The Benefits of Video Games
Picture a gamer. Perhaps it's a teenaged boy, locked away in his room, pouring hours into an online fantasy game or plowing down enemies in a first-person shooter. Perhaps it's a grown man in his parent’s basement, wasting away in front of an online role-player. Perhaps it’s a young woman putting off her homework to explore an open-world adventure. Several versions of the gamer stereotype may come to one’s mind, however, they all have some traits in common. Gamers are often seen as lazy, unproductive, anti-social, and even violent individuals who could easily be doing something better with their lives. Video games are often seen as, at best, entertainment and, at worst, teachers of violence and absolute wastes of time. However, many of these stereotypes and views are negated by real-life evidence. When considering the true effects of video games on players, one must lay aside stereotypes to get a glimpse at what scientists and psychologists have discovered about the benefits of video game play. In stark contrast to video games being a waste of time and only having ill effects, video games can be beneficial by being effective teaching tools, sharpening cognitive skills, and enhancing social abilities.
To begin, video games have proven themselves to be effective teaching tools through their use of already well-known techniques in educational psychology. Firstly, games use effective reinforcement strategies to encourage players to keep playing. Random intervals of positive reinforcement for wanted behavior has been proven to be the most effective way to encourage participants to continue a task. When one believes that any next action they do could result in a reward, the participant is far more likely to want to continue. In the American Journal of Play, Eichenbaum, Bavelier, Green elaborate: “Many video games enhance this effect by layering multiple reward schedules. Therefore, even if one reward is far away, another is almost certainly approaching (e.g., I may need to find one hundred more gold coins to buy the new suit of armor, but I am only two animal furs away from being able to trade for the new sword)” (52). Players want to continue playing so that they can obtain one reward that leads to another that leads to another. This motivation to continue makes games effective learning tools as the more time spent playing, the more that the player is learning the skills and information the games want them to. As many teachers know, one cannot teach a student that is not willing to sit down and be taught. Secondly, video games make use of the learning principle of variability of training. This principle allows for the skills learned in video games to be more applicable to real-world situations. As Eichenbaum, Bavelier, Green continues on to say, “Techniques like these ensure that gamers learn, but it is the last learning principle—variability of training—that allows these players to apply the skills they have learned in more general contexts” (53). Gamers must learn how to apply the skills they have learned in-game to several different contexts. Games requiring players to not just know how to drive a virtual car, but drive different kinds of cars on different tracks in different settings. This forces players to never mindlessly play. Players must be continuously learning and adapting to new challenges, allowing for the information taught to be retained.
Furthermore, video games are teaching tools that can be used to teach players useful information they may not have retained otherwise. Even games not designated as “educational”, often require the player to learn information, tactics, or movements in order to succeed. Whether one is playing a mystery game that requires them to become familiar with another language or a first-person shooter that requires some tactical strategy, games often require some sort of learning by the player. Players may even be learning information that they would not have retained if taught in a class setting. In the article “Your Brain on Video Games”, Gary Panter discusses playing Sim City 2000, a city development game, with his 7-year-old nephew,
“At one point, I showed him a block of rusted, crime-ridden factories that lay abandoned and explained that I’d had difficulty getting this part of my city to come back to life. He turned to me and said, “I think you need to lower your industrial tax rates.” He said it as calmly and as confidently as if he were saying, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.” (3)
The intricacies of how tax rates would impact urban development is not something the average 7-year-old is familiar with, let alone interested in learning. However, when Sim City 2000 made learning urban development related to him succeeding at a fun, engaging game, he was willing to learn without even realizing it. In contrast, Gary Panter goes on to say, “Of course, if you sat my 7-year-old nephew down in an urban studies classroom, he would be asleep in 10 seconds” (3). Video games offer educators and parents a new way to educate students effectively. Different game genres teach different things, but there is certainly potential for video games to be used as engaging, effective educational tools.
Beyond education, playing video games has been linked to improvements in several cognitive skills. Several studies have been done to show how games, particularly action games, impact cognition by comparing participants scores in tasks that test skills such as attention allocation, memory, and focus. In these studies, a sample of people who had not played video games prior is split into a group which plays action games for a certain amount of time and a group which plays a non-action game. Action games, such as shooter games such as Call of Duty or Halo, are used as they often require more skill and attention to detail than many non-action games do. The participants perform a test before the trial begins, after their several weeks of gaming experience are over, and finally, a day or two after they have stopped gaming daily to see if the effects are long-lasting.
In the American Journal of Play’s report on video games, Eichenbaum, Bavelier, and Green discuss the various experiments performed that proved how video games improve several cognitive abilities. These tests include having to identify a certain object amongst a cluttered image, the ability to focus on task-related information across time, to pay attention to minute details, and having to visually track multiple moving objects. In all of these tasks and more, game training significantly improved the scores and abilities of participants. In some cases, the scores of children who had played action games were higher than adults who had not. As Eichenbaum, Bavelier, and Green go on to say, “One genre of video games in particular, the action video games—which involve lots of fast motion, many items to keep track of simultaneously, and a need to attend to peripheral vision constantly—has been linked to a multitude of benefits from the lowest levels of perception up through the highest levels of cognition” (54). Also, as mentioned in the American Psychologist by Granic, Lobel, and Engels, the findings of several studies have concluded in the belief that “Spatial skills can be trained with video games in a relatively brief period, that these training benefits last over an extended period of time, and crucially, that these skills transfer to other spatial tasks outside the video game context” (68).
In contrast to fears of video games only leading to increased aggression and antisocial behaviors, gamers have actually been shown to more inclined to effectively cooperate with others. One of the biggest genres of video games is the MMORPG or massively multiplayer online role-playing game. These games, such as World of Warcraft, require players to work together and use their various skills to achieve a common goal. Even violent shooter games, such as Call of Duty, can increase a person’s willingness to cooperate with others. As discussed by Granic, Lobel, and Engels in the American Psychologist:
Two recent studies have also shown that playing a violent video game cooperatively, compared with competitively, increases subsequent prosocial, cooperative behavior outside of the game context and can even overcome the effects of outgroup membership status (making players more cooperative with outgroup members than if they had played competitively). (73)
Instead of being more prone to aggressive behaviors towards others, these findings prove the opposite for cooperative games. Granic, Lobel, and Engels even point out in this excerpt that gamers are even more inclusive, making outsiders feel like they are part of the bigger team. This applies to real-world situations as well. When cooperative play is required to achieve an in-game goal, the players involved become more likely to cooperate when they need to achieve goals in the real world.
Furthermore, professionals who play video games have been shown to be more adept at communicating and being socially confident. There is a common stereotype of gamers being socially awkward and antisocial individuals. However, in a book by Harvard graduate John Beck discussed in an article in Discover Magazine, a sample of white-collar professionals who never, occasionally, or frequently played video games were assessed on how they functioned in their work environments. When the frequent players of video games were analyzed, Schlesinger, Johnson, and Panter state, “The gaming population turned out to be consistently more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively” (2). These professionals were cooperative workers, as discussed by the findings in the American Psychologist, but also effective communicators. Schlesinger, Johnson, and Panter continue with a direct quote from Beck, “It wasn’t surprising that gamers were more competitive, or more strategic, but the social and leadership skills that they exhibit don’t fit the stereotype of a loner in the basement.” (2)
The popularity of video games has brought on popular stereotypes and beliefs about games and their players that have largely been proven inconsistent with reality. While aggressing and addiction have been studied as effects of video games, these ill-effects are largely due to not playing video games responsibly. Video games, used responsibly, can be used to reap several benefits. Video games are intentionally designed to become more difficult and require players to continually reapply a learned skill in a new way. While it may appear that a gamer is mindlessly defeating a bad guy, their mind is learning skills and information. Whether this is applicable information such as urban development, like Panter’s young nephew did, or enhancing the player’s ability to focus, as proven by the experiments discussed by Eichenbaum, Bavelier, and Green. Finally, although there is violence in video games, the key to whether or not games lead to aggressive behaviors has nothing to do with the content. Even the most violent of shooters can require cooperative play with other players which, as discussed, lead to gamers actually being more willing to work with others outside of the game. Stereotypes may be founded in a bit of truth, but that bit of truth must not be allowed to blind my learned colleagues from what the majority of studies and professionals are saying about the true effects of video games.
In conclusion, video games have become a staple of personal entertainment that has inspired excitement, concern, and questions about how they impact the player. While many may believe that video games are of little benefit, the evidence proves that video games serve as a means to learn information in an engaging way, develop cognitive skills that are undoubtedly useful outside of the gaming context, and a new way to learn how to cooperate and communicate with others for a common goal. As stated by Schlesinger, Johnson, and Panter,
All of this, of course, flies in the face of the classic stereotype of gamers as attention deficit–crazed stimulus junkies, easily distracted by flashy graphics and on-screen carnage. Instead, successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think. (1)
Works Cited
Adam, Eichenbaum et al. "Video Games Play That Can Do Serious Good." American Journal Of Play, vol 7, no. 1, 2014, pp. 50-72.
Granic, Isabela et al. "The Benefits Of Playing Video Games.." American Psychologist, vol 69, no. 1, 2014, pp. 66-78. American Psychological Association (APA), doi:10.1037/a0034857.
Schlesinger, Victoria et al. "This Is Your Brain On Video Games | Discovermagazine.Com." Discover Magazine, 2007, http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/video-games.
