The Positive Effects of Video Games

Ben Griffes ENGL 1202-003 15 October 2013

Lexicon
Action game: Action games are primarily defined as action and response games meaning that you give an direct input, and a the game responds directly back, these games are often overcome by physical means, such and fighting, flying, running and jumping, but involve little to no problem solving. Examples include: Super Mario Bros and God of War Boss: A larger, more powerful and more difficult to defeat enemy than those normally encountered in a game. A typical boss is a singular enemy fought only once, usually at or near the end of a level or stage. FPS (First Person Shooter): A game in which a person plays in the first person view, or seeing what the virtual character sees. These games are centered around the use of an array of guns to achieve the objective. Examples include Call of Duty, Doom, and Counterstrike. Level: A level is an isolated stage in a game, where there are very specific goals that need to be accomplished before the level can be completed. In early games, one level could constitute the entirety of the game, in modern games, a series of levels are often connected, and create what is called a world A level can also refer to the characters power. For example, a player will start at level 1, but as he progresses through the game, gaining experience for completing certain tasks or killing monsters, he will eventually advance to level 2, allowing him to complete more challenging obstacles and progress through the game. Life: Many video games give you multiple chances to succeed. These are commonly referred to as lives, because most of the time failing in a video game results in your character getting killed in the game. Almost always, there is a way to get more lives, either by finding special items or reaching a certain score in the game.

MMORPG: A genre that stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. MMORPGs typically feature hundreds of players living in the same continuous game space for social as well as combat gameplay. Examples include: World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic Puzzle Game: A video game genre that test problem-solving skills logic, strategy, pattern recognition to solve puzzles. Puzzle games can range from the block-puzzle game Tetris to the physics-based puzzle game Portal. RPG (Role-playing Game): The main characteristic is that the player is free to move from place to place in the game environment, interact with other NPCs, solve puzzles, find and collect tools and weapons, keep track of numerous character statistics like Hit Points, Strength and Intelligence, which determine how powerful the character is in combat, in RPGs combat can range from real time combat like in an action game, to turned based combat. Popular RPGs include the Mass Effect Series and the Elder Scrolls Series. Strategy Game: These games are entirely based on the decisions you make, you have little to no control on the actual outcome of battles or other objectives. These games are similar to playing god. Popular strategy games are Starcraft, The Total War series, and Sid Meyers Civilizations Series. Third Person Shooter: Not commonly used, but this is a shooter game, much like a FPS, but the primary view is the third person, also referred to as the over the shoulder view. Mass Effect is the most popular Third Person Shooter.

Background
Video games often get a bad rap. Everyone thinks that they will rot your brain, make you go blind, turn you into a mass murderer, and are just a general waste of time. Well what if I was to tell you that everybody is dead wrong. Being a gamer myself this is something I come across all the time, mostly from those outside the gaming community about how much of a waste of time it is. Recent studies all across the country are proving that video games in reasonable doses are not only, not bad for us, but they can be extremely good for us, and make us happier more effective adults. Thats right, adults, video games are not just for kids. The focus of my paper is to show very specific results from scientific research to show non gamers, that games could be incredibly beneficial to themselves and society as a whole.

Literature Review
In gathering information on this topic, I will be drawing upon my own knowledge and experiences with games. The research I found was split into two main categories, the skills and physical benefits of video games, and the application and effects in the real world. Figuring out how video games affect us and the skills that we build and enhance by playing video games is a very important aspect, and something that is very widely researched. Daphne Bavelier who is a neuro scientist from Geneva Switzerland, whose main focus is the study of video games on the brain. James Paul Gee, a well renowned academic and author, also discusses how video games

teach us life skills, and which ones they usually convey. Luke Reilly of IGN.com also discusses a list of skills video games help us develop. Jane McGonigal, who has a PhD in Performance Studies from University of California at Berkley, and is a groundbreaking game designer. She is the director of the Institute of the Future, which is trying to develop games and harness gamers to solve real world problems like the energy crisis, pollution and other things. Paul Adachi in this article presents the argument that video games are very good for students. The article by mda.gov talks about how the US military is using video games to help train officers. James Paul Gee also discusses how video games help students by given them experience with the topic they study. Snoddgrass does extensive research on how playing World of Warcraft, can be both beneficial and detrimental to us. But he focuses on the impact it has on us socially, and the difference between playing with real life friends, and just playing with people we do not know offline.

Entering the Conversation

So how do video games actually benefit us from a mental and physical standpoint? First it is important to understand that video games are not just for children, in fact the average age of a gamer is 33 years old! I believe that video games are good for our brains, just as good as books are in fact. Dr Bavelier comes to the same conclusion that, video games help our brains become smarter better and stronger. 1 Video games are pervasive throughout our society; everyone plays video games now, especially with the explosion of smart phones and tablets in the past 5 years. Bevelier presents an interesting statistic. Activision, the creator of Call of Duty Black Ops, reported that one month after release that the game had been collectively played for over 68,000

Bavelier, Daphne Your Brain on Video Games

years, worldwide.2 In reasonable doses, because binging is never good, action packed shooter games have powerful beneficial effects. For example video games are proven to in fact make your eyesight better. Not just your eyesight but you depth perception as well, which could be used to help people with a lazy eye3. The average eyesight of a non-gamer is corrected to normal or 20-20. They average eyesight of someone who plays 15 hours of video games per week, is 20-104. Gamers can resolve small detail in the context of clutter, such as reading fine print, or resolving different levels of gray, such as determining different levels of fog. One common misconception is that games lead to attention problems and greater distractibility, this is false. It can improve our attention levels and our ability to focus, this can be tested by the word color game, where a word of a color will appear, such as yellow, but the ink color, will be red, and the conflict to resolve is saying the color of the ink, not the actual word. Gamers have better spatial awareness, meaning that they can track the objects around them better, than non-gamers. Like in driving, you have to be aware of everything around you, gamers can keep track of the dog in the yard, the lady pushing a stroller, and the kid on his bike, as well as the car in front of you and that the light just turned yellow, better than non-gamers. Brain imaging is used to look at the impact of video games on the brain. The main changes are to the brain networks that control attention. There are three main parts of the brain that control attention, first is the parietal cortex, which controls the orientation of attention, the frontal lobe which controls how sustain attention, the other is the anterior cingulate, which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve

2
3

Ibid

Reilly, Luke. IGN 4 Bavelier, Daphne Your Brain on Video Games

conflict. When brain imaging is done on players of action video games, it is clear that the networks in these parts of the brain are much stronger than of those in non-gamers5. Another study was done to see how well people multitask which is really just shifting your attention from one thing to another. Gamers have a substantially better reaction time, and can completely switch focus and attention very swiftly. This group was put up against a more revered group in society the multimedia-tasking group. These are those who are listing to music, surfing the web, doing homework and chatting on Facebook all at the same time. This group performed abysmally at multitasking. With this point it is important to state that not all multimedia or even video games are created equally. Different video games have different effects on the brain. A study was done on the effect of action video games on non-gamers, as to replicate the results of an educational or rehabilitation application. They were asked to do mental rotation problems, and they performed much better after playing 10 hours of video games over a two week period, and were then tested again after 5 months, and they scored very similarly. Coming to the conclusion that video games can have positive long lasting results. The article on MDA.gov provides a very concise list of the potential benefits of video games, especially in regards to children. Advantages of Video Games: Offer the potential to foster creativity; Provide a fun and social form of entertainment; Make kids feel comfortable with technology; Increase children' s self-confidence and self-esteem as they master games; Develop skills in reading, math and problem-solving; Promote pro-social behaviors, such as helping and caring; Teach eye-hand coordination and visual spatial ability; An important medium for
5

Ibid

self-directed learning, health promotion and disease management; Facilitate language development in autistic children and Provide play therapy for inhibited children. 6

All of these are very common and important skills that video games teach, and they often happen in an almost unintentional way. James Paul Gee discusses how games, although not usually created to be educational in nature, are in fact very educational. They cause us to think, to plan out, to fail and to re-think and re-work the problems presented to us. Gee outlines the life skills that good games should relate to us and help us learn. He talks about how games help us learn outside of school, and help us perform better. How could video games be implemented better in the academic community, and how would that effect the performance of students?

Gee talks about his first real experience with video games and how it opened his mind and expanded his perspective about the possibilities that video games could have, Gee talks about wanting to support his son in his first video game. In Pajama Sam as the game is called, you are confronted with several problems and tasks. Gee says that when he was first playing the game he found it very challenging and complex, because it forced him the think in ways he had never had to before in his life. He was learning to use parts of his brain that he was unaccustomed to using. So if Gee, who is a Ph.D. can struggle and learn and grow from playing a video game targeting children, how much we can all learn from the more advanced video games.

One of the reasons video games make such great teachers and help us learn so well, is because they are challenging and engaging, if they werent people wouldnt buy them. If they

Author unknown. Video Games and their effects on Children

werent doable and learnable they wouldnt be very popular either. We as human beings actually do enjoy learning, it is in our nature to learn, we as a society have just gone about learning the wrong way, or have evolved out of our current system of education. Another reason that video games are so effective at helping us learn, is that they are interactive, we dont just learn the facts to pass the test, we apply the principles and put them into use, and in doing so not only learn the what, but also the how. We dont just learn the answers to the biology test, we can actually do biology and get a full comprehension of what the subject matter is. Gee outlines 16 learning principles that games incorporate. While I will not go into depth about each of these here, Gee provides very clear definitions for each of these terms in his article, we can deduce from the names of some of these how games could teach us these skills better than other ways. Identity, is the process of becoming attached to the virtual world, you feel like you and the characters you control have a bond, you are assuming a new identity. Interaction, this is one of the major advantages that video games have over almost all other forms of entertainment, they talk back. Books and television are passive, what is going to happen is already planned out, and there is nothing we can do to change that. Video games however are the exact opposite, nothing happens unless we initiate it, we determine what happens and when it happens, and the video game will respond and give us feedback and new problems in accordance to what we have done. Production, players in these virtual world, help create, or write and produce if you will, these worlds, they are actively involved in changing the environment around them. Risk Taking, this is a skill that is often under-utilized in the academic setting, we teach kids to be risk averse at a young age so that when it comes time in life to make big decisions that involve risk, they dont know how. Video games help us learn to take risks, to evaluate the situation at hand and try to determine the best course of action. Video games allow us to battle epic bosses that are very

challenging, often resulting in taking risks and failing. But video games also allow us to restart from certain points and try again. Customization, can take on many forms, depending on the kind of game you are playing. Customization is purely adapting the game to fit you. Whether that be by changing the difficulty level, or changing the key bindings, or in a RPG, playing a mage or a warrior. The other great thing about video games is that you are never stuck. If you need further adaptation you can always customize the game to suit your needs. Agency, the players are free to act for themselves, because of the principles stated about, the gamers feel like this is their unique game, and they are in absolute control of that virtual world. Well-order problems, this principle deals with the concept of levels. Players are often asked to create solutions to various tasks and challenges in the game. A well-order problem, will take that solution at level 1 for example, and build on it in level 2, and 3 and so on. It allows for the creation of a hypothesis, and the implementation of that hypothesis at later and harder stages. Challenge and consolidation, this is the concept is tied to the previous one, it is the concept of doing a task over and over, until it is mastered and second nature. Then a new challenge is presented, usually in the form of a boss, that requires the player with his taken for granted mastery, and adapt it to something new, to fit this new challenge.Just in Time or On Demand information, this is the concept of giving players information to advance only at the time they need it, not before, this comes in the form of on screen tooltips or pop ups, could be character interaction. In general this is the exact opposite to how a textbook functions, where all the information on that subject is ever present, and dealing with all that information out of context is impossible for most people. Situated Meaning, this is about learning in context, when you are given a word, and presented with an experience and a situation that involves that word. Pleasant Frustration, this is the concept of pushing your limits, going to the edge of your expertise and competence, and then taking one more step.

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Games often make you fail over and over again, before you are able to succeed. System Thinking, this principle explores the idea of future minded decision making. Good video games often force the players to think, If I do this, how might it impact me later in the game. Lateral Thinking, Explore options, Rethink goals, society teaches us to set a goal, and to move as quickly and directly to that goal as possible. Video games on the other hand want us to think laterally, not just linearly. This involves exploration, and this exploration will lead to newly discovered facts and information, which can cause us to rethink and re-evaluate our goals given the new information. Smart Tools and Distributed Knowledge, the characters we control in video games, often have sets of skills, that we do not have, such as the ability to cast spells, or line up in certain battle formations, these are referred to as smart tools, or skills that we do not possess, but have access to. But the player must know and understand how to utilize these skills in order to be successful, this is distributed knowledge. Cross Functional Teams, cross function teams are the idea of understanding what other members of the team bring to the table, what are their skills, strengths and weaknesses. This concept is especially relevant in MMORPG when working with others is something that must be done in order to be successful. Knowing the specialties of all the different members of the group, as well as your own is vital to success, because then you can coordinate your skills in order to optimize abilities. Performances before competence, video games, by design are the opposite of the way society functions. Video games allow you to perform certain skills and tasks, before you become proficient and skilled at it, similar to language acquisition. Society often demands learning through reading and other tasks, before they are allowed to perform a skill.

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Video games work just like books to help us learn. They have the same literacy qualities as other things. When we play video games socially, there is much more going on than just the game. We learn how to use cross functional teams. Every member of the team is an expert in their field, but has to be able to understand the other skill sets in the team just as well as your own. World of Warcraft is a great example of this. Games are only half the picture. Affinity space where the game creates the interest, and then the player goes out into the internet and researches and delves into the topic. Portal uses physics, and there is a certain set of physical laws, which are based on our own laws of physics, and there is a whole wiki based on describing and understanding these laws of physics. Therefore games can provide us with an opportunity to learn, they give us real experience with life things. He says that a kid, who plays Portal for hours and hours, is more likely to succeed in physics, than a kid who has never played Portal, given that there are no other variables. Its like reading the manual before you play the game, it makes no sense at all, but once you play the game, it manual makes sense, you have lived in that world, been given images and experiences that you can associate with the words in the text, unlike before, they were just technical terms that had no real meaning. Gee states as his closing argument in one of his lectures that if you brought the activities the problem solving, the living in the world of chemistry and algebra making kids want to do things with them. To see them as tools to surmise to possibilities, thats the game. If we brought those to school, they would like is as much as Portal.7

So all of this talk of learning and how video games can help us learn better brings us to our next topic of conversation, how do video games apply to the real world. Talk is great but, do they actually have real life applications and effects? In the study conducted by Paul Adachi he
7

Gee, J.P.. "James Paul Gee on Learning with Video Games

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concludes that students who played strategic video games across many years of high school reported higher increases in self- reported problem solving skills over time compared to participants who reported less sustained play.8 While he later concludes that there is an indirect relationship between these findings and academic grades, he states that the likelihood of the events being correlated in some way is high.

The Army of the United States of America has even begun to harness the power of learning through video games. Both Singapore and the US army modified available video games to hone the strategic and decision-making skills of officers. The US army version was also released into the mass market. Americas Army is a game designed by the U.S. Army mainly as a recruiting tool, but has developed itself into a training tool as well, because of the accuracy and design of the game; the gamers can be put inside realistic simulations that are developed to be as real as possible. Inside such a simulation, soldiers can train on foot or in mock-ups of vehicles and aircraft. They wear vests with audio systems embedded in them that send out signals to the simulations location system, enabling a virtual player to interact with the live player and vice versa. 9

Video games are all about solving problems in the environment we are in. How can we spend that time solving the worlds problems? We spend 3 million hours a week worldwide playing video games. World of Warcraft, has been played for a collective 5.93 million years from 2002 to 2010. To put that into perspective, the first known upright human being was, about
8

Adachi, Paul "More Than Just Fun and Game: The Longitudinal Relationships Between Strategic Video Games, Self-Reported Problem Solving Skills, and Academic Grades.
9

Author unknown. Video Games and their effects on Children

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6 million years ago. By the age of 21 the average person plays 10,000 hours of video games, the same amount of time spent in school from the 5th grade to high school graduation. Malcolm Gladwell, a distinguished author, wrote that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of meaningful involved study to become a virtuoso at something. That means the world is running around with video game virtuosos. But what exactly are gamers getting good at? McGonigal suggests four main ideas. Urgent optimism, which is extreme self-motivation, the desire to act immediately combined with the thought that we have a reasonable hope of success. Social Fabric, gamers are becoming virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric. Its the idea of friends who play together stay together. Gamers are more adept at building trusting relationships with people, especially other gamers, than non-gamers. Blissful Productivity, in games we are actually happier working hard, then we are just relaxing or doing nothing. Epic meaning, the realization that you are vital and important, its why most video games take place on a human planetary scale, such as saving the world from an alien invasion, or saving the galaxy, and you are the main protagonist. World of Warcraft is an environment where you are constantly on the verge of an epic win which is a success, where you thought no success was possible. You are also given constant feedback of leveling up or getting +1 strength or +1 intelligence. We dont get that in real life, we dont go to class and then walk out and see that we got +5 intelligence for that day, or finish a semester and level up. Thats why we often find ourselves getting so enthralled in these virtual environments, its so satisfying that it can become better than real life. We often find ourselves being better online than in real life. We feel we can achieve more in games than in real life. Games are an escape from the real world, from real world problems and suffering. So what does all of this mean? How is any of this positive? Well right now its all just potential, untapped potential. McGonigal has created games, which force

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users to solve the hypothetical problems of the future, such as oil shortages, pollution, and other things that could threaten our planet in the future. She is adamant that if we work towards tapping the potential of these virtuosos, that we can solve the worlds problems in the future.

Conclusion
So does this mean that we are supposed to burn every textbook in school and throw away all our medicine and never visit the eye doctor again, and just play video games instead? Of course not, video games can supplement and enhance to the systems we already have in place. Nothing is more important than real life physical an interaction with other people, going outside is always a good idea. Sick? Go to the doctor! But playing video games wont turn you into a psycho mass murderer or a fat lazy slob either. In proper dosages is well documented and reasonable that they are very good for your brain, and social well-being. I discussed the impact and effect that video games have in an academic setting, but how would playing video games effect performance in a workplace environment? Many of the skills that video games help develop are helpful in an academic setting, but do they translate into the real world, such as the workplace?

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Bibliography Adachi, Paul. "More Than Just Fun and Game: The Longitudinal Relationships Between Strategic Video Games, Self-Reported Problem Solving Skills, and Academic Adolescence . no. 10 (2013).

Grades." Journal of Youth and

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235367249_More_Than_Just_Fun_and_ Games_The_ Longitudinal_Relationships_Between_Strategic_Video_Games_SelfReported_Problem_Solving_Skills_and_Academic_Grades (accessed October 3, 2013) Author unknown. Video Games and their effects on Children http://www.mda.gov.sg/Documents/PDF/mobj.579.parents_vid-effects.pdf Bavelier, Daphne Your Brain on Video Games (Presentation, TED Talks, Filmed June 2012) http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_bavelier_your_brain_on_video_games.html Gee, J.P Good Video Games and Good Learning Academic Lab. 3 October 2013 http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/Good_Learning.pdf Gee, J.P.. "James Paul Gee on Learning with Video Games" Recorded March 21 2012. Youtube. Web http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnEN2Sm4IIQ

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Grace, Jean. " Game Branches Out Into Real Combat Training." National Defense Magazine. Feburary 2006. http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2006/February/Pages/games_brance304 2.aspx (accessed October 15, 2013). Griffes, Benjamin. "Assignment One Observation Notes." Accessed October 3, 2013. https://moodle2.uncc.edu/mod/assignment/view.php?id=127442. Mcgonigal, Jane. "TEDtalks conversation " Recorded 02 2010. TED talks 03 2010. Web, http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html Reilly, Luke. IGN, "5 Reasons Video Games Are Actually Good for You But video games are addictive, make kids fat and turn us all into trained killers, right?." Last modified 09 October 3, 2013. http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/10/5-

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