[recycled material - first appeared here]
Video games = bad. Right? Wrong. Why? Because it is a hasty answer to a bogus questions: Are video games good or bad?
Critical thinkers will examine and critique a question before answering it. Video games--which video games? Good or bad--in what ways? And, importantly--good OR bad? Is this black/white thinking helpful?
While the vast majority of research into video games has focused on the violent type and how they might influence human beings to be more aggressive/violent, there have been a few studies on other types of video games having a more beneficial affect on behavior. But there are a few. A new one has just been published in the June 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. And the science behind it seems relatively solid.
The article presents the findings of three separate studies, conducted in different countries with different age groups, and using different scientific approaches. All the studies find that playing games with prosocial content causes players to be more helpful to others after the game is over.
Co-author Brad Bushman said,
These studies show the same kind of impact on three different age groups from three very different cultures.
Good. I like that. But then I think Brad got a bit carried away with this statement,
The resulting triangulation of evidence provides the strongest possible proof that the findings are both valid and generalizable.
Boy do I hate the word "proof." Fine, use it in mathematics. But for forensics and psychology and virtually all of science, I find the term inappropriate. Proof has too much certitude and finality infused into it. Evidence is better.
That said, we can now see how the question, "Are video games good or bad?" is a bogus question, particularly if we expect a brief answer.
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[source] University of Michigan (2009, June 18). Some Video Games Can Make Children Kinder And More Likely To Help. ScienceDaily.
Do violent video games actually alter your brain?
Of course. Eating a piece of pie will alter your brain, at least in the short term. Some areas will become more or less active, other areas may undergo an increase in the circulating amount of "yum, pie" neurochemicals. (Or maybe decrease because they have all bound to their receptors, resulting in dessert euphoria.)
But what about in the longer term? Exciting new experimental results suggest "maybe." Although the news release title does not include that word.
Violent video games alter brain function in young men
Why "exciting"? For a few reasons: the issue is controversial; the research data is fairly strong, being generated by an experiment; there is a potential that I could have my previous high-doubt position corrected.
Yang Wang, lead presenter of the paper at the 2011 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America), concluded -
"For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home."
Interesting.
As for the good of this study: random assignment to experimental and control groups, with a measure of brain changes done relatively objectively (fmri).
The not-so-good--maybe even the "terribly flawed"--is this: It seems the control group was not given a placebo-like task. Oh-oh. They simply didn't play the games. The consequence is that we can't really conclude it was the violence in the video games that caused the brain changes. Can we? I would have liked to see the control group play highly-competitive word games. Or something. If that had been done, I think Yang would have been more justified in making this claim:
"These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning."
An additional criticism might be the use of "long-term." In this case, long term was "a week." Significantly, "the video game group refrained from game play for an additional week," resulting in "the changes to the executive regions of the brain returned closer to the control group."
Is that truly long-term, or merely long-ish term?
It seems this smoking gun may have had some dry ice inserted into its barrel.
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