More Good News About Videogames

As my readers know, I am always looking for good news about the effects of my two major hobbies–drinking coffee and playing Zelda. I confess to struggling with good critical thinking practices when it comes to the relevant literatures–I am predisposed to think coffee is a major food group (hey, it’s a Swedish thing) and that videogames are just too much fun to be bad for you.

A Science Teacher for the 21st Century?

So with that fine print disclaimer out of the way, let’s turn our attention to an interesting set of papers from the APA annual conference. First up, Fran Blumberg and Sabrina Ismailer of Fordham University reported that playing a videogame increased cognitive and perceptual skills in 5th, 6th, and 7th graders. What I liked about this study is that it does NOT involve self-selection. In other words, everybody plays the same game. In contrast, Doug Gentile and William Stone of Iowa State are back to concluding that students playing violent games are more hostile, less forgiving, and more likely to view violence as normal. The self-selection factor in these studies is huge, and the media are all too quick to turn correlation into causality.

Of greater interest to me were other studies by Gentile and Stone that showed that laparoscopic surgeons who played video games were faster in surgery and made fewer errors. When I first read this result, my reaction was oh gosh, please tell me they controlled for age. A sixty year old surgeon is much less likely to play videogames than a 30 year old, right? And a 60 year old is not going to have the reaction time of the 30 year old. They did control for sex, years of medical training, and number of surgeries performed, but without seeing the original paper yet, I can’t tell if age was controlled. My guess is that number of surgeries performed is decently correlated with age. This finding could lead to some very interesting interviews if you’re selecting a surgeon. How many hours do you spend playing videogames, doctor? Or how about the inclusion of videogame homework in the medical curriculum?

Finally, Constance Steinkuehler and Sean Duncan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed discussion boards affiliated with the famed World of Warcraft (WOW to the informed) and concluded that scientific thinking can be learned in virtual worlds. To me, that’s a huge plus. We all read about how Americans lag behind in science and math, and that’s scary. To reason scientifically is to reason rationally, whether one is thinking about science, politics, or personal decisions. If videogames can help us instill scientific reasoning, that’s a huge step forward.