatial reasoning, logic, dexterity, problem solving, reactions, etc.
I’m inclined to disagree based on antithetical first hand experiences. In fact the only console we ever had growing up, my father smashed in front of us after a year because all he gave a shit about was our grades. When a few classes started slipping he blamed the box.
Also, “associated” is different from “causality”, right?
I had a similar upbringing. Video games and TV were blamed for bringing down our grades, and were extremely restricted. We never had a console. Dad would come home and put his hand on the TV to see if it was warm, and ground us if it was. I was allowed to spend time on the computer if I was writing BASIC or playing something "educational" (like Carmen SanDiego, or Oregon Trail). The occasional Sierra game slipped in. The first real game machine I was allowed was a Game Boy, when I was 12.
For better or worse, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have become a coder if I'd had access to lots of games in elementary school.
It's funny how different circumstances shape people so differently. I had access to a lot of video games and I decided I wanted to make them as a kid and that started my programming experience around 11-12.
If I didn't have video games I probably wouldn't have become a programmer!
Same for me and most of my high school friends. We were all dorks that loved video games and most of us ended up going into technical jobs largely because of video games.
Interesting, isn't it? When I was around 10 I had after school access to a lab full of Mac Classics, which had The Manhole installed, and it was about that age that my two best friends and I started working on our first "games" in HyperCard and screensavers in Perl. They were also both banned from having consoles at home, which was a reason we became friends... other kids would go home but we wanted to stay at school late because it was where we had access to Macs. All three of us ended up adjacent to the game industry at one point or another. I remember going to other kids' houses and being blown away by (and terrible at) NES games. Something like Mario 2 seemed impossible to imagine programming for me at the time. Something like The Manhole, though, or even "Glider" could reveal its hypertalk mechanics. So maybe that had more to do with where I went than trying to do text adventures in BASIC on an IBM PC at home.
Yes, but for different reasons. Playing an instrument or sport means you're more likely to have a non-poor family with parents who have time to spend with you.
I think having parents who can help you develop a growth mindset is awesome and something generally reserved for upper/middle class parents. The part where your mind grows comes from practicing. So practicing video games is the same as practicing sports or instruments, the games encourage you to keep pushing yourself in the same way that a coach or teacher would.
That sounds like wishful thinking in a Dunning Kruger kind of way by somebody who never played physical sports on a competitive level.
Video games are a non-social controlled environment with obvious and predictable goals, similar to gambling. Gambling encourages a person to keep pushing themselves for a positive outcome but that alone does indicate any form of personal advancement.
Sports and music require development of skills, often with coaching by a human, and requiring long periods of independent practice without any kind of immediate feedback. In sports it takes years of investment to get good (less than excellent). If a given video game took years of investment to complete the current level almost nobody would play that game.
An athlete doesn’t go from couch potato to immediately scoring touchdowns just after a few attempts at trial and error. You can do that in video games because everything is synthetic and linear.
In the real world you actually have to overcome real pain (both mental and physical) to achieve success. Video games are incapable of teaching that on absolutely any level.
The same way I would explain drugs and gambling. Gambling can be very competitive. That appeals to somebody and glamorizing it can generate a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean it’s beneficial in absolutely any way.
Unless you're thinking of gacha games, I don't see the similarity. In general, video games have defined victory conditions and rewards. Gambling, outside of certain card games, doesn't.
> Video games are a non-social controlled environment
Lots of video games are social. Some are not. The amount the environment is controlled can also varry.
> Gambling encourages a person to keep pushing themselves for a positive outcome but that alone does indicate any form of personal advancement.
So like literally everything. Seriously, can you name an external stimuli that this doesn't fit? Is work gambling? School? Yoga class?
> In sports it takes years of investment to get good (less than excellent). If a given video game took years of investment to complete the current level almost nobody would play that game.
I can be shit at soccer, and still have fun with friends. I can be shit at video games and still have fun. I can spend years practising and still be nowhere close to olympic level. Similarly, i can spend years on video games and be nowhere near the top of competitive e-sports.
The difference is third party contribution. If you are playing games purely for personal enjoyment that’s great. If you consider it a sport you are probably someone else’s product with little or nothing but lost time to show for it. This has long since been explained in Nicomachean Ethics and Utilitarianism. What matters is not the carrot someone can dangle in your face but your ability to tell the difference.
> Would you assume the same thing about playing a musical instrument or playing a sport?
Yes, of course. Musical ability is well known to be closely associated with mathematical ability. Musical achievement is not known to be closely associated with mathematical achievement; people tend to do one or the other.
But this already tells us that playing an instrument will predict better cognitive performance for reasons unrelated to the work you do to learn the instrument.
I would not assume that playing a sport predicted better cognitive performance, but I obviously would assume that playing a sport intensively predicts better athleticism -- independent of the effect of practicing sports -- than avoiding sports does.
Absolutely. Saw a study a few years ago that finds that school music program participation is significantly correlated with parental wealth, which raises all kinds of confounding factors depending on what's actually being measured (e.g. Was the kid 10ms slower because they didn't get a good breakfast? Or mom got home late from her 2nd job and interrupted her family's sleep?)
I dont understand what you're getting at. What are the "reasons to think" that the populations are not equivalent? The study controlled for parental income, sex, age, BMI, IQ.
I doubt those controls are sufficient, individual-level IQ measures are very variant and likely incomplete, so there still could easily be pre-existing differences the controls can't sort out
I'm not seeing your point. Are you saying it is not valid because you doubt if such a study could show anything, or are you saying that you would design the study differently?
The study is what it is, I'm not saying anything about its validity, we were talking about possible interpretations of it.
The point is that we need to be careful not to take this data as implying that games cause better performance, only that it's correlated with it; guelo pointed out the study does control for BMI/IQ/etc, but I think that this is still insufficient to claim any kind of causation there*. We know nothing at all of the counterfactual world where those same kids didn't play games.
* Even if IQ tests were a message from the heavens saying THESE KIDS WERE DESTINED FOR THE EXACT SAME LEVEL OF COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE AT BIRTH we would still know nothing about causality, because there may have been something else in their lives that caused both the game-playing and the better performance.
It’s true that correlation isn’t causation but I think, in moderation, games do improve cognitive skills. If it becomes something the kid does all the time, then I think the lack of balance does more harm than good. Moderation is all things.
One thing I remember from childhood is playing console games at houses of friends who owned consoles. They would be masters of the game and I would pick up a controller and from lack of experience feel completely lost and useless at the game and lose interest quickly. There's seems like there would be a self selection where those who can fall into the learned behavior of the game/reward cycle (console or phone easy access) can get lost in it for quite a time barring supervision. The study itself also mentions confounding things like higher percentage of gamers in study being male (so maybe gender plays a larger role than chance), weird memory effects like the video gamers being better for a short time at start of testing but falling off rapidly versus non gamers being able to continue at a higher level. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
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.
These were children - 9 and 10 years old. It is doubtful that any of them were playing competitively or drinking to excess.
Even in older folks, 3 hours a day isn't really playing competitively nor does it mean you aren't drinking. We used to spend many hours getting drunk and high and playing games. It was great fun, and still is from time to time.
Having 3 hours PER DAY to do anything for leisure, even if it's a form of escape from terrible circumstances, is quite the luxury. I would guess at the population level circumstances that allow 3 hours a day of non-essential activities like this to be associated with circumstances that allow better cognitive performance than those without 3 hours a day of time to do something for personal interest.
Video games are like the cheapest way to keep a kid busy for low income working parents. I guess they could send the kids outside but people nowadays start asking questions if a kid is caught outside while single mom is working for 3 hours or something.
Given infinite money I think many of those parents would send the kid with nanny if needed or whatever to organized sports, piano classes, etc.
The high end gets expensive, but the low end is pretty cheap. Considering that a game can keep a child entertained for a hundred hours or more, the overall cost can easily drop below $1/hour. Compared to the cost of a movie or other activities, it comes out cheap.
Not if they're old/used. Even new games are cheaper than sports lessons, music lessons, or living in a nice area for other activities.
Of course, without video games either, kids will find a way to have fun regardless. My grim apartment complex still had kids kicking around a soccer ball or riding bikes in the parking lot.
I don't know. As a kid, I very rarely heard of other kids being injured from soccer or biking in a way that requires a doctor's visit. People broke limbs skiing or something. The kids playing in the parking lot could've had govt-supplied health coverage anyway; they lived in 2br apartments shared by two families.
Maybe not for the truely destitute, but the $350 for a Nintendo switch and another $150 for some games is way cheaper than private piano lessons or math tutoring where the sky's the limit. The cheapest is probably Roblox on a school-provided Chromebook, both of which are close to free.
Different person here and I'm also not going to provide external information, only more perspective and I'm more so curious on what your first counterpoints in your mind would be, absent any source:
Video games are the cheapest form of paid entertainment for the amount of time that a single purchase occupies.
Despite their audience being extremely price sensitive (which has nothing to do with socioeconomics, just consumer expectations), all stakeholders recognize this and extract value in other ways.
> I'm more so curious on what your first counterpoints in your mind would be
Just some anec-data. I did not have any consoles growing up simply because we could not afford them. Eventually we got a single very old very slow machine that was shared among the family. I know a few other people in the same situation (usually 1st/2nd generation immigrants). Thus in my mind, video games are luxury products, which are not affordable to low income households.
A $500 PC/gaming laptop and pirated games can occupy a kid for thousands of hours over a course of years. Sure, it requires an up-front investment, but in terms of dollars per hour it's hard to beat.
The study combines all forms of game playing no matter the platform. They used self reported studies of all participants who were 9-10 at the time of the study, but used MRI for part of the cognitive testing response measurement.
I think that you probably have in your mind what "gamers" would call "real games", those with highly detailed 3D graphics and requiring significant hardware (especially GPU) power, but what's considered a video game is far broader than that, and can be as simple as a basic puzzle game needing not more than 80s-era hardware.
Discarding all the moderate users seems like a design flaw. A possible effect on cognition is a fairly natural question for regression.
Maybe you saw it in the text but, "This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommend that videogaming time be limited to one to two hours per day for older children."
The thought process I can sort of imagine is that the tests are fairly costly and the hypothesis they're testing is that more play than the official recommended limit should decidedly give detectable impairments to cognition. (Seems they could have rejected that, if they'd had comparable groups in the first place. Now I'm not sure what it says)
There's already some people who they seem to have testing data for that aren't included in the final comparison, the numbers don't add up between available people with scans and total in the data. The only reason I can see is that they have between one and three hours if video games per day.the
This appears to be the study, though I'm not entirely sure [1] and it reads:
Screen Time Survey
This threshold was selected because it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommends that video-gaming time be limited to 1 to 2 hours per day for older children.
Yeah, I saw their excuse for focusing on over three hours a day. I don't understand why you dump that data rather than use it somehow, like a third cohort.
It would be natural to do so since you assume in these time-reported things that people are not precise about the actual amount. If someone will report (x-1,x+1) h then it makes sense to just bucket into low and high so that, if there is an effect, it is initially apparent.
Why does everyone assume consoles? PC gaming is still a thing. And a study published now would have been done before gaming video cards became unaffordable.
My son started playing games (with me) at 4 yo (partly because we were all locked indoors for months on end).
Anecdotally - and providing you use some discretion as to choice of game - I’ve found it absolutely fascinating to watch both the pace of development of problem-solving skills, and some of the frankly astounding leaps of logic and intuition young kids are capable of. I vividly remember one rock-moving puzzle in Breath of the Wild that had me stumped until he piped up with a proposal that turned out to be the correct solution. Fascinating stuff.
My then 8yo daughter who is behind in love with horses saw me riding a horse in botw. Zero experience with video games she picked it up and spent six months working at it so she could get a horse.
Completing shrines so she could get enough stamina to tame the horses.
I’ve found that the same games I was playing around that age are actually still fun - Commodore 64 games. Basic, non-distracting graphics and simple joystick controls make things easy for young kids.
Fun question! I would suggest the following (in no particular order), subject to the proviso that you do need to be sat next to them to help manage frustration, especially in the beginning (although my personal take is that they shouldn’t be left to play by themselves at all at that age) - particularly as they learn the controller, general video game conventions, and the specifics of each game:
- Breath of the Wild
- Animal Crossing
- Stardew Valley
- Minecraft
- Super Mario Odyssey
- Super Mario 3D World
- Rayman Legends
- Ratchet & Clank
- It Takes Two
- Slay the Spire
- Journey
- Spiderman and Miles Morales
My son’s favourite superhero - far and away - is Spiderman, in large part thanks to the PlayStation games. Pretty great role model. Kids find swinging through the city utterly exhilarating.
It Takes Two was such a fantastic, memorable experience for both of us - he still talks about it months later. It does require quite a lot of a kid, though - better for when they’ve got a year’s experience.
And trying to catch all the insects and fish in Animal Crossing kicked off a passion in him for the real things, to say nothing of what it taught him about animals generally, time and seasonality.
A Nintendo Switch is probably a good place to start, although as he gets older I’m encouraging him to move more over to the PlayStation (partly because it’s so much cheaper over time!).
Switch Joycons are great for small hands, too, although most kids seem to be able to manipulate a full-size controller by age 4-5.
Is It Takes Two about a married couple and their struggles? Isn't it made for couples? I could be wrong. What is that like for a child? Did it spark a lot of questions about marriage or anything else? Or did the eyes of a child ignore any adult themes and he only cared about the gameplay?
In our case, the adult themes went straight over his head and we just enjoyed the (frankly terrific) team-driven gameplay. The art style is very cutesy in a way that seems to appeal to kids, and there’s no swearing in the dialogue.
Ymmv, though, this stuff is highly subjective. If you’re particularly concerned then better just to stick to Nintendo first-party stuff - their whole brand is built around keeping everything wholesome.
I also recommend the Switch to begin with. The one that can be hooked to a TV - children will throw stuff to the ground, by mistake or purposely. You'd rather have them throw the control pad instead of the full console.
While I love Breath of the Wild to the death, its combat is rather difficult and somewhat realistic from the start, which might be a turnoff ("scary monsters keep killing me"). It also has lots of written dialog, which may be challenging for a 4 year old. Definitively this one has to be played with an adult.
Super Mario Odyssey is a much better intro game for a 4-year old. It also has combat (complex combat, with all the "possessed enemy powers"), but it introduces all its mechanics extremely gradually (starts with one-attack button, on a safe environment, and builds up from there). The game works well without paying attention to the dialog at all. The cartoon looks is also more child-friendly. At 6 years old my son can do air tricks with Mario that I struggle to do. It is a jewel of a game.
Animal crossing is fun. I worry a bit about the "materialistic/accumulative" parts of it ("gotta have more stuff!" here's an ice-cream shop stand that does nothing) but the insect and fish collection things are great. Again it will require some reading in order to advance.
I have not played Slay the Spire myself. Isn't that too "brainy" for a 4yo?
Oh I forgot to mention: Picu-nicu is a great "my first platformer" game, definitively recommended.
In general, most Nintendo made and published games tend to be great for kids of all ages. Captain Toad Treasure Tracker for problem solving, Mario Maker 2 for dexterity but also once they get comfortable with the game they can make their own levels and express themselves, Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening for the same reasons the above person noted Breath of the Wild. Switch Sports is great for getting your kids into sports that you might not normally have access to (like volleyball).
At young ages, I say give them an old-school Nintendo, or N64 etc. Little/no advertising, monetization of your kid's attention, whatever. If they're not on the web or at school yet, they won't even know they're missing out on more modern systems.
Or some similar setup where there's no online, no monthly charge, no pay-to-win, and instead the child gets to play a carefully crafted game, hopefully an awesome one.
I also think (offline) minecraft is great at that age.
Agree completely! My 6 year old thought the original Wii is the pinnacle of gaming, even told me to treat the controllers gently since he's gonna pass it on to his kids, and they will pass it to theirs - that seemed so obvious to him.
Of course, a few months ago his "girlfriend" down the street got a Switch...
Spelunky HD! Easy to understand and control, terribly difficult to master. I started my oldest on it when she was 4 and she beat it for the first time around age 6. Now she tears through it like a ninja master. She also enjoyed Bit Trip Runner 2 when she was 3-4 yrs old.
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.
The Freddi fish games by Humongous Entertainment are really great at that age. They are simple point and click adventures by Ron Gilbert with fun characters and a lot of interaction on the screen. Easy to get for cheap on Steam or sometimes in bundles and I've been impressed with how quickly it developed puzzle solving skills with my nephews.
Once the child is a bit older, the Pajama Sam serie is also great.
I have tried a lot of stuff, and I believe Lego Marvel Super Heroes (or other similar Lego games) are absolutely perfect for a small kid. There are infinite lives, and you can play co-op where you can do all the hard stuff while they enjoy the ride. Eventually they will learn by seeing you do stuff, and they will learn and want to do it too. It is truly amazing, a very forgiving game for a 4yo.
As a side note, my son learned this using a fight stick, since "move the stick in that direction to make your character go to that direction" is easier for them to comprehend and associate than using a dpad. Also way easier to hold with hittle hands.
I remember reading a paper that there's a strong association between spatial reasoning and performance in math.
This made intuitive sense to me given that there is some overlap between manipulating objects in a 2D or 3D space and visualizing a math problem whether numeric or geometric.
I find it hard to believe that typical video game puzzles can help increase cognitive performance, but plausible that training spatial recognition might help train the same regions of the brain we use for math.
Even the basic mechanics: teaching math to my kids when they were young was purely a visual exercise of moving groups of things (coins, Cheerios, M&M's) around.
My son (6) is allowed to only play one game. https://play0ad.com/. It has been a surreal experience. He is able to gather resources, launch campaigns, build cities, he now creates complex strategies to defeat the enemy (me). The game has great LAN game play so we can attack each other . The next step, he wants to know "how do we change this?" Code.
I'm sure your son could find a way to play the game in a way you disapprove of if forced. Kids on TikTok are learning social skills and creating things in order to star in their own videos, learning to harmonize with all sorts of music and being movie editors. There are even foreign language and math lessons to be had. I'm not sure why you have to dismiss the platform as a whole. Time spent with a an active and participating parent is going to be better for the child, no matter what toy is used.
Was it the urge to hold your inventory full until the game ends? Haha
But seriously, the thing that's interesting is if you could challenge a child's spatial intelligence more in a VR or game universe than in our limited gravity enabled world. Curious indeed.
Can't say it overwhelms my fear of screen time but it's a thing.
Complete anecdote, but my dad and I would play games like Zelda growing up (fond memories). Not sure if that's why I like puzzles now, but it definitely fits with the problem solving involved in software engineering. Or the two are completely unrelated.
I don't know about that. I used to play a lot of point-and-click adventure games as a kid. I think those developed my problem-solving skills. It was certainly a better use of my time than watching cartoons.
A fear of mine is that competitive gaming will usher in a new fascism based on "rank" -- sort of as you're displaying here.
I was in master league when I played Starcraft competitively, so I don't discount the real lessons you can learn from intense focus towards a clear goal, and the acceleration provided by competitive arena.
But there are plenty of people who cheat or buy their way toward "success" in games, because they are chasing the "status" they get from a silly little virtual badge. I know a handful of these folks in real life. They have many other problems, but are very "successful." I know a World of Warcraft Gladiator (rank 1 arena champion for a season) who botted honor at the expense of other players (in-game currency to attain higher quality gear) and in real life juiced his company's image by purchasing online accounts and controlling conversation in forums. I've shared a meal with a current professional gamer who nonchalantly engages in crypto fraud.
Winning is absolutely not everything. Some of the greatest things we can attain in this life will require mass cooperation of humans, and those experiences require dedicated folks with faith in humanity--people who aren't always looking for every crack in the law to screw over their fellow man to get rank 1.
I've seen lots of heartwarming content on TikTok, and left most Counter-Strike and Call of Duty lobbies feeling very dispirited.
Video gaming is massively better than mindless "content" watching because it has the perception-thinking-action feedback loop. On the other hand, I have little hope about gaming in the today's society: the pressure to make money will select the most addictive type of gaming that's going to be even worse than mindless watching (slot machines in casino?)
Btw, what does "associated with better outcomes" really mean? It means that in a large sample of lab rats, 10% demonstrated a sudden spike of activity, 40% didn't react and 50% slided into depression. The study gave each outcome a score and found that the average score is slightly positive, so readers are encouraged to think that all the lab rats had this outcome. After the study got completed, those 10% of the rats got suicidal and died within a week, but studying that was outside the scope of the study.
I 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.
/s I credit Civilization 1 as well. Or should I credit my parents who had PC/XT at home when the price of PC/XT was that of 3 new (soviet) automobiles? /s
I sunk a decade into civ 2. Oh man, the memories. I wish gog would acquire rights to release that abandonware with soundtrack and everything. Running it yourself requires running it on top of win3.1 in dosbox now days, and it's still janky. I would legit pay $60 for a perfectly working copy.
In the same boat and it is great until I run into a more complex multi-faceted problem, pick a solution and end up 30 miles down the road before I realize I need to backtrack and try a different one.
If my childhood had more books and boredom I might have the patience to spend longer in the planning stage and less enthusiasm for the drinking coffee and pounding out a solution stage.
I rarely regret just getting things done. Excessive planning is a much larger issue. I find it's usually better to just do something twice rather than spend too much time thinking about it.
One absolutely fantastic upside for just getting it done is that even if you have to redo it from scratch, you have so much better real-world understanding of the problem space.
I'm inclined to think that this applies to majority of the things we do, but is often brought up regarding building products in the idea that one should build the first prototype quickly, just to be scrapped so the final solution can be built from clean slate, benefiting from all the knowledge the prototype helped us gather.
Most often, in my experience at least, the knowledge one gains from actually doing the thing (even badly) surpasses anything that could have been gained with excessive planning. To actually work, genuine effort including some planning is definitely needed, but I don't think that's too high a bar. At least not when compared to the skills and knowledge one would have needed to achieve the same success with "just" excessive planning up front.
My experience is that this works for following semi-intuitive man-made flowchart type activities (e.g. fixing a car). For truly novel endeavors with high-risk (e.g. if the risk is breaking something irreplaceable), the planning is essential.
My two biggest childhood hobbies were reading and video games. Frankly, grand strategy games like the Civilization series and simulation games like SimCity taught patience and planning much more effectively than any of the books.
What the books taught me was how to write clearly, if with a somewhat unorthodox style. Turns out that's extremely important for a software engineer.
I learned one of the most valuable lessons of my life from RuneScape. My brother and I, playing for years, had amassed something like 100k gold between the two of us. We wanted more gold and were reading a guide online about to get it. The guide recommended a simple process of buying and selling coal in a kind of arbitrage trade. My brother and I were torn if we should try it, reasoning that if it were so easy to make money then everyone would do it. But, on the other hand, the guide seemed like it should work.
In the end, we just followed the guide, and it worked exactly as promised. In literally a day we 10x'd our RuneScape gold to well over a million and had basically unlimited funds from running the coal trading arbitrage the guide described for as long as we played the game.
It's hard for me to put this lesson into words exactly - but it's something like if something seems like it should work explore it and find out if it does. But also something like "Don't discount something for being too obvious." This has helped me in my career where it seemed like there were obvious opportunities for something that were in front of me so I just did the obvious thing and wound up getting richly rewarded for it. This kind of idea was on my mind in most of major life decisions too.
I've forgotten the exact prices at this point (I want to say buying mid-20's per and selling mid-30's but that may be complete misremembering). The basic idea was hanging out in the dwarf mines where people are mining coal and giving low offers on coal, with a promise to increase price if they can sell in quantity (and in certs). Then, just turn around and sell the certs, once you had a lot of them, at a higher price in Varrock town square (or similar).
One other reason we thought this wouldn't work is that it seemed to us buying in large quantity should get a discount - bulk discount, right? But that wasn't the case. It was cheaper, per unit, to buy hundreds of coal than tens of thousands.
It's an old joke: An economist is walking down the street when he steps on a $100 bill lying on the ground. He spots it, but decides to keep walking and doesn't pick it up.
“After all,” he thinks to himself, “if that had really been a $100 bill, someone else would have picked it up already!”
It took me until this moment to finally realize this joke relies on inefficient market to work. Consider: what if everyone in the joke's universe was a rational market actor? The $100 bill would lie there until it got consumed by rats or otherwise destroyed by natural events. For the economists' reasoning to work, there must exist some actors who don't reason this way, and instead pick up the bill on sight.
How does this translate to the efficient market hypothesis in general? Not sure, but if I were to dig down into how rational actors handle such situations, I'd expect to discover the math works out over continuous domain, and the joke is a paradox because we tend to think of money in discrete terms.
I think it's a good example of how rationality is a construct. We arbitrarily choose which rational framework makes the most sense in the situation and apply it.
Do you want to rely on the prior actor framework, or the react to what you see framework? That decision is not rational.
I like to view it this way: optimal decisions are not computable in practice. We never have enough data, nor enough time, nor is our brain particularly well-suited for this. We have no choice but to approximate, to use heuristics. This applies to both snap decisions and carefully applied formal models. The problem is, even the most rational of us sometimes forget they're just approximating, fudging both data and models at the edges, in order to get some result in finite time. They also forget to mention this.
The difference I see between what I wrote above and what you described as not rational choice of a framework is that, per my personal experience, it is possible to reconcile two conflicting seemingly rational frameworks. It just takes time to extend them past their edges until they meet. That is, extend each past the approximation cut-off point.
It’s a little like the newcomb’s paradox. IMO the “rational” action is the one where given the circumstances you win. At least I’d one box in that problem every time given the way it works. In this example, it’s picking up the $100.
The efficient market hypothesis always confused me since it seems empirically false. Who is making the trades that make the market efficient in the first place? Plus people (even large groups of them) are often wrong. Startups and the massive value they can create are an example of that.
Markets are a prediction of predictions to some extent and people are far from agents that act only on hard numbers (and they’re often not wrong to do so). Markets are probably the best tool we’ve got for this, but they’re far from perfectly efficient.
In the EMH people do still trade, it's just that only those with new information trade profitably.
In the joke scenario, as a parallel, you just need the economist to model that there's a chance they are the first person to see the bill.
Then you have a game theory game, where your chance of being the first person to see the bill depends on what everyone else thinks their chance was to be the first person, and hence did or didn't pick up the bill.
Then there is some optimal mixed strategy where people try pick up the bill with a certain probability, and it all works out.
One wonders if the effect you're describing isn't the reason that self-directed entrepreneurship seems to be on a sharp decline in the developed world. Believe the media, let alone the internet, and one would imagine we have 8 year olds building nuclear reactors and curing cancer, in their basements. So how can this hare brained scheme you have ever possibly work? Surely somebody else would have done it by now.
> Believe the media, let alone the internet, and one would imagine we have 8 year olds building nuclear reactors
On the one hand, we do[0].
On the other, what you're describing is why I don't feel bad about the fact that, 15 years after I had the idea, I've still not learned to use MHD modelling software to experiment with an idea I've had that might make fusors a little more interesting.
That is what I was referring to. Building a fusor is not a demonstration of genius so much as it is a demonstration of resources. You need thousands of dollars in parts (at least as his was built) and a significant degree of knowledge about safely managing radioactivity and handling electrical components carrying lethal levels of voltage.
None of this is obtained from genius, but from a father who's experienced in such and most likely an engineer. And I think this is why these sort of tales never have the implied follow through. The unstated implication is '12 year old builds nuclear reactor in toy room' is 'imagine what he'll be doing in 5 years!' And, the answer? Shit posting on Twitter, getting political, and trying to make a AR/VR startup.
Not exactly the Atlas upon which the world can comfortably thrust all of their hopes and expectations upon. And nobody is. Ramanujan [1] was a once in a millennia level of genuine abnormal genius, and he dedicated his entire life to a single pursuit. Yet even that mammoth of a man could but scratch the surface of that which is out there.
> The unstated implication is '12 year old builds nuclear reactor in toy room' is 'imagine what he'll be doing in 5 years!' And, the answer? Shit posting on Twitter, getting political, and trying to make a AR/VR startup.
If they really are asking the unstated question, they don't have good memories of their peers back at age 17.
{I think I was in the middle of my occult/goth/Wicca phase at that age, and now look at me: I use arcane knowledge, get called a wizard, I fly abroad to consort with dragons and werewolves (and other furries) and my familiar's names are Siri and Alexa… ;)}
Many times, the best solutions are very simple. These often seem obvious in hindsight, but were at the time either non-obvious or dismissed prematurely.
Learned Java as a first language to write bots back in 2009. Present day, I’m 1.5 yrs into writing a market analysis/flipping site for OSRS, and it’s been a great way to play with time-series stuff, sysadmin, and front-end.
Gotta credit a good chunk of career success to RuneScape as well.
Something like ge-tracker? I always thought it sounded fun to work on something like that, but also a ton of work for a game I'd probably be bored with way before I'd be able to finish anything tangible. I'm guessing there's decent potential for profit though, so that might be a good motivator.
Yep, same basic premise as GE-tracker with higher detail visualizations and fancier stats/feature engineering on top. Flipping to max cash became a pandemic hobby of mine, so I started off with a handful of homerolled spreadsheets/Jupyter notebooks to cover blind spots that I felt GE-tracker was missing, and eventually decided I could make a better version of the same recipe on my own.
Same here. I credit competitive gaming scene for teaching me all kind of skills. I was never a sports guy. But when I start to watch how ppl train, compete, strategize and work in a team, I realized that so many meta attributes are crucial for one's success
I was a Master SC2 player and strongly disagree with this. SC2 is heavy on execution and ops, which are not good 0 -> 1 skills. SC2 also has very short feedback loops and no long term consequences.
The things I will say it has going for it is that it has an extremely steep learning curve and you have to grind. Though many other games also have these attributes at a sufficiently high level.
The reality is that most people who are very good at video games wouldn't be able to maintain the long-term discipline or focus to run a company, nor be able to handle the responsibility of leading a team.
I credit Civ I with my almost failing my GCSEs, but I guess I did okay in the end. But then I have in the decades since avoided games I could happily play all night :).
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!!!
I used to play a lot of RPGs on the gameboy, but my English was still not good enough so I avoided reading. Sometimes I had my gameboy and a dictionary and I'd translate NPC dialogue one word at a time.
I remember Final Fantasy 1 on gameboy had a surprisingly open world and I could walk all over the map, and it had random monster encounters. I'd be fighting a lengthy turn based battle about every 20 steps, and it could be way above my level, and I was completely and utterly lost!
I spent so much time on that game. But I never progressed far into the quest. Playing it as an adult I realized one random NPC says there's a hidden cave to the east, and if you never read it's pretty much impossible to find.
Similarly in Pokemon, bumbling through caves in the dark until I go out the other side through sheer luck and grit. Turns out the move Flash just lights up the cave.
I had a similar thing happened with Zelda for the original Gameboy. There was some mobs in one of the first dungeons, that needed to be killed in a particular order, written on a plack. I spent months on and off trying everything, but it took a older friend borrowing it until I got past it.
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.
Parental availability has been steadily declining for decades - the same decades where video game usage took the place of other activities. You can do your own research. If it's difficult to get hard data, use soft data and draw inferences, but don't invalidate what data we clearly have and from which plenty of valid use can be extrapolated.
Books and video games were my way of being 'out of sight, out of mind' as a kid. Sadly, the less interaction I had with my parents, the more peaceful my life. I loved being left alone during the summer time.
I'm happy you got all of that from video-games and in no way I'm advocating against video games for everyone.
But, in my life, I credit sports for everything you said.
With the added benefit of a healthy neurology and biology in general. Something video games - and the digital world, as a whole - have been demonstrated to be detrimental. I mean, by serious studies.
Studies don’t investigate something as complex as the total impact of video games or anything else in all contexts.
You get individual studies of the impact in terms of say specific reflexes or some aspect of depression for some subset of games, but you would need a comprehensive set of studies for every single context to build a holistic picture which we simply don’t have.
Occasionally it’s enough to find major downsides such as with smoking’s really negative health impacts and say it’s not worth it. But for most things, including video games, there isn’t a single overwhelming downside just some negatives and other positives.
People want a black and white world where they can say “_ is good/bad,” but in the real world meat, carbs, video games etc isn’t that simple they are good and bad at the same time. Many people would be better off by reducing meat and carb consumption but that doesn’t mean a worldwide ban on consuming them is a good idea.
Because there are simply far to many variables involved. On one dimension you have type of game, but that variety impacts everything else.
Mario Party and Call of Duty for example may impact peoples emotions differently.
Tetris and StarCraft are both test actions per minute in a different way which may mean different things for reflexes etc.
Hours per week are another dimension, someone spending a few minutes per day playing Wordle is obviously different than someone who only works a part time job to have more time for their MMO addiction.
Finances is another dimension with actual free games being well free but some people spending their life savings on loot boxes in “Free to Play” games.
Degree of socialization is again varies wildly with a surprising number of marriages starting from MMO’s but single player games obvious don’t have that.
Exercise is another with some people getting a real workout playing beat saber and others getting embolisms from sitting to long with their addiction.
I agree that the digital world can have detrimental effects, but I don't think it's alone in that. I have many friends, a brother, and a wife who also credit sports for all of the above, with the added benefit of a the trauma and lifelong pain from the injury that forced them to quit. Books honestly seem like a complete win. Hopefully my daughter will benefit from the safest parts of all 3.
Agree that reading books is a great habit to take.
It's sad that an injury from a physical exercise can cause a lot of trauma indeed, but I don't think practicing it is inherently bad because of that.
An accident can happen related to anything in life. People die from coconuts or tree branches falling upon their heads. We won't say trees or coconuts are inherently bad because of that.
I would like to see a comparison to other mentally demanding hobbies, such as sports, cooking, crafting, art, dance, etc. My money is on video games not looking so good.
I wouldn't compare the focus needed to play amateur sports with the focus needed to finish Megaman 3 on the NES at an amateur level. It teaches you resource managing, planning, timing, memorization, and delayed gratification.
The question you have to ask is what is the trade off in the long term. Are these skills where development is frontloaded while gaming but happens naturally over time for other kids?
I played games competitively as a kid. I did well cognitively. If I could go back and get the time back I would.
My kid is 3.5. Would love to game with him but had assumed it was years off.... Any tips on games or consoles? I think I have an ancient ps4 in the attic somewhere but very open to buying new kit
Mario Kart. The great thing is you can turn off the handicaps for yourself to make it a little more challenging to play with them. I regularly play with my 7 year and twin 4 year olds - we bought the switch about a year ago.
if you can dig up a hacked wii somewhere, that's probably a pretty perfect device for that age range. stuff like wii sports & just dance + the nintendo back catalogue is not a bad place to start.
I 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 home. We'll see how it goes.
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.
It can be up to 1/2 of the class who plays them regularly and maybe 1/8 who talks about them a lot. I'm gen Z (married sorta young) and grew up in a city in California. The thing that'd exclude you more is not being on social media, but even then, not really.
I didn't have any until I was 14 or so but mostly because we were too poor for the ones available and the only screens I saw were the minicomputer terminals at the community college but I got to make a few as an adult. YMMV.
Since I see we're using this as an excuse for general video-gaming-and-parenting discussion... I'm currently very conflicted about video games for my son (7). He loves them but mom hates them and insists on a limit of 10 minutes per day.
I am not sure she is wrong. I played a lot of games as a kid and I probably could have done better things with my time. Not that I got any guidance as to what those better things would have been, but still.
At the same time, it seems like a lot of dads are bonding with their boys by playing games, and I wonder if I am missing out.
In your situation I would give him an hour per day (10 minutes is a very short amount of time to do anything fun or see progress in most games) then monitor the outcome based on your previous baseline , does he ask for extra time when its time to call it quit, do you see a negative outcome on his grades, focus and desire to play outside or with other toys, etc. Then simply cut back if you see any downsides with 1 hour per day. You should definitely play with him during that time if you can, it is a great way to bond with your son and try to change the activity during the week, like play lego with him instead of gaming and see what will be his reaction when a video game is no longer involved.
Video games are always good in moderation and there are definitely some great games for kids, exploring with him when searching for a new game will teach you a lot about about why he’s drawn to such and such game and this way you may be able to find other hobbies outside of gaming which are related to his interests.
> He loves them but mom hates them and insists on a limit of 10 minutes per day.
Come on this is ridiculous! 10 minutes is nothing!.
Maybe 2 or 3 hours, but 10 minutes? It will take him a full year to finish the first part of a game!, and will never allow him to discover games with depth and stories(my favorites), so he is going to play quick mobile games, which IMO are the worst.
> I am not sure she is wrong. I played a lot of games as a kid and I probably could have done better things with my time. Not that I got any guidance as to what those better things would have been, but still.
Games in my experience are a gateway to most of tech, for example my first interaction with networks and servers was when trying to create a Minecraft server to play with my friends.
Like everything, doing it moderation is the best, I think 2 or 3 hours would be fitting(not that I had them personally),
But please make sure there is actually something else for him to do, because otherwise he is going to spend the whole day waiting for these three hours.
> At the same time, it seems like a lot of dads are bonding with their boys by playing games, and I wonder if I am missing out.
Probably, your kid is also missing out on playing with his friends online.
To this day gaming is one of the biggest ways to keep in touch with remote people for me.
I honestly laughed at this. This is like limiting movie time to 5 minutes per day.
The way we do it in our house... the kids have an hour of tablet time doing whatever they want. Games, tv shows, movies, whatever. When the hour is up, its up.
Beyond that, we do have a nintendo switch, but that's for family video game time. I don't mind the singular switch/tv we have as much as the tablets, because since we have only 1 it requires 3 kids 7 & under to negotiate with eachother. But if you only have 1 kid that can change the game.
Someday I do plan to get them all desktop PCs. I have friends with similarly aged kids and they have family Minecraft and Valheim servers. Sounds like a lot of fun to me. My nephew recently went to college and he keeps in touch with his high school friends in part via a minecraft server he runs.
I grew up as a heavy gamer, and it became my identity.
I absolutely got addicted to games and I still struggle with functioning in daily life without trying to go back and play 1-2 hours of games each night for the dopamine hit.
More importantly, I missed out on actual real life experiences throughout my childhood all the way till I was 28.
I let me kids play games now, but as long as it doesn't overtake more useful activities (reading, going out, playground, socializing with friends, swimming, biking)
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadThe issue is exacerbated by the fact that more gaming companies are embracing loot boxes, pay-to-win schemes, and other parlor tricks to not only keep the players addicted but to also extract as much cash as possible from its captive audience. When hearing the stories of people whose lives were ruined by video games, it's hard not to draw the similarities with gambling addicts who poured their entire life savings into casinos. Except the casinos now exist in the pockets of 14 year olds, accessible at all times.
I'm a long time gamer and a hobby game dev myself. I very much dislike the tendency for media to overstate the harms of gaming, but the reality is that gaming in its current form can be a very dangerous thing to become addicted to.
E. G. A healthy bank balance, an unhealthy obsession, a healthy debate etc.
Some games are shallow but lots of games have far more depth than chess.
Part of the whole Hans Neimann cheating scandal is that he played too close to optimal as measures by his correlation to a computer. So no, it seems mostly to be about drilling positions with solvers and playing faithfully to that.
I played chess competitively as a kid, before chess programs were very strong or widely available. We memorized maybe 4 moves in and that's it. After that it was all strategy, creativity, etc... Nowadays they're doing far more work with solvers and it's pretty much taken the strategy out of it. Which is why Go is increasing in popularity. Competitive gaming probably as well.
but with cheap phone games, maybe not. hmmm...
Also, “associated” is different from “causality”, right?
For better or worse, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have become a coder if I'd had access to lots of games in elementary school.
If I didn't have video games I probably wouldn't have become a programmer!
Video games are a non-social controlled environment with obvious and predictable goals, similar to gambling. Gambling encourages a person to keep pushing themselves for a positive outcome but that alone does indicate any form of personal advancement.
Sports and music require development of skills, often with coaching by a human, and requiring long periods of independent practice without any kind of immediate feedback. In sports it takes years of investment to get good (less than excellent). If a given video game took years of investment to complete the current level almost nobody would play that game.
In the real world you actually have to overcome real pain (both mental and physical) to achieve success. Video games are incapable of teaching that on absolutely any level.
How do you explain League of Legends or even E-sports in general? Games are as competitive as they are endeavors of creativity.
Lots of video games are social. Some are not. The amount the environment is controlled can also varry.
> Gambling encourages a person to keep pushing themselves for a positive outcome but that alone does indicate any form of personal advancement.
So like literally everything. Seriously, can you name an external stimuli that this doesn't fit? Is work gambling? School? Yoga class?
> In sports it takes years of investment to get good (less than excellent). If a given video game took years of investment to complete the current level almost nobody would play that game.
I can be shit at soccer, and still have fun with friends. I can be shit at video games and still have fun. I can spend years practising and still be nowhere close to olympic level. Similarly, i can spend years on video games and be nowhere near the top of competitive e-sports.
What's the difference exactly?
The difference is third party contribution. If you are playing games purely for personal enjoyment that’s great. If you consider it a sport you are probably someone else’s product with little or nothing but lost time to show for it. This has long since been explained in Nicomachean Ethics and Utilitarianism. What matters is not the carrot someone can dangle in your face but your ability to tell the difference.
Like i said, what is the difference?
Yes, of course. Musical ability is well known to be closely associated with mathematical ability. Musical achievement is not known to be closely associated with mathematical achievement; people tend to do one or the other.
But this already tells us that playing an instrument will predict better cognitive performance for reasons unrelated to the work you do to learn the instrument.
I would not assume that playing a sport predicted better cognitive performance, but I obviously would assume that playing a sport intensively predicts better athleticism -- independent of the effect of practicing sports -- than avoiding sports does.
The point is that we need to be careful not to take this data as implying that games cause better performance, only that it's correlated with it; guelo pointed out the study does control for BMI/IQ/etc, but I think that this is still insufficient to claim any kind of causation there*. We know nothing at all of the counterfactual world where those same kids didn't play games.
* Even if IQ tests were a message from the heavens saying THESE KIDS WERE DESTINED FOR THE EXACT SAME LEVEL OF COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE AT BIRTH we would still know nothing about causality, because there may have been something else in their lives that caused both the game-playing and the better performance.
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.
Even in older folks, 3 hours a day isn't really playing competitively nor does it mean you aren't drinking. We used to spend many hours getting drunk and high and playing games. It was great fun, and still is from time to time.
The gender difference is huge though, the nongaming cohort had 288 males and 840 females while the gaming cohort had 372 males and 307 females.
Also, I'm a bit confused why they just dumped anyone with between one and three hours of videogame playing a day.
Given infinite money I think many of those parents would send the kid with nanny if needed or whatever to organized sports, piano classes, etc.
Source on that? Video games (console or pc) is very expensive and not something low income folks can generally afford for their kids.
Of course, without video games either, kids will find a way to have fun regardless. My grim apartment complex still had kids kicking around a soccer ball or riding bikes in the parking lot.
Video games are the cheapest form of paid entertainment for the amount of time that a single purchase occupies.
Despite their audience being extremely price sensitive (which has nothing to do with socioeconomics, just consumer expectations), all stakeholders recognize this and extract value in other ways.
Just some anec-data. I did not have any consoles growing up simply because we could not afford them. Eventually we got a single very old very slow machine that was shared among the family. I know a few other people in the same situation (usually 1st/2nd generation immigrants). Thus in my mind, video games are luxury products, which are not affordable to low income households.
Maybe you saw it in the text but, "This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommend that videogaming time be limited to one to two hours per day for older children."
The thought process I can sort of imagine is that the tests are fairly costly and the hypothesis they're testing is that more play than the official recommended limit should decidedly give detectable impairments to cognition. (Seems they could have rejected that, if they'd had comparable groups in the first place. Now I'm not sure what it says)
Screen Time Survey
This threshold was selected because it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommends that video-gaming time be limited to 1 to 2 hours per day for older children.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Anecdotally - and providing you use some discretion as to choice of game - I’ve found it absolutely fascinating to watch both the pace of development of problem-solving skills, and some of the frankly astounding leaps of logic and intuition young kids are capable of. I vividly remember one rock-moving puzzle in Breath of the Wild that had me stumped until he piped up with a proposal that turned out to be the correct solution. Fascinating stuff.
Completing shrines so she could get enough stamina to tame the horses.
She has collected all the rare ones now.
- Breath of the Wild - Animal Crossing - Stardew Valley - Minecraft - Super Mario Odyssey - Super Mario 3D World - Rayman Legends - Ratchet & Clank - It Takes Two - Slay the Spire - Journey - Spiderman and Miles Morales
My son’s favourite superhero - far and away - is Spiderman, in large part thanks to the PlayStation games. Pretty great role model. Kids find swinging through the city utterly exhilarating.
It Takes Two was such a fantastic, memorable experience for both of us - he still talks about it months later. It does require quite a lot of a kid, though - better for when they’ve got a year’s experience.
And trying to catch all the insects and fish in Animal Crossing kicked off a passion in him for the real things, to say nothing of what it taught him about animals generally, time and seasonality.
A Nintendo Switch is probably a good place to start, although as he gets older I’m encouraging him to move more over to the PlayStation (partly because it’s so much cheaper over time!).
Switch Joycons are great for small hands, too, although most kids seem to be able to manipulate a full-size controller by age 4-5.
Enjoy!
Ymmv, though, this stuff is highly subjective. If you’re particularly concerned then better just to stick to Nintendo first-party stuff - their whole brand is built around keeping everything wholesome.
While I love Breath of the Wild to the death, its combat is rather difficult and somewhat realistic from the start, which might be a turnoff ("scary monsters keep killing me"). It also has lots of written dialog, which may be challenging for a 4 year old. Definitively this one has to be played with an adult.
Super Mario Odyssey is a much better intro game for a 4-year old. It also has combat (complex combat, with all the "possessed enemy powers"), but it introduces all its mechanics extremely gradually (starts with one-attack button, on a safe environment, and builds up from there). The game works well without paying attention to the dialog at all. The cartoon looks is also more child-friendly. At 6 years old my son can do air tricks with Mario that I struggle to do. It is a jewel of a game.
Animal crossing is fun. I worry a bit about the "materialistic/accumulative" parts of it ("gotta have more stuff!" here's an ice-cream shop stand that does nothing) but the insect and fish collection things are great. Again it will require some reading in order to advance.
I have not played Slay the Spire myself. Isn't that too "brainy" for a 4yo?
Oh I forgot to mention: Picu-nicu is a great "my first platformer" game, definitively recommended.
Or some similar setup where there's no online, no monthly charge, no pay-to-win, and instead the child gets to play a carefully crafted game, hopefully an awesome one.
I also think (offline) minecraft is great at that age.
Of course, a few months ago his "girlfriend" down the street got a Switch...
It's fun because I have fond memories of playing it on the Macintosh Classic II as a kid.
They like making custom levels for each other, just like me and my siblings used to do.
I was also happy to find an ad-free Minesweeper remake on Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Page. [1] They like the maps game from that page as well.
[0] https://loderunnerwebgame.com/game/
[1] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
It’s not like I don’t understand, but it still feels mildly wrong.
The recent puzzle game Railbound is fun, with some very tricky puzzles.
* * *
Instead of video games though, let me highly recommend the physical logic puzzle games by the company SmartGames, most of which are excellent.
Raf Peeters, one of their puzzle designers, has a nice website with some back story about many of them, https://smartgamesandpuzzles.com
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.
though I guess they'll be better trained for when they tackle dark souls...
Some games we recommend (platform we played it on):
Cave Story (PC, was free on Epic)
Shovel Knight, Treasure Trove Edition (PC, Steam)
Castlevania Symphony of the Night (ios, ipad)
Minecraft (ios, ipad)
Once the child is a bit older, the Pajama Sam serie is also great.
As a side note, my son learned this using a fight stick, since "move the stick in that direction to make your character go to that direction" is easier for them to comprehend and associate than using a dpad. Also way easier to hold with hittle hands.
This made intuitive sense to me given that there is some overlap between manipulating objects in a 2D or 3D space and visualizing a math problem whether numeric or geometric.
I find it hard to believe that typical video game puzzles can help increase cognitive performance, but plausible that training spatial recognition might help train the same regions of the brain we use for math.
Even the basic mechanics: teaching math to my kids when they were young was purely a visual exercise of moving groups of things (coins, Cheerios, M&M's) around.
Compare this to watching tiktok?
But seriously, the thing that's interesting is if you could challenge a child's spatial intelligence more in a VR or game universe than in our limited gravity enabled world. Curious indeed.
Can't say it overwhelms my fear of screen time but it's a thing.
leisure/casual gaming is no better than browsing TikTok.
I was in master league when I played Starcraft competitively, so I don't discount the real lessons you can learn from intense focus towards a clear goal, and the acceleration provided by competitive arena.
But there are plenty of people who cheat or buy their way toward "success" in games, because they are chasing the "status" they get from a silly little virtual badge. I know a handful of these folks in real life. They have many other problems, but are very "successful." I know a World of Warcraft Gladiator (rank 1 arena champion for a season) who botted honor at the expense of other players (in-game currency to attain higher quality gear) and in real life juiced his company's image by purchasing online accounts and controlling conversation in forums. I've shared a meal with a current professional gamer who nonchalantly engages in crypto fraud.
Winning is absolutely not everything. Some of the greatest things we can attain in this life will require mass cooperation of humans, and those experiences require dedicated folks with faith in humanity--people who aren't always looking for every crack in the law to screw over their fellow man to get rank 1.
I've seen lots of heartwarming content on TikTok, and left most Counter-Strike and Call of Duty lobbies feeling very dispirited.
Maxis and older Blizzard games were probably the best.
Btw, what does "associated with better outcomes" really mean? It means that in a large sample of lab rats, 10% demonstrated a sudden spike of activity, 40% didn't react and 50% slided into depression. The study gave each outcome a score and found that the average score is slightly positive, so readers are encouraged to think that all the lab rats had this outcome. After the study got completed, those 10% of the rats got suicidal and died within a week, but studying that was outside the scope of the study.
Honestly. My video game experience was instrumental to my success so far in life. This is not surprising to me.
If my childhood had more books and boredom I might have the patience to spend longer in the planning stage and less enthusiasm for the drinking coffee and pounding out a solution stage.
I rarely regret just getting things done. Excessive planning is a much larger issue. I find it's usually better to just do something twice rather than spend too much time thinking about it.
One absolutely fantastic upside for just getting it done is that even if you have to redo it from scratch, you have so much better real-world understanding of the problem space.
I'm inclined to think that this applies to majority of the things we do, but is often brought up regarding building products in the idea that one should build the first prototype quickly, just to be scrapped so the final solution can be built from clean slate, benefiting from all the knowledge the prototype helped us gather.
Most often, in my experience at least, the knowledge one gains from actually doing the thing (even badly) surpasses anything that could have been gained with excessive planning. To actually work, genuine effort including some planning is definitely needed, but I don't think that's too high a bar. At least not when compared to the skills and knowledge one would have needed to achieve the same success with "just" excessive planning up front.
What the books taught me was how to write clearly, if with a somewhat unorthodox style. Turns out that's extremely important for a software engineer.
In the end, we just followed the guide, and it worked exactly as promised. In literally a day we 10x'd our RuneScape gold to well over a million and had basically unlimited funds from running the coal trading arbitrage the guide described for as long as we played the game.
It's hard for me to put this lesson into words exactly - but it's something like if something seems like it should work explore it and find out if it does. But also something like "Don't discount something for being too obvious." This has helped me in my career where it seemed like there were obvious opportunities for something that were in front of me so I just did the obvious thing and wound up getting richly rewarded for it. This kind of idea was on my mind in most of major life decisions too.
One other reason we thought this wouldn't work is that it seemed to us buying in large quantity should get a discount - bulk discount, right? But that wasn't the case. It was cheaper, per unit, to buy hundreds of coal than tens of thousands.
“After all,” he thinks to himself, “if that had really been a $100 bill, someone else would have picked it up already!”
How does this translate to the efficient market hypothesis in general? Not sure, but if I were to dig down into how rational actors handle such situations, I'd expect to discover the math works out over continuous domain, and the joke is a paradox because we tend to think of money in discrete terms.
Do you want to rely on the prior actor framework, or the react to what you see framework? That decision is not rational.
The difference I see between what I wrote above and what you described as not rational choice of a framework is that, per my personal experience, it is possible to reconcile two conflicting seemingly rational frameworks. It just takes time to extend them past their edges until they meet. That is, extend each past the approximation cut-off point.
The efficient market hypothesis always confused me since it seems empirically false. Who is making the trades that make the market efficient in the first place? Plus people (even large groups of them) are often wrong. Startups and the massive value they can create are an example of that.
Markets are a prediction of predictions to some extent and people are far from agents that act only on hard numbers (and they’re often not wrong to do so). Markets are probably the best tool we’ve got for this, but they’re far from perfectly efficient.
In the EMH people do still trade, it's just that only those with new information trade profitably.
In the joke scenario, as a parallel, you just need the economist to model that there's a chance they are the first person to see the bill.
Then you have a game theory game, where your chance of being the first person to see the bill depends on what everyone else thinks their chance was to be the first person, and hence did or didn't pick up the bill.
Then there is some optimal mixed strategy where people try pick up the bill with a certain probability, and it all works out.
On the one hand, we do[0].
On the other, what you're describing is why I don't feel bad about the fact that, 15 years after I had the idea, I've still not learned to use MHD modelling software to experiment with an idea I've had that might make fusors a little more interesting.
[0] ok so they were 12 not 8: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2020/10/middle-sch...
None of this is obtained from genius, but from a father who's experienced in such and most likely an engineer. And I think this is why these sort of tales never have the implied follow through. The unstated implication is '12 year old builds nuclear reactor in toy room' is 'imagine what he'll be doing in 5 years!' And, the answer? Shit posting on Twitter, getting political, and trying to make a AR/VR startup.
Not exactly the Atlas upon which the world can comfortably thrust all of their hopes and expectations upon. And nobody is. Ramanujan [1] was a once in a millennia level of genuine abnormal genius, and he dedicated his entire life to a single pursuit. Yet even that mammoth of a man could but scratch the surface of that which is out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
If they really are asking the unstated question, they don't have good memories of their peers back at age 17.
{I think I was in the middle of my occult/goth/Wicca phase at that age, and now look at me: I use arcane knowledge, get called a wizard, I fly abroad to consort with dragons and werewolves (and other furries) and my familiar's names are Siri and Alexa… ;)}
I credit RuneScape with teaching me to write Java code to write bots to do the work involved with the delayed gratification.
Then eventually created a GP selling business online.
Also led a PvP clan and ran a PHP forum for it.
The RuneScape metagame was where I acquired real-world software development skills.
Gotta credit a good chunk of career success to RuneScape as well.
H3 taught real social skills and teamwork.
Roguelikes produces explorers and risk-takers.
The things I will say it has going for it is that it has an extremely steep learning curve and you have to grind. Though many other games also have these attributes at a sufficiently high level.
The reality is that most people who are very good at video games wouldn't be able to maintain the long-term discipline or focus to run a company, nor be able to handle the responsibility of leading a team.
On the other hand how to inspire people and the importance of operational doctrine has been massively important.
Also spreadsheets..
Also the value of realtime market information.
The best skill in life
I love reading about eve, but I can't imagine ever having enough free time for it
Lots of other great games helped me build my English skills, most of all The Legacy of Kain series.
I remember Final Fantasy 1 on gameboy had a surprisingly open world and I could walk all over the map, and it had random monster encounters. I'd be fighting a lengthy turn based battle about every 20 steps, and it could be way above my level, and I was completely and utterly lost!
I spent so much time on that game. But I never progressed far into the quest. Playing it as an adult I realized one random NPC says there's a hidden cave to the east, and if you never read it's pretty much impossible to find.
Similarly in Pokemon, bumbling through caves in the dark until I go out the other side through sheer luck and grit. Turns out the move Flash just lights up the cave.
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
watching eSports showed me how big difference mentality and attitude makes
But, in my life, I credit sports for everything you said.
With the added benefit of a healthy neurology and biology in general. Something video games - and the digital world, as a whole - have been demonstrated to be detrimental. I mean, by serious studies.
You get individual studies of the impact in terms of say specific reflexes or some aspect of depression for some subset of games, but you would need a comprehensive set of studies for every single context to build a holistic picture which we simply don’t have.
Occasionally it’s enough to find major downsides such as with smoking’s really negative health impacts and say it’s not worth it. But for most things, including video games, there isn’t a single overwhelming downside just some negatives and other positives.
People want a black and white world where they can say “_ is good/bad,” but in the real world meat, carbs, video games etc isn’t that simple they are good and bad at the same time. Many people would be better off by reducing meat and carb consumption but that doesn’t mean a worldwide ban on consuming them is a good idea.
Why not? What's the purpose of saying it's good for cognitive performance if cognitive performance isn't tested seriously?
Try at least two or three dimensions of it. Outside the video gaming context of course.
Otherwise just say: video gaming is good for getting better at video gaming.
That would be an honest conclusion.
Because there are simply far to many variables involved. On one dimension you have type of game, but that variety impacts everything else.
Mario Party and Call of Duty for example may impact peoples emotions differently.
Tetris and StarCraft are both test actions per minute in a different way which may mean different things for reflexes etc.
Hours per week are another dimension, someone spending a few minutes per day playing Wordle is obviously different than someone who only works a part time job to have more time for their MMO addiction.
Finances is another dimension with actual free games being well free but some people spending their life savings on loot boxes in “Free to Play” games.
Degree of socialization is again varies wildly with a surprising number of marriages starting from MMO’s but single player games obvious don’t have that.
Exercise is another with some people getting a real workout playing beat saber and others getting embolisms from sitting to long with their addiction.
Etc etc.
If you are interested in economics, you can learn a lot from it.
In an intersection with behavioral economics, you can even learn a lot of business from observing sports.
It's sad that an injury from a physical exercise can cause a lot of trauma indeed, but I don't think practicing it is inherently bad because of that.
An accident can happen related to anything in life. People die from coconuts or tree branches falling upon their heads. We won't say trees or coconuts are inherently bad because of that.
- AoE for laying the groundwork of my love of history and archeology.
- Skyrim for making me finally learn how to create 3D art, which I still do as profession today.
- All those weird Japanese games that tell you that you don't have to conform to the predefine notion of what should and shouldn't be videogames.
Of course it doesn't replace real learning. It's hilarious when some gaming-addicted argue that 'videogames made me smart! see that research!'
Hell no Bob, smart people out there spend most of their time learning and play videogames just occasionally.
I played games competitively as a kid. I did well cognitively. If I could go back and get the time back I would.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
My wife and I decided our kids won't have video games at home. 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.
"This makes me smart"
I am not sure she is wrong. I played a lot of games as a kid and I probably could have done better things with my time. Not that I got any guidance as to what those better things would have been, but still.
At the same time, it seems like a lot of dads are bonding with their boys by playing games, and I wonder if I am missing out.
I just don't know what to think.
Video games are always good in moderation and there are definitely some great games for kids, exploring with him when searching for a new game will teach you a lot about about why he’s drawn to such and such game and this way you may be able to find other hobbies outside of gaming which are related to his interests.
Come on this is ridiculous! 10 minutes is nothing!.
Maybe 2 or 3 hours, but 10 minutes? It will take him a full year to finish the first part of a game!, and will never allow him to discover games with depth and stories(my favorites), so he is going to play quick mobile games, which IMO are the worst.
> I am not sure she is wrong. I played a lot of games as a kid and I probably could have done better things with my time. Not that I got any guidance as to what those better things would have been, but still.
Games in my experience are a gateway to most of tech, for example my first interaction with networks and servers was when trying to create a Minecraft server to play with my friends.
Like everything, doing it moderation is the best, I think 2 or 3 hours would be fitting(not that I had them personally),
But please make sure there is actually something else for him to do, because otherwise he is going to spend the whole day waiting for these three hours.
> At the same time, it seems like a lot of dads are bonding with their boys by playing games, and I wonder if I am missing out.
Probably, your kid is also missing out on playing with his friends online.
To this day gaming is one of the biggest ways to keep in touch with remote people for me.
But that's just my own opinion.
I honestly laughed at this. This is like limiting movie time to 5 minutes per day.
The way we do it in our house... the kids have an hour of tablet time doing whatever they want. Games, tv shows, movies, whatever. When the hour is up, its up.
Beyond that, we do have a nintendo switch, but that's for family video game time. I don't mind the singular switch/tv we have as much as the tablets, because since we have only 1 it requires 3 kids 7 & under to negotiate with eachother. But if you only have 1 kid that can change the game.
Someday I do plan to get them all desktop PCs. I have friends with similarly aged kids and they have family Minecraft and Valheim servers. Sounds like a lot of fun to me. My nephew recently went to college and he keeps in touch with his high school friends in part via a minecraft server he runs.
I absolutely got addicted to games and I still struggle with functioning in daily life without trying to go back and play 1-2 hours of games each night for the dopamine hit.
More importantly, I missed out on actual real life experiences throughout my childhood all the way till I was 28.
I let me kids play games now, but as long as it doesn't overtake more useful activities (reading, going out, playground, socializing with friends, swimming, biking)