Video games change your brain.

I suspect that a lot of this is selection bias.

People who already have these skills may just be more successful at video games, and end up playing them more.

I let my kids play, though my son is more interested than my daughter. My firm rule is no first person shooter games. He plays a lot of kung fu type games, some adventure games, and we all play Kinect sports and other active games. Mario Kart is still my all time favorite, but I've always loved driving games. Gaming has definitely come a long way since my days of Missile Command and Donkey Kong.

I do try to make sure they never spend too much time on any one screen based activity, though, because I feel like it makes them cranky and anti-social.

Good point.

But I love playing video games even though I'm not very good at them.

I like to play RPGs and strategic games. My all-time favorite strategic game is 1503, a sort of combination of Age of Empires and Sim-City. I don't think the RPGs make me particularly anti-social, but, then, there aren't a lot of goblins and trolls in our neighborhood.

I sometimes get concerned about the social aspects. Mo plays online with a very small group of friends and I think that kind of helps him socially. It keeps him in touch with kids he doesn't go to school with (kids from his football and baseball teams) so it expands his "base" at bit. I like that.

Right now they're all crazy for MineCraft and it's a very cooperative game and I think that's been good for him socially too.

Mo is VERY good at Minecraft and I hear him get crazy bossy with his friends sometimes. That bothers me.

I like to play games on Mo's old Play Station 2 so I'm pretty old school.

When I get very involved with a game I can be a bit anti-social in that I want to just get past this next bit before I do anything else. Of course, "this next bit" can take me a half hour to get through so........

Honestly though, I'm not real social anyway.

Ooops. I forgot to link the article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203458604577263273943183932.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I never, ever get anti-social . . . butter wouldn't melt, etc. . . .

Sometimes the boy dog wants to go outside (as in, every ten minutes), and he'll jump up and hit me in the butt with his forepaws. I take it all in good part, though. I usually turn to him and say:

What ? ! ? ! ?

I actually love the social aspect of video games now. When we first got the Kinect, we were playing volleyball with one of his friends and their dad. It was hilarious and made the whole thing way more fun.

The bossy thing happens here too and I'll say things to my kids when I hear it, but their friends seem to take it in stride. Not sure what that's about but maybe it's age appropriate. As long as they can take getting bossed sometimes, I guess it's all good.

My friends have an autistic daughter who is CRAZY good at just about every video game she has every played. And I mean right away good. They see it as a blessing I think.

Video games DO change your brain. In an entirely positive way.

One great example is dreaming. Persistent video gamers show a marked difference in their dreaming patterns than non-gamers.

http://www.livescience.com/6521-video-gamers-control-dreams-study-suggests.html

I play video games before falling asleep almost every day, and I can report that the above article is totally correct. Especially in one area: nightmares. When zombies show up in MY dreams, it's not me that's afraid - it's them. You learn to be a hunter, to be in control of the situation, instead of being a passive observer.

Cycloptichorn

That's called lucid dreaming, and i learned to do that before video games were invented.

Personally, I play many video games, yet this generation does feel shallow, the artistic values feel simplified and mainstream, I have been generally playing rpgs, indie games and mods.



The definition of this "downside" is pressuposed, such as being introverted, however I do believe this extro/intro continuum to be of a false dichotomy, why is this assumed to be intrinsic?

Also, human mass is independent of video games, this is satisfied by thermodynamic laws, however it may be argued that video games are an 'indirect' consequence.

Is it possible for statistical practices to be logically consistent?

Empirical suggestion (circular reasoning) is induced from biased cognitive faculties, there may always be error in the truth reliability.

Though, I would personally like to believe that video games do change the brain, or contemporarily (i.e.neuroplasticity), gamers do appear to be open to concepts, such as being anti-normative, or anti-real.

Or, perhaps I am simply misinterpreting this for 'niche' phenomena, such as elite athletes, significantly high intelligent quotients, or other atypical constructs.

Hmm, I would say that the small difference between this and what I would call my 'lucid' dreams is that there's no awareness that I'm actually dreaming in many of them - the reactions are situational, not conscious ones.

I do have lucid dreams from time to time, and infrequently, VERY lucid dreams, where I don't wake up for what seems like an eternity on my part. Wish I had more of those.

Cycloptichorn

I think the Wikipedia article is wrong to say that one is always aware that one is dreaming when engaged in a lucid dream. The important aspect is having control over one's "dreamscape."

By the way, my brain didn't seem to like the lucid dreaming. My dreams got very strange. Sometimes i was watching a motion picture, with recognizable actors (one starred James Garner and Meryl Streep--i don't recall the others). Other times, it would be animation, as though done with water colors--sometimes i'd be a spectator, sometimes a participant. But it became obvious to me that some part of my consciousness was unhappy with me controlling the dreamscape, so i stopped. My dreams are more or less "normal" now.

Have you seen Waking Life? If not, I highly recommend it. I think you would find it to be very interesting.

Cycloptichorn

I'm not sure if sozlet and I play video games or not. (E.G. definitely doesn't.)

We have an iPod, and there are a lot of games on it. I love Angry Birds (which might qualify) and Words With Friends (which I'm pretty sure does not).

Sozlet's current major game is Temple Run. She's very good at it. (I'm OK.)

We don't have a Wii, or a Kinect, or a Playstation, or anything else. Sozlet has gotten tragic about it at intervals but actually is mostly OK with it. She plays videogames at friends' houses, and especially likes the dance games.

We don't have anything mostly at E.G.'s insistence. I'm neutral to positive about videogames. I had a bit of an a-ha moment when we were having a conversation with my mom about why she didn't let me go see "Star Wars" when I was a kid. (My whole class went, but not me. Sniff.) He was taking her to task for it, and I realized that there is a very similar dynamic going on with sozlet and her friends -- she's pretty much the only one who doesn't have any sort of a gaming system in her house.

My hesitation is about the grumpiness/ anti-social thing FreeDuck mentions (yes, that happens to me and definitely to sozlet) but also what happens on the occasions when one of her friends brings their iPod or DS over. The kids slump on the couch and play games. And that's pretty much it.

The rest of the time (which is the vast majority of the time), they do all kinds of crazy stuff. They go out in the backyard and play survivor games. They make movies. They stage fashion shows. They make things. They pack provisions and go exploring for a couple of hours. They TALK.

From reports from sozlet and her friends' parents, a lot less of that happens at houses of friends with gaming systems. It's not that they ONLY play videogames or watch TV/ movies, but it's often a pretty big part of what they do.

Some kids basically refuse to come over here because we have a tiny TV and no gaming system and one iPod and I usually need the computer for work. Sozlet seems sincere about saying that she considers that a problem with the person, not with our electronics.

We don't have any hard and fast rules but if sozlet's been on the iPod too long or if she has a certain sort of manic "MUST DO THIS NOW" sort of thing going on, I tend to say "OK, time to wrap up." I usually give her a while before enforcing it.

Playing games on the iPod seems really good for her when she's had a rough day and needs to just calm down for a while. I don't have a problem with that.

Those definitely count! They aren't as in-depth as the complex and immersive games that Set and I like, but they are games nonetheless.

The first video games - Pong and Pac-Man - were as addictive to the people of their day as our modern ones were...



That's because many of these games are more fun than any other activity you could possibly engage in, that doesn't cost a lot of money to do. By a lot. It engages your brain in ways that no other waking activity does, and gives a sense of achievement that directly rewards you.

And the more effort, the more reward. The older I get, the harder I want my games to be - as I've grown in complexity, so have my entertainment choices. The one I'm currently playing - a fun yet violent game called Demon's Souls - is so hard as to be considered to be brutal by most. It demands perfection and pushes me to be my best. I think about it a lot while I'm not playing it - it's the biggest challenge in my life at this moment.

Cycloptichorn