"At baseline, time watching and socializing were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence, but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming."
> Following the steps of a previous study with this same dataset (measuring baseline associations only [13]), we categorized screen time here into three major groups: (a) Watching (1 + 2), (b) Socializing (4 + 5 + 6), (c) Gaming (3).
So that's why they described it as " ocial media, text, and video chat". Their data comes from the ABCD study. I didn't look much further. https://abcdstudy.org/
Do you have a source for that? Happiness I can believe, especially because of the correlation between intelligence and neuroticism, but if IQ is a valid proxy for intelligence then I think the consensus is that intelligence strongly correlates with success.
High IQ people are also thought to be prone to ambition, questioning for purpose and stricter yearning at any achievement level which leaves them perennially unsatisfied
The fact that they "controlled" for genetics using polygenic scores already is a strong sign of low quality research. Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects. Controlling for genetics using them is like controlling for income by asking whether the respondents own a Porsche.
Also, be aware that Scientific Reports is, if not quite a predatory journal, a very low bar. They publish tens of thousands of articles every year, while charging vast fees.
In general, these guys have correlations, not causation. Children's IQ - and gaming habits etc. - develop as they age, so controlling for baseline IQ is not enough to make a correlation with later IQ and gaming causal. It seems much more likely that smarter kids game more, e.g. because they live in richer households. (No, controlling for SES isn't enough to rule this out, for much the same reasons of measurement error as for the genetics.)
If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.
If the noise in polygenic scores is random, all that will do is reduce correlations. Random measurement error always reduces the ability to observe relationships. To be clear, I do not know enough about polygenic scores to judge one way or another how the noise "works" vis-a-vis the entire analysis.
The Porsche comment is snide, but actually exposes a similar error in your critique. Sure, a tax return-derived measure of income would be superior to measuring if someone owned a luxury car. But, if you found yourself in a situation where all you had to go on for measuring economic wellbeing was (luxury) car ownership, your analysis is likely to improve by including it rather than excluding it, unless the measure itself had serious other issues with its accuracy.
Likewise, for SES, it is an imperfect measure, but it is the best we have for measuring social position in a concise way.
Having worked in research and universities for a while, the type of critique presented in this post is one you often see of new graduate students. They are able to tear down problems with research very well, but tend to overlook whether the study itself was still informative, or whether the opposite finding is likely to be true.
For example, suppose we wanted to know if video games or watching videos on the internet are making you dumber. A study like this may not convince you it's making you smarter, but it presents decent evidence they're not making you dumber. You can point out how the measures aren't perfect, but that is far from saying the opposite is true or the observed trends are completely spurious.
> If the noise in polygenic scores is random, all that will do is reduce correlations. Random measurement error always reduces the ability to observe relationships. To be clear, I do not know enough about polygenic scores to judge one way or another how the noise "works" vis-a-vis the entire analysis.
That's correct, it is a flaw of the entire analysis, not the PGS in isolation. Yes, the polygenic score, when used to define 'genetic intelligence', will be biased towards zero and will miss a lot of the genetic intelligence. What then happens is the video-game playing becomes a measure of intelligence (genetic or otherwise), capturing what the polygenic score (and other covariates) miss. The logic then works in reverse: the reduced correlation is precisely why the residual confounding works. The worse your 'measurements' are at measuring the underlying trait, the more wiggle room there is for your 'outcomes' to actually be correcting the 'measurements' and not vice versa. See "Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... , Westfall & Yarkoni 2016. (More examples: https://www.gwern.net/notes/Regression )
What OP shows is not that video game playing causes IQ, but IQ causes video game playing. The choice to play video games (or not play them, because you are bad at learning) is an additional 1-item long IQ test and helps corrects for the error.
(And we do in fact know that video gaming & IQ correlate, so nothing new there. We also know from all the brain training randomized experiments that the causal arrow doesn't run in the direction they want it to run. OP is very wrong, including in claiming that the Flynn effect justifies believing in their effect - it actually is a criticism of their claimed causal relationship between IQs have been steady or falling even as video gaming increased massively.)
The point is not whether including polygenic scores is better than nothing. The point is whether it's good enough to justify the claims they are making. It's not. The same holds for SES.
I disagree that this study presents decent evidence of anything. I don't claim that the conclusions are false. But they haven't backed them up. There are lots of ways that the observed trends can be spurious. I mentioned some. The study is very weakly informative.
> The point is not whether including polygenic scores is better than nothing. The point is whether it's good enough to justify the claims they are making. It's not.
What is the justification for this assertion? If polygenic scores are simply "noisy," then, as the GP mentioned, they may be good enough when used in aggregate. There can be a lot of signal in noisy data. Ask any ML practitioner.
Polygenic scores are themselves an aggregation. And they contain a ton of noise. From twin studies, R2 of the "true" polygenic score on education is about 40%. The R2 of our best actual polygenic score is 4%. IIRC these guys aren't even using the education polygenic score. They're using the PGS for IQ. That's even noisier (because it was created using smaller samples, and you need biiig samples for this to work).
> Polygenic scores are themselves an aggregation. And they contain a ton of noise.
Again, noisy data can still be useful. For instance, generate a perfect single-variable normal distribution, sample along the x-axis and perturb each point randomly in the y direction either up or down. Depending on the range of random values used to move the sampled points, you can still see the underlying distribution even though the data is noisy.
Two possible arguments you might make:
1) The data is noisy and the paper's authors haven't collected enough data to account for the amount of noise. Usually people will do something like null-hypothesis significance testing to measure this.
2) The noise isn't uniformly random and has some underlying bias that is affecting the results.
Noisy data can be useful. What it can't do is be useful enough to say "we have controlled for X". There will be a large unmeasured component of genetic variation - probably about 90% of it - that controlling for the PGS doesn't capture. Given that, throwing a PGS into the regression is not worth the candle.
> If the noise in polygenic scores is random, all that will do is reduce correlations. Random measurement error always reduces the ability to observe relationships.
I think you’re misunderstanding how they’re being used (or I am). I think they’re trying to control for genetics via polygenic scores, not trying to establish a relationship between those scores and intelligence. The analogy is that you’re measuring the effect of the price of kids’ socks on their intelligence, and saying the observed effect isn’t due to parental income in some other way, because you’ve controlled for parental income(by controlling for whether there’s a porche in the driveway).
> If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.
Video games, like all things, should not all be treated equal. I could certainly see problem solving skills developing from world building or highly complex games (Civ, PoE, etc.). In fact, most (but not all) highly successful games have depth, which requires time investment and problem solving. The difference in games can be as varied as comparing a marketing pamphlet to Asimov's novels.
I don't dispute your take on the quality of the research though. I would even go further and speculate it would be really really hard to come up with meaningful tests due to game variance. So most anything on the subject is likely fluff.
Reminds me of when I played SimCity 2000 as a teenager. In my first attempt I ran out of money and got kicked out.
So I decided to start again. I noted down the cost of all the necessary items: Residential, city, industrial zones, cost of building roads, power plant, and utility lines, and of course water. I put the game on pause, took out a notebook, and started calculating a somewhat optimal city with the initial budget I was provided.
I built the city very quickly, and this time round I didn't run out of money, and took the game all the way to archologies. I did skimp on fire stations and a disaster destroyed most of the city, but it still survived overall.
I don't think I could have succeeded without that level of planning.
Any real-time PvP game has the ultimate puzzle: another human being. Once you're mechanically familiar with a PvP game, the game disappears, in a sense, and you're left trying to figure out the (very human) weaknesses of your opponent. It's quite a beautiful experience, and not one unique to video games. You see similar phenomena in sports and many other forms of competition as well.
In my experience, the vast majority of game play time, even with most complex games, is spent on relatively mindless repetitive behavior. This gets worse the more time is spent with a specific game. As a player improves, they start to know what they're supposed to do in more and more situations (compare the way a novice agonizes over an opening pawn move in chess with the way advanced players often speed through the opening moves). Games might be complex, but you might only be dealing with that complexity ~10% of the time (or less as you improve).
> As a player improves, they start to know what they're supposed to do in more and more situations (compare the way a novice agonizes over an opening pawn move in chess with the way advanced players often speed through the opening moves).
Chess is a particularly bad example because you can memorize openings.
In Fischer random chess, the starting positions of the pieces are randomized, so even advanced players will agonize over the opening move.
In chess advanced players start to agonize at move 7.
Chess has all the benefits of Fisher random chess, but has an additional layer, and requires three additional skills: learn, analyze, and memorize.
(I myself I am a bughouse chess person, it's a very different beast on the same board. It's full of adrenaline, hope, fear, anger, grief, in 2 minute long runs.)
Some competitive (PvP) games are basically imperfect chess. Just like you'd learn chess, and eventually move on to studying matches, you would do the same with some (PvP) video games, like DotA etc.
On the other hand you could literally have a game to see how long you can keep pushing a big read button (dopamine inducing effects and sounds included of course!).
The variance is huge. We couldn't make a blanket general statement about brain development from tabletop games that include say Snap / War, Checkers, and Chess. And that's not even a sliver of the variance video games gave.
P.S. I'm by no means a gaming advocate. IMO video games are becoming (have become) Vegas 2.0 and I could list a huge number of potential negatives.
How can you recognize the huge variance of games in one breath but then suggest in another they're in any real sense becoming (parenthetically already became) the equivalent of casino games? In what sense, exactly, because it can't be variety? Sure there are negative points to both video games and casino games, but there are negative points to everything. The ones that are arguably 'shared' aren't unique to that pair either. Have you actually analyzed the things they call electronic 'games' in casinos? They're not varied at all; whether you're in Vegas or some random Indian casino, about the most variety you'll get is one row of slots has wolf clipart and another row has zoo animal clipart. Sure I guess you might find some non-slots that wrap one of the physical games like the card games, and to be fair I once saw some giant flappy bird thing on my way to a casino buffet years ago. Still, overall game design? What game design? Any random gacha has better game design. As a genre of game in the way slots are a genre of game, there's already been a lot of evolution and variety in 'gameplay' while retaining the core PNG collection premise. You'll find more slots innovation in mini-games inside larger video games than in slots themselves. The random gacha probably has better art too.
> could literally have a game to see how long you can keep pushing a big read button
Could? Did. Even Progress Quest counts for this sort of thing, and it was a parody in 2002. There's also the classic game of Simon Says which is basically keep pushing shiny buttons but less entertaining long term, since "number goes up" only goes as high as your human memory instead of a computer's. The biggest modern twist that some will find a negative is something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14UerIOvZKM (literal red button) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kkGu7yIi98 where the time "wasting" is magnified beyond just the gamer but also to an audience.
> Just like you'd learn chess, and eventually move on to studying matches, you would do the same with some (PvP) video games, like DotA etc.
Sure, but as far as I know there isn't much value (beyond personal interest) in studying high level chess (and from what I've seen, it's detrimental when people start obsessing over it). You're putting effort into getting better at playing a game.
> I could certainly see problem solving skills developing from world building or highly complex games (Civ, PoE, etc.). In fact, most (but not all) highly successful games have depth, which requires time investment and problem solving.
I’m a big grand strategy fan, mostly Paradox games rn, and I almost feel like these are worse for me because the depth keeps me engaged longer (and honesty waste a lot of time) compared even to something like a shitty copy/paste mobile game employing dark patterns because those get so boring so quick. Whereas if I start and eu4 or ck3 campaign and actually play it, it’s almost certain my brain will be shot to hell to for a few days.
Ahh I agree with this. I think there is a benefit at the beginning in the learning process of the game but then it has seriously diminishing returns. I would put factorio in this category where once you get the model and have learned most of the curve you are then at diminishing returns or negative returns because of the painful way in that devs construct these games to keep you on for longer periods of times. I'm not sure the highest levels of complexity and long dedication to the game really do provide greater learning for people.
I'll add to this I wish there was a game that didn't follow the traditionally.. now you've leveled up spend X time at this level/technology/etc before you go to the next one. Why not create a game that you can grow as fast as you can learn instead of putting in time barriers. Probably incentives for developers/game companies ruin that model but would be nice for a change.
I love Paradox games, but I can't play them because as soon as I start up a campaign I know it will become a huge time sink for a few days. I think their games definitely require/develop problem solving skills, especially in areas where you need to make changes to create indirect effects. With that said, they may not be the best way of going about it.
I think that even if we found that children who play difficult games tend to be more intelligent, that still makes it hard to separate correlation from causation. Do children become smarter because they play difficult games? Or do smart children enjoy playing difficult games? Or both?
Hades, played competently, is a nice little optimization problem with lots of arbitrary constraints thrown at you to keep it fresh. Well, it is mostly reflexes, but the optimization problem is also a significant part of it.
Grand strategy and 4x games always feel like too much depth, to me. I know I could do better if I pause and manually place every worker/micro everything. But that's overwhelming. I could try to be clever and only optimize where necessary, but the game is paused, there's no tradeoff for analyzing everything other than my time. Just give me the meaningful choices, game!
I wouldn't underestimate how much time people can sink into dumb gotcha games. Maybe not you, but others.
IMO, the biggest problem with modern video games is how many of them are designed to keep you playing virtually forever. I think a game like Zelda (maybe not BoTW, but definitely OoT) is great for children, because it teaches problem solving and rational thinking, and it has a natural time limit! You might play it incessantly for a few days, but eventually you'll reach the end and need to seek out a new experience.
You're not wrong in terms of how much time people can spend on something that doesn't take much thought (it can be a comfort, even), but your diagnosis of the problem is way off. There's nothing about modern video games that can receive the blame for this, even if I hate what gacha and friends have done to the place on the design perspective. (Fortunately there's still plenty of market that's not design I dislike. Another commenter mentioned games as Vegas 2.0, but I don't think that commenter is a gamer either. Casinos are absolutely dominated by the shittiest of games, from a pure game design perspective, with seemingly no room for anything else. The overall gaming market though? It's quite healthy and varied. And even the cancer in mobile gaming is but a harmless mole compared to the tumor of casino electronic 'games'. And to be clear, people can spend/waste their time and money as they choose, that's never been my complaint against any of it, I'd sooner complain about people complaining about others wasting time on X.)
I'm surprised, you seem to have spent enough time around kids (and were a kid once yourself), yet you think "replay value" (which is inflated for some games by not having a definitive end) is at all a modern thing, or even necessarily a bad thing. This extends beyond games. Do you realize how many hours of Frozen have been watched, over, and over, and over? Or how many hours listening to Baby Shark? Or whatever's going around now? Or whatever was going around when you were a kid? (Insert favorite classic Disney movie? Tetris? Cribbage? Chutes and Ladders? Minecraft?) Kids love repetition -- humans in general like repetition a lot. Heard of the Hero's Journey?
Don't underestimate OoT either! If a kid liked OoT enough to reach the end, it's unlikely that they'll just move on immediately unless they're literally forced onto the next shrink-wrapped "brand new" experience by someone. (To be sure, if I'm ever a parent myself, I will consciously do a bit of that pushing to try avoiding letting them repeat the same thing like some popular movie too much, but I'd be a hypocrite and a fool to think I can or should prevent all of it. Besides, it's remarkable how many times you can watch/be all but forced to watch something even as a young teen (cough Napoleon Dynamite) and yet retain almost no memory of the thing's details as an adult.)
OoT is a real-time interactive simulation, such things are naturally just fun to immerse in, even after you've beaten Ganon / "reached the end". But besides just continuing to 'hang out' aimlessly in the game, there's all the stuff they could aim at in order to "100%" the game, or just go back through optional/missed stuff in general/at leisure. (But everyone who plays OoT needs to get the Biggoron's Sword!) So the kid could do that, even talk to friends playing the same game (socializing skills even with a 1p game!) and trade notes or experiences, or compete on times for various races, or they could develop their own random aims, like a quest to smash every pot. Or start a new playthrough but with some difference. Or they might discover the speed running scene and get into that, or just generally see the crazy nonsense people have done to that poor game's code. Again, don't underestimate games like OoT, Super Mario 64, Dark Souls, Megaman X, or Chess, either; having an "end" doesn't protect them from being the object of people's time spending/wasting.
I'm actually training to teach elementary school, so yes you could say I've spent some time around children!
I would absolutely expect a child to play OoT well past beating Ganon for the first time, but there is still a limit to how much you can do. Compare that to something like Destiny, which is basically designed to be a bottomless pit you could grind forever!
> So the kid could do that, even talk to friends playing the same game (socializing skills even with a 1p game!) and trade notes or experiences, or compete on times for various races, or they could develop their own random aims, like a quest to smash every pot. Or start a new playthrough but with some difference. Or they might discover the speed running scene and get into that, or just generally see the crazy nonsense people have done to that poor game's code.
But all of that stuff is great, because now they're creating their own experiences for themselves, getting creative, perhaps even socializing. It's basically the virtual equivalent of traditional unstructured play, which we know has all sorts of educational benefits.
I don't know why children like to e.g. watch Frozen a million times, but I imagine it's because they actually discover something new with each watch. As long as they're driven by intrinsic motivation, I think that's relatively healthy, at least compared to an XP bar that gets higher with each Frozen rewatch!
I think it's more about comfort in familiarity than discovering something new (Frozen isn't that deep), but whatever the case, as external media there's always some intrinsic "I want this for reasons I think are my own" motivation combined with extrinsic "I want this because for good or ill, by various carrots and sticks, others made it intending that I should want it" motivation. Would it be so bad if Frozen had a built-in times-watched counter or an XP bar? Nonsensical for the latter and tasteless, but grant that it could bring people in for rewatches more than it pushed them away, it still surely wouldn't rob people of all their will, ultimately they'd still rewatch for some other intrinsic reasons along with the extrinsic XP bar and other extrinsic things like the intentionally designed attractive (for many) art aesthetic. How much of each motivation will vary; I think people are probably biased to imagine the extrinsics are usually 'nice bonuses on top'.
Destiny doesn't really help your case, I think. The most objectionable thing they do (as I hear it, I skipped it), at least relative to things like it (Warframe), is exploit fear-of-missing-out psychology; they remove previously released content. (Like adding an ad to a site to exploit/monetize viewers, this is not a neutral design choice, and has driven people away from the game entirely rather than what seems to be the default assumed effect of any psychology exploit (except 'make things beautiful'?) of sucking out their will and owning them.) But over time they've not just cut stuff, but added new content. So there are eventually fresh(er) experiences even if you hit max level/acquired everything/etc. like an MMO. Until they dry out anyway, and the problem solves itself, because ultimately an infinitely increasing XP bar just isn't enough to keep most people interested.
They did make an actual title cut to the sequel for Destiny 2 and that's where further new content went -- has it since had enough content added that another timeline could have legitimately packaged it as Destiny 3?
Besides all that, it's legitimately a game, quite more than a glorified slot, it's a full simulation, and has a satisfying core gameplay loop -- the same one refined through the earlier Halo games.
Similarly, though not as core, it's also just satisfying to have Link roll around everywhere. Adding lootboxes to OoT would be beyond tasteless and obscene, but the product would still be quite a bit better than an actual glorified slot, because there's enough game design there alongside, there's something beyond just plain 'give money maybe win prize'. Japanese crane games / ufo catchers are more in line with glorified slots than a game with typical distasteful 'games-as-service' monetization strategies.
That ties in with your earlier deleted edit I still thought worth addressing. I see the concern on glorified slots, but I don't think it's really worth worrying about. In video games, even some hypothetical one with master manipulator levels of thought to make it indefinitely addicting, it's ultimately not chemical injection in basis to form a true dependency on the average human, and so the next thing comes out sooner or later and voila, newness, change. Is the 'Destiny is a dead game' meme close to the truth? It certainly seems a lot less popular than several battle royales, and those too will decline.
Casinos are in comparison much more niche, have little competition and innovation (look at their dull slots with no redeeming game design to them at all), have physical chemical associations (booze and smokes minimum) driving a bunch of it (their psychological playbook is laughably weak in comparison to something like Genshin Impact), and of course must be enabled by real money. The last factor is the simplest barrier to keep kids from getting addicted to casino-style crap, free-to-play dominates. Now maybe it's sad if trends like lootboxes or gachas or battle passes continue (or perhaps in your mind also trends of games designed with elements to never end), but it's far from concerning, especially when games lacking such crap continue to be successful...
> but I don't think that commenter is a gamer either. Casinos are absolutely dominated by the shittiest of games, from a pure game design perspective, with seemingly no room for anything else.
Definitely not the wider market, but I wouldn’t think it unfair to describe the mobile gaming market like this. There have recently been a number of AAA PC games ported to mobile which makes me actually realize the power of the hardware in my hand, and also wonder why every other mobile game I see is a rip off puzzle game concept that’s been done a million times over.
I feel fortunate enough to have grown up playing point and click games, like Myst, 7th Guest, and Fate of Atlantis, and keeping a notebook on my desk for clues to puzzles. I think it had a positive effect on my development, comparable to playing chess, which I also did.
If you are going to critique the methodology please provide a reference where this is not a robust method. You may be right but how can I tell without some references? The scholar.google search for "controlling for genetics using polygenetic scores" brings up many recent papers about this methodology and the arguments made in these seem stronger to me than this one comment. IMO on the internet when people can easily misinterpret the science, its important to be clear as possible especially when we take things down.
As far as scientific reports goes its a fine journal, its run by nature. It's not on the same planet as the predatory journals that spam inboxes. I worry that people will read your comment, assume you speak from authority, and discount any work they might see coming from that journal when we both know that good science can be found in scientific reports, and that impact factor is more strongly correlated with "sexy" or expensive science than good science anyhow.
I don't speak from authority, but I do speak from experience as an academic. Scientific Reports is run by Springer, who are more competent than Elsevier but just as predatory. Their acceptance rate is 48%, and in 2021, they published 23000 articles. (You can check this here: https://www.nature.com/srep/research-articles?year=2021.) At a publication fee of almost $2000 (Wikipedia), this is a money-making machine, as skewered by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9gzQz1Pms. I think it's obvious what the incentives are here.
The reason the method is not robust is that the typical polygenic score explains only 10% or less of the variance of its target phenotype. That leaves 90% of the variance unaccounted for by the control, which means your error term will be correlated with your focal dependent variable, violating the requirements for regression to give an unbiased estimate. I don't think these claims are controversial. We know polygenic scores are noisy. We know what happens when your control variables are noisy.
The fact that lots of people do it doesn't, sadly, make it work. Lots of social psychologists run trials with an N of 35 (though they're addressing this critique, to their credit). Lots of historians fail to specify their hypotheses and to search for disconfirming data. Economists spent the 80s and 90s running cross-country regressions, before realizing that they had, in aggregate, more independent variables than cases. And so on.
Your response seemed reasonable, and I was nodding along until the last paragraph. I get the impression you had your mind made up about video games and intelligence long before this study was published.
I think the point the prior commenter was making was that this research validates people who think gaming is good. They pointed out the issues and said “if you still want to believe this, I can’t stop you”
The commenter may have a bias, but most prior research shows us the opposite of the study.
I also saw the poor experimental design and had a similar thoughts. Basically, this research looks poorly done and like an effort to prop up the gaming industry (and / or validate the authors pre-suppositions).
In any case, using CoD as an example does not exactly show good will.
I personally believe in huge gains from gaming, based on personal experience (so obviously n = 1, read further accordingly).
Platformers train hand-eye coordination and pattern recognition, strategies teach resource management, RPGs about optimization and adopting growth mindset, racing games require long-time concentration, puzzlers and adventure games test your logic.
In general, games require you to:
- learn a set of tools
- master them
- conquer objective
while also prevailing in face of adversity.
I never regretted the hours I spent gaming and I feel they contributed very much to my softeng career (not directly though).
If you seriously play the game you get good at... the game.
Even within the same game genre that barely translates. People good at Starcraft I struggled with Starcraft II, people great at Warcraft made little headway in Starcraft II (e.g. WCIII players like Grubby or Happy).
Given that, claiming that things even further removed than those other games, which closely resemble one another, requires quite a bit of proof. It does not look like the skills transfer well even between similar games.
> while also prevailing in face of adversity.
I don't think we agree on what "adversity" is. You are just playing a game, and your brain knows it. If someone has the same brain reaction to the game avatar being in virtual "danger" to his actual body being in mortal danger than I'd like to see that, and I think most people would think that is not normal or healthy.
You don't need to defend yourself, if you had fun playing than that's more than enough. I don't understand why you want to drive yourself to seeing more in it than that.
> Even within the same game genre that barely translates. People good at Starcraft I struggled with Starcraft II, people great at Warcraft made little headway in Starcraft II (e.g. WCIII players like Grubby or Happy).
That might be true if you're comparing the top 0.1%, but someone who played a lot of Starcraft would be miles ahead of any newcomer in both Starcraft II and Warcraft III.
Your example is like saying that a world-class sprinter would struggle to be a world-class cyclist. Yes, that's true, but the aspects that do carry over - cardio and muscle development - would immediately put them in the top 5% of the field even if they never win the Tour de France.
Maybe a world-class sprinter would be in the top 5% of the entire population who has ever cycled (not “the field”). Sprinting and cycling are so different you may as well be comparing snooker and darts and saying that wrist control is the determining factor.
> Even within the same game genre that barely translates. People good at Starcraft I struggled with Starcraft II, people great at Warcraft made little headway in Starcraft II (e.g. WCIII players like Grubby or Happy).
Even being good at Starcraft I in 1998 wouldn't make you good at Starcraft I in 2003. People uncover certain optimizations and strategies over times that are quickly adopted by everyone, to the extent that playing the same a good player in 1998 would get you dubbed a "noob" in 2003.
It didn't translate 100%, but even a pro player in Starcraft1 unsuccessfully transitioning to Starcraft2 still played at an insanely high level relative to the general population. It was the difference from maybe being a top 50 player before to a top 500 player after. I would say that this is evidence of a very high carryover.
WC3 => Sc2 is a much greater leap than sc1 -> sc2 but still there was decent carryover. Grubby was still a GM or high masters player, even if he was no longer elite.
> Platformers train hand-eye coordination and pattern recognition, strategies teach resource management, RPGs about optimization and adopting growth mindset...
Sure - and joining the high school football team teaches teamwork, self-discipline, dealing with adversity, appearing before crowds, nutrition, fitness, etc etc
Video games are available to people of all abilities. You certainly can't say the same of football (indeed, with concussions, one might question if this lowers intelligence over the long term)
I'm actually really curious what effect playing fast, twitchy games will have on things like reaction time as one ages. Would be interesting to see long-term studies on the subject.
I don't understand your reply. This is a thread about the impact video games can have and whether they are positive. How is it not relevant listing a few examples on how specific games could improve certain areas of a person?
The question is about incrementality. in those same hours you played CoD, do you think (assuming the endpoint as you suggest is being a softeng) you could have learned more by practicing softeng (even if for half the time)
Obviously. Which is why the question isn't about incrementality. It's about whether the choices one was willing to make were beneficial to something that doesn't seem remotely related at first glance.
Most people aren't going to program 10 hours a day. But they might program 8 hours a day and then do 2 hours of entertainment. Maybe those 2 hours of watching TV were better spent gaming in terms of contributing to other aspects in life. Maybe those 2 hours of gaming could've been 2 hours of drawing instead.
If we're talking about incrementality, we'd better question why almost every software company is still treating their employees like idiot savants when games show us how quickly people can learn drastically different concepts, as long as presented correctly.
The right kind of toys, yes... and the right kind of video games.
There are toys, and games, that make you dumber. Especially games designed to emphasize the addiction loop and monetize inconvenience. Case in point: Angry Birds.
It used to be a very fun, silly, physics-based game. Now, it is infested with pay-to-unlock consumables that in some cases are required to get all three stars on a level (because you can't knock everything down without an explosion and the default roster of birds for the level doesn't give you that).
The simpler a physical toy is (a ball, simple blocks) the more likely it is to contribute to a child's development. The insidious "I-need-another-outfit-Barbie" on the other hand only trains frivolous spending. Even Lego sets vary in the kind of play they foster.
Playing with toys and games can have cognitive benefits, but, digital or otherwise, there's a quality spectrum parents have to be aware of.
Pattern recognition+spacial rotation+quick answer to stimuli+repetitive tasks or short term memories, several IQ components are testing these.
Kids might have higher IQ because of video games, but poorer to everything else that matters.
”Scientific Reports is an open access journal. To publish in Scientific Reports, all authors are required to pay an article-processing charge (APC) of $1,495.”
This is becoming very common in academia. The university I used to work for is beginning to require that all research is published in open access journals. Do you know the ludicrous fees universities pay to closed-access journals?
“Open access” journal fees are often accounted for by institutional affiliations or grant funding donors. The upside of upfront publication charges is that the research output isn’t paywalled and therefore ideally reaches more eyeballs and brainpans than the conventional route.
That is the upside, but there are many other high reputation peer-reviewed open journals with close to zero payment. Is the domain really worth the cost?
It is kinda messed up, when you adjust the price based on the available money of institutional affiliations or donors. It is just more profits for journal and nothing for authors, while forcing authors to pay.
For example accepted papers in HICSS are stored publicly without extra cost.
> Starting with HICSS-50, all HICSS publication will be archived and disseminated at no cost to all readers worldwide through ScholarSpace. A complete set of HICSS proceedings will also be made available in the digital library of the Association of Information Systems (AIS).
Note though that their data comes from the ABCD study, so at least the journal's reputability is not relevant to quality of data collection and most of the experimental design. Edit: of course, this is not a rebuttal of your specific criticisms.
I don't really agree with your qualification of Scientific Reports as "not quite predatory" or "a very low bar". Though it doesn't come close to comparing to Nature or Science, it's a perfectly respectable journal and it publishes quality research.
The worst things you can say about Scientific Reports are it doesn't have the same novelty/impact requirements as many journals* and people like to over-emphasize the "Nature" part of the name in a pointles grab for journal prestige. Journals in general can be pretty shady on a case-by-case basis. See "Nano Chopsticks" published in Nano Letters for a good materials science example of straight garbage (laughably obvious image manipulation) getting published in a fancy journal.
*Not really a problem if you correctly believe science should be more than publishing sexy results.
>If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.
You know there are more video games styles than FPS right? Strategy games teach patience and discipline, EVE online teaches economics, even the much dismissed 'mindless' fps teach teamwork.
I think it's likely that at least some games do increase intelligence relative to other activities (i.e. mindlessly watching tv) but less so than others like reading.
Mindlessly watching junk food TV is not going to help you a lot. It's not very "nutrient rich" (to continue the expression) in terms of knowledge gained.. but you will probably gain some.
Watching documentaries and, crucially, actively watching them is probably very good in terms of how much you learn.
It takes a certain kind of nerdy kid to sit down and watch a documentary (not judging, I was that certain kind of nerdy kid). With video games, the user, i.e. child is actively engaged. Video games require more from the consumer. I found myself much more likely to dig into history while playing civilization than I did while watching a documentary for example.
Actively engaged does not mean exercising higher cognitive function, and even less so developing higher cognitive function.
Imagine if e.g. basketball players never practiced but just played for all the marbles at the most competitive level every day when they stepped on the court. You would have chaos and exhausted players.
* There are tons of randomized controlled trials of policy measures (malaria bednets, minimum income). Many measure long-run outcomes.
* Natural experiments can measure long-run effects. In economic history, sometimes that means centuries.
* Many other designs are plausibly causal. The right instrumental variable, or a regression discontinuity design. In some cases, even a simple diff-in-diff with panel data. This design, nope.
The treatment here is regular social media use and video game playing. This not something where you can randomize people to treatment conditions, like you can with malaria.
Likewise, tell me -- what would be a good instrument for estimating a causal effect of video game playing? What measure would plausibly affect intelligence only through video game playing? Where is there a natural experiment that allows for an RD design where young people on one side of the discontinuity play video games and the others do not?
We get it -- you've taken a causal inference or econometrics course and want people to know it.
No, my point is that bad research which conforms to people's priors should not be taken seriously.
There are many experiments on video game playing. Most of them are short run, obviously. But never underestimate researcher ingenuity. Here's a cute paper which uses as an instrument "did your roommate bring a video game to university"? Not beyond critique, but plausible: https://economics.uwo.ca/people/stinebrickner_docs/paper2.pd.... It's also relevant because the dependent variable is how much students study, and their resulting performance.
More to the point, if anyone seriously thinks video games will raise kids' IQ, and can persuade funders of it, they could simply give the treatment group an Xbox. That would be expensive - say $20K-ish - but much cheaper than the benefit of an extra IQ point or 2, over millions of children.
Anecdata but one thing I've noticed over time between those who grew up on video games and those who didn't is that those who were gamers deal better with change, especially WRT learning new software in the workplace, starting new projects, etc...
Obviously though the benefits aren't there if people just mindlessly play the same game all day.
This makes sense: Every game is a new piece of software that has to be installed/inserted with its own interface and mechanics. If you played a lot of games it means you had to get used to using a lot of different interfaces and controls.
Is there a reason to consider the use of a noisy signal as a strong sign of a low-quality study, without addressing whether the noise is correlated with the outcome?
Do we think this study would be improved if it did not control for genetics at all?
It wouldn't be any worse. The question isn't whether the noise is correlated with the outcome. The question is whether the denoised variable would be much more correlated with the outcome (yes), and whether that would change the effect of the focal variable.
In any case, it's a weird thing to control for in a panel study. Why not just use per-person fixed effects? That would eliminate all effects that are constant across individuals.
A first shot would be a look at the introduction of digital media in particular places or times. Some people have done this with the internet by using e.g. distance to an ADSL exchange as an instrument.
Or, a randomized controlled trial. If it has an effect worth caring about, then it's worth running an experiment on. A real positive or negative effect would be a big deal for policy.
I never claimed anything about whether game-playing developed reasoning skills. Indeed, I explicitly said "believe that if you want to." I just said this research didn't prove it.
If this study has you scratching your head about the impact of digital media, do have a read of "Four arguments for the elimination of television" by Jerry Mander.
The arguments included in it are no different than many of these new studies coming out. If you grew up to be a latchkey kid and had your fair share of TV/video games/etc, it might give you perspective into things you never thought about.
One of the things he mentions is that TV is passive, and puts you in an alpha state where your brain stops trying to respond because there’s no point in responding.
My partner and I do watch a few hours of TV every night now. But we don’t do this “alpha” thing, at least not exclusively. We pause frequently to comment on or joke about what we’re seeing. To the point that I think sometimes a 30 minute show will take us an hour to get through.
The way it works is one of holds the remote and pauses whenever they want to, and if the other wants to pause they just say “pause!”
I wonder how that changes Mander’s analysis. For us it make TV a pretty fun interactive experience.
And this way of watching was largely impossible when Mander did his work, because you simply couldn’t pause TV. Although you could pause a VCR or DVD.
I’m curious how widespread pausing is. I certainly feel that even solo TV watching is a more interactive experience than TV watching was when I was a kid. Alone, I’ll pause to Wikipedia things or to go find related media.
Thanks for sharing. I'm sure there's plenty of counter-arguments to his, but the only thing I have to work with is my anecdote/experiences.
Ridding myself of TV over the last 2 years has been extremely hard. I'm down to watching a maximum of an hour a night. Most times I don't even try nor care to. I have seen significant improvements to my own life, but most importantly I see the effects it has had on my young kids and how much more creative they are because they aren't sitting in front of a TV watching shows like I was when I was their age. It was the only thing I knew as a parent taught by mine and I had to challenge that for myself.
Moderation is the key to everything, but this book woke me up to things I wasn't aware of and figured I'd share.
"A latchkey kid, or latchkey child, is a child who returns to an empty home after school or a child who is often left at home with no supervision because their parents are away at work."
The only program I let my kids use is KidPix on the iPad. It's a (rather remarkable) drawing and animation program and I'm constantly amazed at what they make with it. And sometimes horrified. But the 5 yo enjoys creating scenes with sound effects (that she recorded) and animation (that she also recorded), while the 3 yo enjoys making intricate drawings and then methodically coloring everything green. It's his favorite color, and he enjoys this. Not affiliated at all, but KidPix is a great piece of software, and I wouldn't have known about it except it was on a public library computer.
My point is there is (at least) another important category of program that the researchers missed: creator software. I've also made simple songs with them with garage band, but the UI is still rather difficult for them to use it on their own. I was inspired to take this approach because my first introduction to computers was Logo on an Apple IIe, and Seymore Papert's beautiful work left a lasting impression.
Tux Paint is available for iOS. There's another one that my kids loved, which was a puppet show theater app, which easily let you animate characters and add voices. Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of it.
Thanks jrussino! I was hoping HN would come through with some more info on the author, because it's clearly a special program, and it certainly wasn't on my radar before kids + public library. (They still call it "Kid Pix 3D" even though it's really "Kid Pix 5" on the iPad)
It's amazing the researchers forgot to include categories like apps. The apps my 3 year old son used is Pokpok, YouTube and an iOS app I develop specifically for him since he's on the non-verbal ASD spectrum.
When I was a kid I spent too much time on computers but it was mostly reading Wikipedia and googling programming questions, that kind of stuff.
Where I grew up there wasn't anyone around I could ask those kinds of questions of. I know that's not the Netflix / ipad world that the study is talking about or nessecarily exists today. But I suspect that bifurcation still exists.
My entry was scripting in Counter-Strike (Quake CFG Scripts). This cannot happen with consoles and Apps on Pads/Smartphones entirely prevent this.
Some people try to bring this modification friendly things back, with BBC Microbit, RasPi and so on. But in the end you need to be motivated - and playing better was huge motivation for me!
My early days were DOS mode-x experiments mainly in Turbo Pascal. I had a manual I printed out, and some kind of BBS usenet-like forum thing.
The docs were so sparse and the communities so small that it really was a much different experience than today. I have fond memories of it, but that might just be me looking back with rose colored glasses.
I would have killed for stack overflow though! But there is a sense of self directed mastery that you don't get when you are so much more familiar with how fast the bodies of knowledge are.
The closest I get to that these days is trying to hack code on a plane :)
"Digital media" is a gigantic umbrella and there are so many variations and confounding factors that I doubt anything useful could come from a study like this. As with anything that has the potential for addiction or maladaptive behavior, the difference between healthy and unhealthy consumption comes down to moderation and mindful consumption.
Interesting points mentioned about genetic influence and heritability of intelligence..
"We believe that studies with genetic data could clarify causal claims and correct for the typically unaccounted role of genetic predispositions. Here, we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic status."
"The contradictions among studies on screen time and cognition are likely due to limitations of cross-sectional designs, relatively small sample sizes, and, most critically, failures to control for genetic predispositions and socio-economic context. Although studies account for some confounding effects, very few have accounted for socioeconomic status and none have accounted for genetic effects. This matters because intelligence, educational attainment, and other cognitive abilities are all highly heritable."
I’ve tried to encourage my wife to choose video games over Disney+ when she needs to drop the kids in front of something, but she still has a strong resistance to the idea that games are better.
To me, it’s pretty obvious. The kids problem solve when gaming, and are obviously engaged. When watching TV, they look like zombies.
I think my wife’s biggest hang up with games is that she was always told that they rot your brain. Also, our kids talk about games, but never about TV which she interprets as games being more addictive. I interpret it as games being more interesting and engaging.
I recall, when I was a kid the games were extremely addictive for me and I couldn't just quit playing unless I absolutely have to. I had emotionally very similar experience when quitting smoking, the feeling that if I just can have this one more smoke I will be satisfied and live happily thereafter is very similar to the desire to have one more round.
So I wouldn't call games "not addictive". If anything, watching something on TV is often less adictive because you are told a story with its introduction, climax and ending(up until the Netflix ruined everything with it's endless shovelware).
IMHO, the key is moderation. A day with diverse activities is a day well spent, kid or adult.
Today, if I play Sid Meier's Civilization, a day or two would be completely gone and I will be disconnected from the reality and I will need to re-adapt to the real world. I suspect, excessive gamings primary risk is developing unhealthy understanding of the world in the area where the game simulates the real thing.
> Letting your children roam unattended is not child abuse
I'd check your local laws around this. I know people in my city have been investigated for Child Neglect for letting their 7 year old walk to the mailbox alone.
I absolutely would. It sickens me how our society seems hellbent on making sure everyone is anxious and fearful of everything, all of the time. If people do not stand up and push back, this sort of government paternalism just keeps intruding. I'd fight any charges against me to the supreme court if necessary, and I'd hope they'd set a precedent.
I think there is something to do with agency. Look at the video games kids are playing, like minecraft. They are building homes, changing the environment to suit their needs, stockpiling resources, linearly levelling up, etc. It's a lot more enticing than being told what to do every day in scouts or marching up that same tired old trail you are already bored to death of, or seeing your skills plateau in sports. Plus there aren't even many adults doing these things anymore to pass on to their kids. Hard to become a teenage fisherman when you don't have a family member to teach you to tie a lure or what bait is good for where, or have a spare rod you can use, and have no money to buy a rod since you aren't working yet, and have no way to even get to somewhere to get a rod or even get to a fishing hole without your parents making time to shuttle you about. Hard to play catch when your dad doesn't own a glove to toss with you.
Sure but not everyone has access to these all the time. When I was a kid, I used to live in a smaller town on the river Danube and I did my fair share of biking and fishing. Those are definitely great activities that everyone who can should do but watching TV and playing video games is also nice. The more options you have the luckier you are.
Disagree with this categorization, unless one lives in Chernobyl there is always something to do outdoors solo or with a party. Using your body as it was designed to be physically active is naturally good for the body and the mind
Come to Istanbul or any 5M-10M+ city. Anything outdoors is hours away for the most, so it's a special occasion and cannot be a daily activity. Those who have access, they use it. Most don't have access.
Europe tends to be on the better side of the things because the cities are not gargantuous. Amerikan suburbs thanks to the early driving age probably situated fine too but I hear that helicopter parenting is widespread in the USA, so maybe they have the opportunity but don't use it?
I remember riding my bike through the rain and hitting puddles full speed and doing skids on wet grass and absolutely loving it. I also remember we used to go catch and observe certain insects and frogs that would only be seen in the rain.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just bad weather can be an opportunity for children too. What about doing art? Lego ? Even cooking something fun?
Recently my friends kids were going mad because they wanted to jump on the trampoline but she wouldn’t let them because it was raining. I really couldn’t see the logic behind it. I’d just let them go for it.
If they’ve been outside doing stuff all day I can’t see how they’d need more stimulus, maybe a bit of TV / relaxation is good for them ?
The comments seemed framed as if it was TV or games, that’s all.
That's a somewhat popular term already. It was especially useful in the days of shareware/careware and close-source freeware distributed largely on CD or dial-up BBSes. You'd buy a CD with 650 MB of content, and depending on the publisher it might be 1/4 or 9/10 just crap.
I.e. the problem isn't video games, it's ads, greed, and lazy parenting.
It's not that hard to find good games. Even our moms managed to know Nintendo. We were annoyed that every video game was a "Nintendo" to our moms, but thinking back on it, that meant mom walks into game store and asks for Nintendo, can't go wrong there.
that just sounds like ADHD. the ADHD brain craves stimulation and games are a pretty easy place to find it. Modern life is kinda boring, especially if you grow up in a US suburb.
My addiction to video games led me to software development.
Addiction is a peculiar thing. Anything that makes you feel good is inherently addictive. People get addicted to biting their fingernails.
Is it bad to be addicted to reading? Or working out? If gaming is making your synapses fire faster, if for nothing more than to increase your IQ score (which is based on speed), is it a bad addiction?
Addiction is a compulsion to do something you would not chose to do. It really depends on that something whether it's good or bad for you. Addiction is something everyone will have to deal with at some point in life. Learning it from gaming is probably not a bad thing.
Not every addict makes something out of their addiction but every addict gives a lot of their potential away, often their health too.
A lot of people become software developers without being addicted to games. Great software developers bring things on the table that they learned doing stuff that is not software development, gaming is one of those but people are capable to do so many great things.
Nerding over something is cool but when it becomes an addiction, it's dangerous.
Right. I would begin to see addiction to gaming as a potential problem at the threshold where it interferes with other aspects of one's life. For as much as I loved gaming as a kid, it never posed a problem. I still played sports and finished schoolwork. Probably it overtook some potential social time, but I also lived in a pretty isolated area, so w/e.
It's funny, because people put a premium on creativity and inspiration for their children, but that level of engagement is indistinguishable from that of addiction to gaming. Even without gaming in the picture, it's not uncommon for parents to get leery at the prospect of their kids spending all their time on books or a musical instrument.
They want to see a balance according to their preferred level of allocation to every activity, but still see savant-like engagement. It's absurd. Geniuses are geniuses because they go into the deep end. You can make the case that it might be possible to manipulate the environment to the extent that obsessive engagement will likely follow one path over another, but ultimately it's not up to you, and I don't see one as objectively more important than another.
Nintendo games on a console that don’t need an internet connection or include advertising. These have been the best combination for our kids where they have fun but aren’t addicted and can easily put them down.
The moment games include advertising they optimize for all the wrong things. I won’t let my kids get free games on iPad, etc for this reason alone.
Not a parent but if I was, I would absolutely get them a Switch over an Xbox/PS5. While games can be hit and miss on XB/PS, Nintendo seems to really have their shit together when it comes to releasing consistent high quality games with no shenanigans.
The downside is the games never go on sale so you aren't getting any deals but the upside is that you can give your kid just about any Nintendo game and not worry about shenanigans around loot boxes, ads and other crap they stick inside games now.
I was trying to game on my brother's iPad (M1 chip) and realised that iPad even though powerful are absolutely trash when it comes to the free video gaming market. Filled to the brim with advertisement, slot machines, lootboxes, paid powerups to levelup. Only acceptable games were paid like Minecraft, terraria, Limbo etc. But they cost too much on the iPad. I won't advise strangers on how to raise kids but a steam deck ( if its available in your region ) with parental settings on has a huge list of games which go on sale very often or Nintendo switch would be a great option for kids to play.
I tried so hard to find good free games on my brother's ipad but I realised, thats not what an iPad is good for. Its Excellent for video content consumption, reading, surfing web but not gaming period. I remember a time when there were lots of beautiful video games on my nexus tablet but the switch to freemium model has completely turned the mobile market into a dumpster fire.
Regardless of ads or Internet connectivity requirements, I can find hardly any acceptable games on phones/tablets, in mobile app stores. If you want to play games on the go, I suggest a proper videogame console, like a 3DS.
I agree, and thanks for the advice. However, as another commenter pointed out, I believe the lack of good games in mobile app stores is a direct consequence of the economic model, driven by ads and internet connectivity.
Agreed. The constant dopamine hit with sounds and flashing colors set a horrible precedence. It's bad enough television advertisements hit all the right spots, now video games are a minefield their selves.
Games are designed to be addictive, so restraint is a good option. So is television, though, so limiting both is a good policy. I would guess that games' interactivity and personalization lead to much more opportunities for deeper addiction, though (see e.g loot boxes.)
Limiting both is a good policy, but understanding the different games is also an important aspect here. When my kids were in elementary school I encouraged them to play Minecraft and I played with them. I didn't prevent them from playing Clash of Clans because so many of their friends were playing, but I made sure they understood how incentives were structured and how the game was designed around that.
That was ten years ago, and I still don't know if I struck the right balance. Parenting is hard. If you have young kids today it's a good idea to understand what games are popular and what their business models are.
It depends strongly on kind of game, and especially on the business model involved. Gacha games, free-to-play, and similar models are very much optimised around addictiveness. Personally I've found that story-based finite games, i.e. the ones you play through and then you've experienced it, are much better in those respects. Unfortunately those seem to become much more rare these days.
> i.e. the ones you play through and then you've experienced it, are much better in those respects.
This has not been my experience at all. It's very easy for me to play a few rounds of rocket league and keep my daily game time to under an hour. When I play stuff like Zelda BOTW though, I have to use the parental controls on myself or else I'll spend half of my day on it.
In my observation, the platform matters. The iPad has a noticeable negative impact on my kids mood in ~15 minutes, and I’ve observed similar behavior with other tablets and other kids.
The PlayStation doesn’t seem to do that, although my son gets in trouble more often when it’s time to end because there is a higher level of effort to get out. But it doesn’t seem to zombify him.
I think BOTW, while it has a beginning and ending, is much more open than some other games where you're on a structured path.
However I think it speaks that everyone has a different approach and solution to how they play games. It then becomes interesting to see what they play and how they limit their self.
Are old games designed to be addictive? The original NES and Sega games? Like Mario Bros, etc? I think more recent games added the addictive components
Old games were designed similarly to arcade games, where the "true" goal was to get you to keep inserting coins. Then there was kind of a slow transition away from that, but they still relied heavily on the player spending a lot of time replaying prior levels to get to the harder (final) ones due to the limited amount of content.
IMO it was addictive, but only to certain personality types. Mine is definitely one of them. Others would see a difficulty spike and/or the amount of re-treading they need to do to make progress as a deterrent.
Recent games are more addictive in a way that appeals more widely.
Id disagree that console games were the same as arcade. Arcade often had gimmicks that _required_ more quarters, whereas console encouraged mastery (e.g. learning boss patterns, level layouts, etc). Very few console games would need a game genie to beat, but many arcade games are near impossible with a single quarter.
In reality for certain personalities (myself included) that focus on mastery is actually the addictive bit, and I think its a productive addiction all things considered. Im not addicted to the mind-numbing aspect of playing, I'm addicted to the huge amount of knowledge I need to gain in order to succeed. Its the same reason I was drawn to DOTA and Magic later in life.
A single quarter? Perhaps, though every arcade had a few wizards that, through mastery of the game and its mechanics, could play for much longer on much less money. I couldn't tell you how many were literally impossible on a single play, though I don't see the distinction as particularly important. In both cases, the idea is clearly to have the player continuously retrying, getting more and more skilled, and going further and further. They both absolutely encouraged mastery.
They may not be as refined, or they may not have been mistaken at what qualities were addictive, but they were designed to be addictive.
Of course, the incentives were also a little different. Old arcade, for example, games wanted you to drop in more quarters. So they had to find ways to make you lose. But not just lose, lose when you're just close enough to the next level.
Some games are addictive and some television is garbage. You have to be picky with both. Older Disney films had some great music, animation, and morals. Good video games make you think or build reflexes.
If I had a kid they'd have a laptop running Linux with all the open source games (and some of the older Nintendo ones on emulators) and probably a collection of older films on DVD.
> To me, it’s pretty obvious. The kids problem solve when gaming, and are obviously engaged. When watching TV, they look like zombies.
Are you not just seeing what you want to see? Maybe from your wife's perspective, the kids are carefully to observing and learning a wide range of human emotions, social dynamics, new idioms and music from Disney+, whereas in their games they're learning a few tricks that they repeat ad nauseam to get some trivial rewards from their digital Skinner boxes?
Amen, my preschooler got a lot out of watching (quality) shows, learning about conflict resolution, expressing & communicating, and so on. Learning to relate with complex emotions that characters were experiencing was a big cognitive milestone.
> I think my wife’s biggest hang up with games is that she was always told that they rot your brain
People used to say that about TV too.
I always feel a bit personally attacked when people claim videogames are just bad for you full stop. I'm really passionate about games, I grew up playing NES, and just never stopped. I almost always have a new game waiting to play for when I'm finished with what I'm currently playing.
Sample size of one, but I don't think my brain is rotten. I have a pretty successful career in software, I have a close partner, I have a social life. I have other hobbies too, but it's my main one.
Don't get me wrong, I know my gaming takes time away from other stuff I could/should be doing, like building side projects or getting enough exercise. But TV does the same, so in a choice between the two I pick gaming any day
As others have said, highly dependent on the game. My kids playing minecraft together on the TV? I have no trouble at all with that. Them sitting, like zombies, playing shovelware android games? I am likely to shout at them to go out and play when that happens.
Games and Watching Videos are two different dopamine rewards systems, but both are still dopamine rewards systems. I encourage my kid for games more than watching youtube or doing anything less challenging. However, I still worry about when the stubbornness of leaving the games appear.
One rule I made to myself is simply don't encourage anything just for dopamine rewards. I try to mix things with effort, contemplation, or interaction. Doing something like this specific rule: No more than 1h playing Minecraft alone. If you want to keep playing, ask Dad, Mom, or your cousins to play together; the same for Watching videos.
in what may be somewhat more of a hot take, i would argue that there is an incredible amount of educational value to be found even within the most meritless garbage games as they are still fundamentally systems to be dissected and solved and learning the maximally efficient way to do something worthless is a skillset that transfers quite handily to the valuable things in life. also unlike tv, games have a lot of potential to be immensely collaborative [or competitive] and social. some of my fondest childhood memories were going to my friend's house and co-oping diablo with one of us controlling the mouse and the other controlling the keyboard. there are many far less ad-hoc ways for kids to share games and even singleplayer is a highly rewarding shared experience.
Very very honestly, my experience with people who watch Disney too much is much much better then with excessive gamers. Only one of those groups yells, swears and is vent their anger at people around when they loose the match.
For the record, my kids do play games, I never did complete ban. But, the gaming does not seem to be superior, does not zombify them less nor leads to more inventive play after session finished.
Because competitive games are a cesspit. Even games with highly competitive PvE aspects have this problem (MMOs, most notably). Ironically, those are also the games which allow for the highest time investment for the common player. Mostly because everyone is online and anonymous, which subsequently keeps their filters from activating.
By comparison, I've never had a local game of Mario Party remotely as heated as the average experience in a competitive, online game. Not even after Chance Time did the unthinkable.
The downsides of Disney are a little more subtle, too.
The one thing everyone who plays a competitive game has in common is wishing they played less. Part of it is definitely self selection, people who aren't competitive never start playing these games
Not the same. Sports have refs, coaches, and parents. Yes it is possible to get a bad outcome in sports but there is no container in competitive online gaming. It is Lord of the Flies by design.
Gamers have their clans too and people can get kicked from that. You can get mic banned or worse too for being too flagrant. You can lose real money if microsoft bans you and you had a bunch of digital games for example. In sports its not like all the interactions are going to be moderated either. Sports are pretty notorious for talking crap about the opposition, but it can get much worse than just talking crap. I heard a lot of terrible racist things too during my time in high school sports just 10 years ago, from players and parents. There are a lot of nasty people out there and they perpetuate those views on their kids.
Actually in competitive scenarios, e.g. tournaments, there are. Add to the fact ranked play is generally better behaved.
Speaking of parents, from my experience playing hockey, they are usually the worst offenders. Yelling at not just the refs, but the kids too. I've seen intimidation in more than one occasion.
At any rate, concern over the prospect of kids being "angry" is a weak take.
You think these eight-year-olds are playing video games in tournaments?
As someone who coaches elementary school sports players, I can tell instantly the ones who play online competitive video games and those who don’t. Sample size is maybe only ~40 kids, but I’m convinced.
Maybe it improves behavior later but the ones who do are initially the worst sports I’ve seen in my life. I have to spend time before every practice and game reiterating stuff like “it’s not ok to pretend to teabag the other players”.
I’ll agree parents have changed a lot since I played. I think the poor example they set influences this generation of parents.
I am not concerned over them feeling angry. I am concerned over yelling, swearing, mistreating younger siblings or other family member after playing. If that does not happen, fine. But when it does happen, younger sibling or grandma are more entitled to not be target of aggression then someone else of gaming.
The exactly same way as with adults - whether they feel angry does not matter. Whether they demand everyone else to tip toe around them after/during playing, whether they loudly swear or hit the table with fists does matter.
If I had seen people act the same way in sport or other activity I would. Which actually also happen in real life, when some club or sport becomes source of bad peer pressure, many parents wont allow kids to participate.
Just my memory but eg gaming cafes have resulted in numerous deaths from exhaustion (World of Warcraft) while I cannot recall the same ever happening at a soap opera cafe (does this exist?) or sports bar.
Also can we talk about the hoarding instinct that develops? I always max out my inventory, ie my basement. Just in case I need to craft or sell something, which I almost never do.
Why are you trying to fight over what is the best for your kids?
Both have obvious benefits: Grimm Brothers tales are still culturally relevant for a reason, even if you can probably find useless brain fodder on Disney+; and video games can totally teach some stuff to your kids.
Reasoning through combat strategy, even in the age-inappropriate context of gun battles, exercises higher level thinking that clearly remains off when watching Ryan’s world.
To be fair, the article does say watching videos had a positive effect as well.
The people handwringing about combat games have obviously never played them and their complaints reflect that. War is brutal, violence is terrible, and when you hear that there is some army game where you shoot people, you naturally think thats terrible, and I don't blame them for thinking that from their gut. But its nothing like the experience of being in an army and shooting people and dealing with that of course. You are playing capture the flag or something like that; team deathmatches are kinda like a basketball game racking up as much points as you can in the time period. No one actually dies, they respawn in five seconds and try again. Its basically just a game of electronic dodge ball or tag, or even basketball if you squint. campaign shooting games feel like those carnival shooting games with the flashing lights and point values for different targets, especially games like call of duty where its just march through the campaign and rack up points for different levels.
That's all they really are when you remove the theming and look at the actual mechanics of the game. the mechanics aren't screwed up or morally bankrupt or anything like that, they are the same games we've always played of racking up points or moving an object across a playing field or something like that. It's probably the reason why the fps formula is so successful, it plays almost like the games we already like kinda like basketball (with deathmatch) or football/soccer (with capture the flag or assault style gamemodes moving some object offensively or defending as a team).
They spend a decent amount of the week doing after school clubs/sports - so sometimes they fancy an hour of playing Mariokart or wii sports or something - I prefer that because then we can join in as well.
(Otherwise they love watching Ninjago - which tbf I don't mind that much!)
Hang in there. Your kids will require less supervision as they grow older. But also the stakes are higher as the potential for emotional turmoil and property damage increase.
I get a few hours after they're in bed and before I go to bed in which to cram cleanup, catching up with my wife, and other bits of essential life maintenance.
It does get easier as they age. Our youngest is three, so I have a while before the "hanging off my legs" phase is done, but I can remember the era of newborns, when I could be interrupted at any moment, and I couldn't count on an entire hour to myself at any point during the day or night.
(FWIW, a big part of making this work is shifting your mindset to appreciate the little things and recognize how precious they actually are. At this point I cherish being woken up by a wailing toddler and rocking her back to sleep, because I know I won't get many more moments in my life when she's a tiny little bundle snuggled up and cozy against my chest, and it's truly magical when I manage not to be hung up on anger over being woken up at 3 AM.)
You have about 1,000 weekends with your kids before they are legally adults. My children are mostly grown up now (18 and 14) and, despite the sleepless nights, I miss having them fall asleep in my arms and their absolute wonder of the world as infants and toddlers.
I appreciate the perspective. I kind of agree with you however my ideas slightly changed over the last year. It is hard to keep spending as much time as possible with kids when you are also trying to make a living and prepare for a better future for them. I think a balanced approach is better for your mental health and also for their future.
Why can't the kids play among themselves? I have two little daughters, ages 3 and 5 and I've never had to drop them in front of something. If I have time to play with them I do (which is most days) but when I don't have time or I'm very tired or I need to do something else I tell them to play among themselves.
Telling them to go play has diminishing returns as they get older.
My kids are 18 and 14, and I've done my best to encourage creating things instead of consuming things.. but sometimes they need some down-time, and so do I.
That's great. Keep doing this as much as you can. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to spend much time with their kids, so if you do, don't squander the opportunity.
It's going to be harder to keep these boundaries as your daughters grow older and their natural personalities develop. They'll likely take interest in whatever their friends and social peers are doing, and the two of them may go off in wildly different directions. Stay engaged and be ready to adjust your parenting techniques as the girls grow older.
I've found that doing that just makes it worse - they both have very strong personalities, so it ends up in war rather than letting me cook for 10 mins!
Nothing is better than the 10% of the time that siblings get along. The problem is that 90% of the time they actually are fighting with each other and its way more frustrating to deal with as you repeat the same exact arguments you've made every single day for the past 2 years.
I don't think the problem is that polygenic scores are noisy. (You can choose to make them less noisy by restricting to significant SNPs, for example.) And noise doesn't require directional bias. But to me there are 2 problems:
(A) Polygenic scores for behavioral traits may be estimated in GWAS where the null assumptions (e.g., that mating is not conditioned on the trait being estimated) may not be valid[1]. That is on top of the issues that we usually face for other phenotypes (e.g., more routine population stratification due to geographic history).
(B) The authors did not describe the (genetic) ancestral background of the children being studied. Current techniques are biased across ancestries, for most traits, when using polygenic scores[2]. Certainly adjusting for 20PCs in the final model, as the authors seemingly did, would not be expected to make the scores comparable unless all of the children are from a close ancestral group.
With these sources of stratification, the polygenic score represents more (and less) than the trait that you're hoping it estimates; it also encodes population stratification.
As such, I hardly think this study can be interpreted.
> You can choose to make them less noisy by restricting to significant SNPs, for example.
That makes them more noisy, not less. PGS predictive power for EDU/IQ is always maximized at use of all SNPs. Restricting to the arbitrary subset of genome-wide statistically-significant SNPs in Lee would drive it from the 7% or so they have to <1%, IIRC.
Also, neither of your two problems are the problem here, as the biases there would not be expected to drive a correlation between video game playing & IQ (what sort of within-ethnic interaction would you need for that and why is it plausible?), and would mostly serve to simply not control for intelligence (and quantitatively, because the PGS here is a small fraction of the variance, even gross biases which somehow did manage to drive correlations between those two variables, would still be unable to meaningfully affect the estimates).
Using only genome-wide significant SNPs reduces the amount of variance explained by the polygenic score, which is what you describe and I agree with. My comment about the concern about "noise" is with respect to a sibling comment ("Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects.") That is the "noise" that I was addressing. And just as you say, the noise is, essentially, a worthwhile cost to pay since it should not be directional, and so we use various approaches to include thousands or millions of SNPs in these scores.
> Also, neither of your two problems are the problem here
I don't agree. These problems occur very clearly in any mixed-ancestry analyses, and they have to be carefully accounted for or else they induce between-ancestry bias. It's not a function of the phenotype itself (i.e., I'm not making a comment about intelligence); this is true for all polygenic scores.
They say that some of their main conclusions change if they control for parental education level, which they did not do. So that makes it all sounds questionable. Plus I've never heard of the journal; don't be misled into thinking it's a high profile Nature journal. Someone else here says it's a low quality journal.
Measuring "Intelligence" always seems to result in some questionable science.....
That being said I do wonder about how I would have turned out had my childhood not been spent hiding under the covers at night with a small light devouring novel after novel and instead been inundated with social media and other distractions.
I would love to know what "watching videos" means here. There's a big difference between educational YouTube (Kurzgesagt, Physics Girl, Vertitasium, etc) and TV.
I think it is better to focus on getting kids to do creative projects. For example, parents should get them to write and illustrate a story once a month, or learn to play a music instrument, etc. If kids are doing interesting projects that change yearly and they work to improve their skills then the amount of time they spend on digital media will decrease and will not be a concern.
Having kids do projects is super helpful.
1) It builds their confidence in their ability
2) It shows the world (e.g. college admission boards) how they are valuable
3) It can become a way for them to be their own boss
4) It allows them to figure out what they want to be
5) It keeps them busy and out of trouble
The "get them to" part is the killer. I was easily frustrated as a kid and quit a lot of things in hindsight that I wish I stuck with. You never realize that time now is an investment for later, or that learning curves are different for everyone as a kid. I think that environment where you are in a cohort as a kid can be challenging too. If you see a few people in your class who are really good at something and you are struggling, that kills your confidence, and you will probably quit before actually putting in the work you need to get yourself to that same level and just assume it will always be impossible for you. As an adult now I see a lot of my peers still with this mentality and they drop new hobbies fast. Life is a slow march though and you shouldn't hold yourself to the standards of others, but that's a lifelong lesson that even 35 year olds are learning, and not something you can easily tell a 5 year old.
Of course, if you push too hard the other way, your kid may just hate the skill and drop it. I knew a lot of people who were forced into piano lessons, and got very good at it too. Many quit over the years due to that resentment once their parents gave them the choice, and today never play any music in adulthood. Such a shame.
TL;DR - the complexity of media has been increasing over the past decades, which means that children spending time with digital media are benefiting from it relative to past generations.
As an example, playing a modern AAA video game is much more mentally stimulating than playing Pong. But also, watching an hour of a modern TV show, or even a modern reality show, is more challenging mentally than watching classic TV from the 60s and 70s—there are many, many more plots and relationship dynamics to track and speculate about.
A counter argument (made by Alan Kay and others) is that the language complexity of what people read is reducing which is leading to a return to an oral culture rather than literate culture (to our collective detriment). My anecdotal experience as a high school English teacher leads me to say this feels true.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but I think Johnson had hypothesized that more modern reading experiences (e.g. browsing the Internet) might require more context switching and mental processing than traditional written formats like a newspaper. Granted, he wrote the book in 2005, but I do think memes and other internet-native forms of content are challenging in new and different ways.
I wonder what Johnson thinks about the decline of reading going on in parallel to the rise of TV viewership? It's true that old shows or movies might have had simpler and more tidy plots (not all of them of course), but I think even the most complicated modern shows aren't nearly so complicated as a basic novel. Case in point, anything adapted from print to tv or film has a lot of plot left out because there simply isn't enough time to convey that information given the lower information density of these forms of media vs the printed page. Before serialized TV was also serialized stories that could have very complicated subplots and other things going on. Then you have the newspaper itself with all of its complicated real world subplots; a lot more content certainly than what the talking heads on CNN can cover even with 24 hour news.
It's interesting with the internet too, even though there should be a lot more stories in the zeitgeist at once given its wide reach, sometimes due to its virality, one storyline is able to dominate everything at once and suck the air out of the room. Did we really need a dozen article about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in everything from Reuters to The Atlantic for seemingly two whole days? If you only got news from twitter that might consume your entire feed. If you got your news from the newspaper, that would at most just consume one article or two out of many others of pages of printed material. It would also be limited to probably one section of the many different sections of the paper all covering different news topics.
Copying a comment from below - it’s been a while since I read the book, but I think Johnson had hypothesized that more modern reading experiences (e.g. browsing the Internet) might require more context switching and mental processing than traditional written formats like a newspaper. Granted, he wrote the book in 2005, but I do think memes and other internet-native forms of content are challenging in new and different ways.
Can't say whether they're addictive or not. My personal opinion based on my own history is that the reward system in games (levelling up etc.) made me feel like I'd achieved something while in reality, I just entertained myself.
Long hours of gaming and imbibing this translated over into the real world where it became harder for me to put in effort because I had to see rewards accumulate as a score somewhere and that wasn't happening.
Looking back in my childhood, I clearly exhibited sign of addition.
Walking into arcade filled me with joy. Trying to decide which game to play. Imagining if I'm going to finally beat Wonderboy on one coin. Playing Kabal with my brother.
I was a good kid, but I would STEAL money from Mom's purse occasionally to satisfy my arcade craving.
Is the effect of media on intelligence really the primary concern?
Ad absurdum: if watching the Kardashians for two hours a day doubled your intelligence (however you decide to measure that) would you do it? Would you have your kids do it?
I am very out of touch w/ the current world of gaming, but in my past experience Nintendo has always been the 'healthiest' platform. The games are full of beautiful animation and great music - truly works of art, and aren't violent and/or trying to get them to buy things.
I worry about my future children's relationship with technology, especially social media.
But I'm not really concerned about general intelligence. As a parent I feel I have some input into their intellectual growth (to the extent environment allows). I'm far more concerned about the impact of social media on their emotional wellbeing. How they interact with others, and how they view themselves.
In Australia the Government is trying to regulate social media companies. For example, last year it introduced an "anti-trolling" bill, which would require companies to reveal the identities of anonymous trolls. And this is only the beginning of what in my opinion is heavy-handed Government overreach that will not improve the online experience of young people.
Despite being a fairly libertarian person, I'm open to a discussion on banning social media for people under a certain age (16? 18?). And then getting rid of all/most regulations on content.
Not saying this is something we should do right now, or that it's definitely a good idea. I'm just saying I think it's a discussion worth having.
So it's confirmed? Gaming > Socializing? /s