Interesting Discover Magazine article
July's Discover Magazine has an article on page 38 written by Steven Johnson, titled "Your Brain on Video Games." Page 38 is a rather interesting graphic (by Matt Mahurin) of faintly glowing Tetris blocks falling to form the top of a man's head; the motif of these blue Tetris blocks is repeated throughout the article. The caption for the Tetrishead includes the phrase "...learning expert James Gee's research reveals that typical teenage gamers are anything but addlebrained. 'We had a hard time finding kids who were bad at school but good at games,' Gee says." Fun stuff. The article starts out relaying the story of James Gee, "a professor of learning sciences at the University of Wisconsin," who apparently got owned the first time he tried out a game his son Sam had been demanding to play - "Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside."
[Pardon my direct quotes and halfassed paraphrases.]
The language here is interesting:
"These scholars [Gee and other researchers] are the first to admit that games can be addictive, and indeed part of their research explores how games connect to the reward circuits of the human brain. But they are now beginning to recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition [for example, did you notice that they've use the root three times in quick succession here - Ed], system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body..."
The next section deals with how Richard Haier (professr of psychology at the University of California, Irvine) traced glucose levels in the brain as novice players learned Tetris: after some months of practice with the game, glucose levels dropped. The training allowed subjects to intuitively grasp the mechanics and internalize the rules and patterns of the game so that their brain simply didn't need as much energy to figure it out. Almost 10 years later, Gee found out why: games are "embedded" with one of the "core principles of learning--students prosper when the subject matter challenges them right at the edge of their abilities." In professional terms: "Cognitive psychologists call this the 'regime of competence' principle."
Games mentioned by name are (a long list): The New Adventures of The Time Machine (a title Gee tried out after his experience with his son's game, dates his experience a bit, doesn't it?), Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (check the illustration on page 40, with a rather PlayStation-like controller, but even so strangely different with elongated grips and red d-pad and buttons), The Sims (original), Grand Theft Auto III ("Even a violent game like GTA III involves networks of characters that the player must navigate and master, picking up clues and detecting patterns;" the guide for GTA III is said here to be 53,000 words long, the length of "a short novel" !), PONG ("even Pong got more challenging as a player's skills improved"), Medal of Honor (page 41, test subjects found to have improved visual skills), Tactical Ops, Pokemon ("a great cognitive developer, if it's being scaffolded by the parents and they're getting their kids to talk about it," says Gee), SimCity (2000, actually; it's called simply SimCity near the end of the article, where Johnson reveals his nephew learned the rule of urban economics that areas zoned for specific uses can turn out badly if zone-specific taxes are too high), and in an interestingly shaped yellow "sidebar" along the top of pages 43 and 42 titled "Steven Johnson's Top Brain Games:" Black & White, World of Warcraft, The Sims 2, and...Katamari Damacy ("it may be the most original video game of the last five years")!
A "Discover More" sidebar advertises Johnson's book: "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How TOday's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter." Steven Johnson. Riverhead Books, 2005. Johnson's blog is at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com (Steven Berlin Johnson .com). On the resources page: "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever." John Beck and Mitchell Wade. Harvard Business School Press, 2004; and "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy." James Paul Gee. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Overall, a great article, and I think it underlines why people continue to buy new games as fast as they can, and why relatively few games manage to bring us back year after year.
The bombshell of the article, I think, comes with this quote, though, on the question of what sorts of skills gamers are learning: "They're going to think well about systems; they're going to be good at exploring; they're going to be good at reconceptualizing their goals based on their experience; they're not going to judge people's intelligence just by how fast and efficient they are; and they're going to think nonlaterally. In our current world with its complex systems that are quite dangerous, those are damn good ways to think."
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