This controversy got me thinking: Why do games exist? Why do we play at all? Well, the obvious evolutionary/biological answer is that "play" is a way to train our youngsters in how to do things necessary for their survival. To evaluate the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the games children currently play, then, we'd need to assess how useful they are for learning useful skills.
I started considering a wide variety of games, and surprisingly found that a good chunk of them actually could be seen as teaching something worthwhile. A few examples:
- High paced video games (any of them, really): These develop dexterity, reaction times, and hand-eye-coordination. Seems pretty stupid, right? Wrong. My sister (a physician) has noticed that younger surgeons are much better at dealing with laproscopic surgery than older ones, as they already have learnt the skill of looking at a screen while your hands control what is occuring on the screen. Plenty of other examples where that came from.
- Minesweeper: Develops mousing skills, and extremely precise control over the hands (useful for any number of applications, again).
- Card Games (example: Set): Develops pattern recognition skills.
- RTS and simulation games: Strategy, long-term planning, resource management, balancing a variety of factors, ranking objectives, etc.
I could go on indefinitely about this, but I won't go into all of the details. Point being, modern games have the same purpose that olders ones had: masking the teaching of useful skills with a fun activity.
No, it wasn't profound. Deal with it.
2 comments:
It makes sense that games should help develop a lot of skills, but the proof is in the pudding, and it's not happening. I expected the first (or ANY) generation of arcade computer game players to have better driving reflexes and cause a big drop in accidents. Noone has noticed such a trend.
There's evidence that playing aggressive video games makes people more aggressive.
You don't have to play a game for 100 hours to develop mousing skills.
In fact a big issue is: what are you NOT doing while playing computer games? In moderation, they simply form a part of life. When relativley young children are playing games instead of being physically active with their whole bodies, socializing more, and learning how to cope with more realistic types of frustration, and not reading, games may be more bad than good.
(It's not just computer games mind you; I spent MUCH too much of my youth playing chess, and short-shrifting myself on all those good things I listed above.)
- The Precision Blogger
http://precision-blogging.blogspot.com
Well, anything not done in moderation can be bad, games included. Obviously, kids need to have a variety of methods of stimulation/learning/etc. I certainly don't advocate that we suddenly let kids play all the games they want, when they want - nor do I think that all games are appropriate for children, particularly younger ones.
That still doesn't mean that games should be portrayed as rotting away the minds of our youth. In moderation, these games can develop a number of worthwhile skills, and widely varied ones at that.
For example, you were mentioning that mousing skills are only important for a short learning period. I'll grant that, but most well-designed computer games have levels of complexity. Minesweeper, in the example given, can have pose some interesting mathematical and pattern-related problems. Essentially, one figures out certain number groupings that always lead to a certain pattern of mines, logically, and one gets good at recognizing those patterns. There are certain pseudo-algorithms one can use to determine the most efficient way to mark the mines and uncover new numbers (ie, with the greatest likelihood of finishing quickly and not hitting dead ends). And Minesweeper is a simple game.
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