Video Games Play May Provide Learning, Health, Social Benefits, Review Finds (http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2013/11/video-games.aspx) WASHINGTON — Playing video games, including violent shooter games, may boost children’s learning, health and social skills, according to a review of research on the positive effects of video game play to be published by the American Psychological Association. The study comes out as debate continues among psychologists and other health professionals regarding the effects of violent media on youth. An APA task force is conducting a comprehensive review of research on violence in video games and interactive media and will release its findings in 2014. “Important research has already been conducted for decades on the negative effects of gaming, including addiction, depression and aggression, and we are certainly not suggesting that this should be ignored,” said lead author Isabela Granic, PhD, of Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands. “However, to understand the impact of video games on children’s and adolescents’ development, a more balanced perspective is needed.” The article will be published in APA’s flagship journal, American Psychologist. While one widely held view maintains playing video games is intellectually lazy, such play actually may strengthen a range of cognitive skills such as spatial navigation, reasoning, memory and perception, according to several studies reviewed in the article. This is particularly true for shooter video games that are often violent, the authors said. A 2013 meta-analysis found that playing shooter video games improved a player’s capacity to think about objects in three dimensions, just as well as academic courses to enhance these same skills, according to the study. “This has critical implications for education and career development, as previous research has established the power of spatial skills for achievement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” Granic said. This enhanced thinking was not found with playing other types of video games, such as puzzles or role-playing games. Playing video games may also help children develop problem-solving skills, the authors said. The more adolescents reported playing strategic video games, such as roleplaying games, the more they improved in problem solving and school grades the following year, according to a long-term study published in 2013. Children’s creativity was also enhanced by playing any kind of video game, including violent games, but not when the children used other forms of technology, such as a computer or cell phone, other research revealed. Simple games that are easy to access and can be played quickly, such as “Angry Birds,” can improve players’ moods, promote relaxation and ward off anxiety, the study said. “If playing video games simply makes people happier, this seems to be a fundamental emotional benefit to consider,” said Granic. The authors also highlighted the possibility that video games are effective tools to learn resilience in the face of failure. By learning to cope with ongoing failures in games, the authors suggest that children build emotional resilience they can rely upon in their everyday lives. Another stereotype the research challenges is the socially isolated gamer. More than 70 percent of gamers play with a friend and millions of people worldwide participate in massive virtual worlds through video games such as “Farmville” and “World of Warcraft,” the article noted. Multiplayer games become virtual social communities, where decisions need to be made quickly about whom to trust or reject and how to lead a group, the authors said. People who play video games, even if they are violent, that encourage cooperation are more likely to be helpful to others while gaming than those who play the same games competitively, a 2011 study found. The article emphasized that educators are currently redesigning classroom experiences, integrating video games that can shift the way the next generation of teachers and students approach learning. Likewise, physicians have begun to use video games to motivate patients to improve their health, the authors said. In the video game “Re-Mission,” child cancer patients can control a tiny robot that shoots cancer cells, overcomes bacterial infections and manages nausea and other barriers to adhering to treatments. A 2008 international study in 34 medical centers found significantly greater adherence to treatment and cancer-related knowledge among children who played “ReMission” compared to children who played a different computer game. “It is this same kind of transformation, based on the foundational principle of play, that we suggest has the potential to transform the field of mental health,” Granic said. “This is especially true because engaging children and youth is one of the most challenging tasks clinicians face.” The authors recommended that teams of psychologists, clinicians and game designers work together to develop approaches to mental health care that integrate video game playing with traditional therapy. Article: “The Benefits of Playing Video Games,” Isabela Granic, PhD, Adam Lobel, PhD, and Rutger C.M.E. Engels, PhD, Radboud University Nijmegen; Nijmegen, The Netherlands; American Psychologist, Vol. 69, No. 1. Isabela Granic can be contacted by email , cell: 011.31.6.19.50.00.99 or work: 011.31.24.361.2142 The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes more than 134,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives. Mar. 02 2016 Time Spent Playing Video Games May Have Positive Effects on Young Children (https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/time-spent-playing-video-games-may-havepositive-effects-young-children Video games are a favorite activity of children, yet its affect on their health is often perceived to be negative. A study by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and colleagues at Paris Descartes University assessed the association between the amount of time spent playing video games and children’s mental health and cognitive and social skills, and found that playing video games may have positive effects on young children. Results are published online in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. After adjusting for child age, gender, and number of children, the researchers found that high video game usage was associated with a 1.75 times the odds of high intellectual functioning and 1.88 times the odds of high overall school competence. There were no significant associations with any child self-reported or mother- or teacher-reported mental health problems. The researchers also found that more video game playing was associated with less relationship problems with their peers. Based on parent reporting, one in five children played video games more than 5 hours per week. Results were based on data from the School Children Mental Health Europe project for children ages 6-11. Parents and teachers assessed their child’s mental health in a questionnaire and the children themselves responded to questions through an interactive tool. Teachers evaluated academic success. Factors associated with time spent playing video games included being a boy, being older, and belonging to a medium size family. Having a less educated or single mother decreased time spent playing video games. “Video game playing is often a collaborative leisure time activity for school-aged children. These results indicate that children who frequently play video games may be socially cohesive with peers and integrated into the school community. We caution against over interpretation, however, as setting limits on screen usage remains and important component of parental responsibility as an overall strategy for student success," said Katherine M. Keyes, PhD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. Benefits of Gaming: What Research Shows (https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/06/13/benefits-of-gaming-what-research-shows/) Games and learning advocates often come up against the video game stigma. Despite the fact that we’ve now seen decades of game play, and that a generation of gamers has grown up without a civilization collapsing, the bad reputation persists — and it’s mostly based around fear. News stories abound: games make kids hyper, violent, stupid, anti-social. It’s not only that people are generally wary of the unfamiliar, we also live in a culture of heroism and progress that casts every innovation as a revolution. Rather than celebrating modification and iteration, we divide the world into what’s cutting-edge and what’s obsolete. We’re always afraid that the new school will completely displace an old school that we’re not quite ready to abandon. But the introduction of video games in the classroom does not need to mean the end of books. Blended learning will not necessarily replace the lecture. Games, however, can supplement time-tested pedagogical practices with new technological solutions to longterm problems. We can have the best of both the new and the old. Other posts in this series have already discussed the way games can help educators answer the ongoing assessment question, the way games can help develop kid’s metacognitive skills and empathy, and the way they can help to break down the boundaries between academic subjects. Still, not everyone’s convinced. Recently, researchers have begun to look at the positive impact of games both in a general way and for learning in particular. The data is still sparse, but there are already some important takeaways. Here, I’ll summarize some of the general research on the positive impact of gameplay. In a future post, I’ll look at the research specific to games in school, education, and learning. The recent APA (American Psychological Association) article entitled, “The Benefits of Playing Video Games” by authors Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C. M. E. Engels surveyed the landscape of video games. They identified four types of positive impact that video games have on the kids who play them: cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social. Gameplay has cognitive benefit because games have been shown to improve attention, focus, and reaction time. Games have motivational benefit because they encourage an incremental, rather than an entitytheory of intelligence. Games have emotional benefit because they induce positive mood states; in addition, there is speculative evidence that games may help kids develop adaptive emotion regulation. Games have social benefit because gamers are able to translate the prosocial skills that they learn from co-playing or multiplayer gameplay to “peer and family relations outside the gaming environment.” Thinking about cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social skills reminds us that educators are not just responsible for the transmission of content and facts. Of course, this is one of the reasons that there is so much controversy over testing. Standardized tests measure only quantifiable outcomes. Educators, however, are also responsible for the non-quantifiable well-being of our students. Some of these skills are taken into account in some schools when folks talk about “character education.” But mostly, there is little curricular systematization in these areas. Still, teachers are accountable for conflict resolution and other interpersonal skills. Video games can help. A survey done in Ireland, Online Gaming and Youth Cultural Perceptions by Killian Forde and Catherine Kenny, suggests that kids who play multi-player games online are more likely to have a positive attitude toward people from another country: 62 percent of online gamers hold a favorable view of people from different cultures compared to 50 percent of non-gamers. Unlike school, where the diversity of the institution is rarely reflected by individuals’ peer groups, interactive online gaming correlates with a more diverse group of friends. Might the same principle be applied to the classroom? Could multi-player learning games help eliminate bullying and build camaraderie among classmates? Studies like these are generally held at face value, but critics of games are quick to point out that the violent ones are morally reprehensible. Though I’m not a fan of violent video games, studies have shown that there are even positive benefits from playing these types of games. One study, published in Nature, showed that playing fast-paced “action based” video games improves “attentional processing” and also “induces long-lasting improvements in contrast sensitivity, a basic visual function that commonly deteriorates with age.” Of course, the violent narrative content is not likely responsible for these benefits. It seems more likely that it has something to do with the fast pace which demands quick reflexes. The most convincing neurological research shows that video games contribute to neural plasticity because games provide “a multitude of complex motor and cognitive demands.” In this study, players played platformers such as Super Mario Brothers for at least 30 minutes a day for 2 months. They showed “significant gray matter (GM) increase in right hippocampal formation (HC), right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and bilateral cerebellum.” These are the areas of the brain “crucial for spatial navigation, strategic planning, working memory and motor performance.” DIFFERENT GAMES FOR DIFFERENT GOALS But it’s a little disingenuous to say that games are “good for kids.” Games are not like vegetables. Don’t imagine them as if they were packed with vitamins and nutrients that help kids grow into healthy adults. Like all forms of media, it depends on the particular games and how they are used. “One can no more say what the effects of video games are, than one can say what the effects of food are. There are millions of individual games, hundreds of distinct genres and sub-genres, and they can be played on computers, consoles, hand-held devices and cell phones. Simply put, if one wants to know what the effects of video games are, the devil is in the details.” Say Daphne Bavelier & C. Shawn Green, in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The details include, among other things, the narrative content: the story of the game. Games with very similar mechanics could have drastically different stories. For example, replace PacMan and the Space-Ghosts with Theseus and the Minotaur and it is a very different game. I can imagine a game called Steve the Fracker that might look very similar to Minecraft, but the implications are altogether different. Understanding how shifting the narrative can change the game gives developers a clue about how they might build learning games and also helps teachers imagine how they might use existing commercial games to reinforce learning outcomes. Imagine if we could build learning games that provided the same kinds of complex motor and cognitive demands as fast paced action games while featuring narrative content that was curricularly relevant. Games all feature stories laid atop interactive mechanics. One approach to learning games might be to build narratives that reinforce educational content while employing the same familiar game mechanics. Teachers could also have students imagine how existing commercial game narratives might be retold to be relevant to class content. The studies summarized here identify some of the ways that games, considered in a general way, can have positive impact on the people that play them. To get the most out of games, however, the facilitation and mentoring that adults can provide children is absolutely essential. Teachers should design curriculum that not only uses game-based instruction, but also makes kids aware of the way games are designed. Parents should play games with their kids at home.
