Video games change your brain.

@FreeDuck,

Quote:

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

Mo's like that even though he's not autistic.

He'll wander in while I'm playing and say "I can beat that for you" and he can. Always. Usually on the first try. Without me even telling him the game's objective or how to select different capabilities.

It's really kind of freaky.

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@Cycloptichorn,

That was an interesting article as is you and Set's conversation on gaming and lucid dreaming. I haven't noticed whether gaming effects my dreams but I'm going to start paying attention.

Quote:

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.

One thing I like about games is that sometimes caution works against you. Rushing in with guns blazing (so to speak) can really work in your favor. I suppose this relates to what the article I posted means when they say that games can help you become faster at making decisions.

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@boomerang,

Games teach you new skills and new ways of thinking that you wouldn't have had before.

A good example. A job I could do, that I've been prepped for? Starship pilot. I've played countless simulations over the years. I understand vectors and orbital mechanics. I understand momentum conservation and the tactics of engaging a group of enemies at high speed. I've been trained to keep track of dozens of different factors at once. In the more complex games, you will fail if you cannot master those concepts.

And, it's not just stuff irrelevant to our current life. I could just as easily say Helicopter pilot or tank pilot. Civilization provides it's users with a great intro to the concept of resource and population management, and realpolitk. First-person shooters teach you how to properly move through an urban environment without getting ambushed. Simcity introduces the concept of city planning and growth management.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Cycloptichorn

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@Anomie,

I would like to see the studies that support this notion of overweight, depressed introverts being created by gaming too.

I know overweight, introverted, prone to depression people who don't play video games. When I was a kid there were kids like that and video games didn't even exist.

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@sozobe,

When Mo's friends come over they typically head to the basement saying they're going to play video games but they rarely do. Our basement is equipped with a full size wrestling mat, boxing gloves (and helmets), a heavy bag, a nerf gun arsenal, etc. They often use the games as a launch for more physical play, adapting the characters and story line to more physical, real world play.

Mo gets in that MUST DO NOW mode too. It can really be annoying.

To tell the truth, I get in that mode too. Usually it is when I'm reading though "Just let me finish this" is my typical refrain. I know it annoys my family so I guess that makes me sympathetic to Mo when he gets like that.

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@sozobe,

sozobe wrote:

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.

This is my issue as well. When they're into electronics so much of the time, they start to take this attitude of needing to be entertained and unable to find something else to do. We finally got into a pretty good groove with consistently enforced screen time limits and there's a lot less of that now. (Ok don't laugh, but it includes my use of the Screen Time iPhone app.) Their attitudes and general happiness have improved. I love seeing kids just playing, coming up with adventures, and just being kids, alive and in the world. So the limits are important but I've found them challenging to implement consistently. That's an issue with TV as well, though, and I'm pretty sure TV doesn't do much of anything to improve decision making capabilities.

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

Mo gets in that MUST DO NOW mode too. It can really be annoying.

To tell the truth, I get in that mode too. Usually it is when I'm reading though "Just let me finish this" is my typical refrain. I know it annoys my family so I guess that makes me sympathetic to Mo when he gets like that.

I know, I'm really bad about it. On A2K too! She wants something when I'm in the middle of a reply and I'm like just WAIT.

The MUST DO NOW thing is not really when she's in the middle of a game, but when she's been out of the house or something and then gets too manic/ addictive/ weird about wanting to get back to a game.

It's a little hard to describe, doesn't happen that often, but it's something about the obsessiveness of it that makes me want her to take a deep breath and calm down a bit first. If she NEEDS a game, that worries me. If she's doing it for fun, fine. I don't have any clear-cut parameters there, just a gut feeling sort of thing.

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@FreeDuck,

YES. I agree with all of that.

The iPod seems to have really supplanted TV for sozlet. She watches Spongebob in the morning, but then will frequently go for a week without watching more than a couple of hours of TV.

She's at an age where she's out and about a lot -- I basically don't see her between saying goodbye in the morning and dinnertime. If she's here with friends, they're off doing their own thing. Otherwise she's at friends' houses, or sports/ activities.

Then dinner and general family hanging-out-age.

Then she has homework. (Homework has finally kicked in with a vengeance, ugh.)

So she ends up usually having only an hour or so of non-homework screen time on an average day, and that's usually an iPod.

Weekends are different of course, she can spend a whole Saturday with the iPod if I don't kick her out the door.

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@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

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

Definitely. I was working as a bartender while waiting and hoping for a job at the university (eventually got it), We got a space invaders, and, as time permitted, i would take quarters from my tip jar and go play. Not two weeks after we got it one of the regulars asked me if i was "in the hundred club." Hundred club, i asked. Yeah, he says, those who have put $100 or more in space invaders. One hundred dollars in two weeks or less--400 games, two hundred a week, 25 cents a pop . . . I quit playing immediately. It was an object lesson about obsessing. Today, i've probably spent about two hours total since i got up in my current 1503 game. I stopped before lunch and haven't been back there.

Cyclo's right, it's immersive. To do anything worth while, i'd need an hour or more right now. Sorry, i've got better things to do with that hour. I'll wait until early tomorrow.

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@Cycloptichorn,

I obsess over 1503 because it's like Age of Empires (or Civilization) combinedd with Sim City. When you are in the middle of something absorbing, the game will announce that your houses are on fire, or there's a plague in your city--stuff like that. It taught me to be preparedd and then to ignore that stuff and concentrate on the here and now ("I've got a fire brigade, i built hospitals, piss off.")

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@boomerang,

The new years eve day before this last one, I helped to chase down one of three armed robbers who crashed their car into the light pole near my house... Talking to one of the cops later, another old fart like myself, he told me that he plays war games at home running on his treadmill... He said his score was better sitting on the couch, but not that much better... The real problem is the immorality of it all, when people should learn that life taking is the absolute last resort of humanity they are desensitized to it....The are even desensitize to their own value, and denied the meaning of their own deaths... Think of all these sorts of people who end up in cube farms flying drone aircraft that can murder whole families at a time without the pilot ever breaking a sweat, or having to smell burning human being, and will make if home in time for supper if traffic isn't snarled... There are no conseqences, and without consequences people can reach conclusions much faster... But what conclusion do they reach???

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@DrewDad,

DrewDad wrote:

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.

People do what they do well, do what they enjoy, and enjoy what they do well...

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@Fido,

I don't believe it's ever been shown that playing video games desensitizes anyone to violence. They have seen that people with violent dispositions that play a lot of video games are more likely to commit violence -- but they haven't shown that that person might not have had the same reaction if they had, say, read true crime fiction, or watched the Saw movies or whatever.

I'm not sure that soldiers don't feel the consequences of their actions and I don't really get how that applies to the topic. Care to elaborate?

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

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.

I allege that I saved a girl's life with a video game, to wit: Space Invaders, in the 1980s.
I had gotten an Atari game n I played that on it.
Its basically a shooting gallery, wherein u blast incoming illegal aliens.
With practice, I got fairly good at it.

A girl of my acquaintance lost her job as an executive secretary.
In consequence, she had to sell her condo.
She was running out of money, near destitution. I took her in.
She arrived in terrible emotional condition; much weeping.
I feared coming home from court some day and finding a dead female
corpse on the floor. I enacted a landlord 's rule against female suicide,
but I knew that she was very headstrong n might violate it.

I knew from experience that your mind can fall into the Space Invaders game
for several hours at a time; ergo, I tawt her how to play it.
That worked! Q.E.D.: no dead female corpses on the floor.

David

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

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

I LOVE when that happens. Its really GREAT!
The dreamer is the unlimited lord of his Universe,
for so long as he remains asleep. I 've had only a few of them.

Do u know how to induce lucid dreams, Setanta ?

David

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Video games change your brain.

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