Do video games rot our children's brains?

[Darren Dirt]

Is Boris Johnson right? Do video games rot our children's brains? by Frank Mainwaring

For those who haven't seen the original story: http://www.boris-johnson.com/archives/2006/12/computer_games.php#comments

I apologise for the borrowing and hackneyed use of the title here....but to refute Boris Johnson's article and have an eye-catching title that I hope will lead to real debate, I had to cheat a little. I hope that this catches his eye, and I welcome it. Please, Boris, do some research....I hope you find some of my points a good place to start:

1. You open your article' and use emotive terms designed to inspire fear and loathing to behaviour which you describe as being "a sudden narcotic withdrawal". 2. Deprive any child of an activity they love and you will experience a backlash of inappropriate behaviour. One only has to watch the proliferation of "Supernanny" style programs to see that this behaviour can be attributed more to the parents than the child. 3. In your first paragraph you use the words narcotic, withdrawal, drug and addiction. This predilection for these words displays not only your ignorance in this area, but your bias and lack of understanding by the flagrant promulgation of wrong assumptions and lazy semiological shorthand.

I do not intend to go through the whole article and blow it up piece by piece, as this is not a personal attack. This is the view from someone who views the overall games market as being a tool that can be used for good or ill, but not inherently evil. In order to refute your assumptions I please ask you to take into account the following:

1. You attack the falling standards of education on children between the ages of 7-15 being "addicted" (your word) to videogames. You show no proof of this whilst there are proven works which show that since the election of New Labour in 1997, educational standards have fallen. If you know your videogame history, you will realise that videogames, consoles or arcades in shape or form have been around since 1962. Home computing in the UK came of age circa 1982.

2. You seek to "paralyse Playstation". The violence of your language in "garrotte the Gameboy" belies your apparently pacifistic dogma, rather than just "switching the console off" (my words).

3. If you look at recent gaming history you will find games such as Brain Training and Big Brain Academy actually making the process of learning, and the repetition necessary for mental arithmetic (something lacking in modern schools with the allowance of calculators into maths exams!), fun.

Despite the Labour governments' introduction of the "literacy" hour, you claim that children dislike reading and you take as evidence an apparent increase in children stating such. To my mind, there is little academic rigour in such statements, and fails wholly to take into account a whole host of other socio-economic factors which are beloved of social scientists. So, a series of questions:

1. What was the sample of children made of? What age groups, gender, ethnicity (yes this is important), sample size?

2. Was the sample random? Self-selecting? How many schools, regional areas etc? Was the North/South divide taken into consideration?

3. What access to books did the children have at the school?

4. What access to books did the children have at home?

5. What educational level did the children's' parents attain?

6. What socio-economic grouping did the children's' parents belong to?

7. Did any questionnaire that was potentially used use standard Likert scales or other statistical analysis tools to avoid bias?

8. What level of comfort did the children have with new technology?

9. Did the parents teach the child to read or was this attained in school?

This still doesn't come close to even touching on those children which are placed in mainstream education despite having severe problems interacting with other children due to psychological problems; those children whose parents have abdicated their responsibility to teach manners, toilet training or table skills by the time their child reaches school age. These are major problems faced by schools today as well.

Why after nearly nine years in power has the government suddenly overturned nearly 4 decades of "right-on" social experimentation and reverted to "synthetic phonics" that USED to be taught, and achieved the hitherto unsurpassed literacy rates of the 1950s and 60s.

You criticize boys in particular for playing games. Yet never before have men had so few role models either in the classroom or at home. Men are attacked daily through law (the recent rash of collapsed rape trials changed the law against men), through the tax system, and the media. This may come across as extreme? Well, think about the stories of 2006 about men. Sexual harassment? Rape? Fathers 4 Justice? Why Women don't need men? Teachers "inappropriate relationships" with girls? To be fair there were a lot about women and boys, but look at the language used: there was more sensationalism about the women, and there "must be something wrong with them" in tone, whereas the men were "oh look, this proves it again" tone.

Where in the media do celebrities read books? It's all sport, singing, drugs and sex. Of course, if skinny celebrities can be held responsible for anorexia nervosa, why the hell can't they be held responsible for the decline in educational standards? This government, alongside its fascination with the cult of celebrity can be directly responsible for the rise of the "you can make it without work" ethic. Who wants to do the basic jobs anymore? Why should kids today get qualifications when all they have to do is take their clothes off/sing/kick a football and be famous as well as obscenely well-rewarded?

I also take exception to the fact that Boris seems to think that games are made specifically to feed boys' addictions. He might slate one videogame as pretending to be something it isn't but isn't that true of a lot of things? Why aren't girls as susceptible? Give them something with a similar stimulus, and you betcha you can find girls that can enjoy this as much as boys. Again the direct correlation is made between someone's love of videogames and the lack of reading...why? What TV consumption is there? What reading material is there available to them? These are questions with so many variables that it is utterly simplistic to relegate them into a games-versus-books debate.

There are many excellent games out there that entertain, and require a capacity to read that Boris would be at a loss to explain. There are games which cross the figurative plane of fun and reach out into the educational sphere teaching not only tactics and formulaic strategy but maths, probability theory and physics, ethics and psychology. To state that games are a such a bad influence on young people is to denigrate a whole new medium for cultural and creative expression.

Don't even get me started on how the average age of the gamer is fast approaching 30, and is therefore "no longer for the kids"(again my words).

...from the original article by "Offbase Boris":

We demand that teachers provide our children with reading skills; we expect the schools to fill them with a love of books; and yet at home we let them slump in front of the consoles. We get on with our hedonistic 21st-century lives while in some other room the nippers are bleeping and zapping in speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore. They sit for so long that their souls seem to have been sucked down the cathode ray tube.

They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious. These machines teach them nothing. They stimulate no ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory...

Is this guy stuck in 1982? Seriously though, there's a few good responses in the "comments" section, such as one by "Chris Walker":
...Try playing through a Legend of Zelda game without basic literacy. You can't, because you're required to read virtually all the way through or you won't understand what to do in even the early stages of the game. You will also need good problem solving skills later on in the game. Now, I'm not claiming to know what I'm talking about here, but I'd wager that one Legend of Zelda game will teach more about problem solving than your Classics degree ever did...

[Brendan]

no

[Mr. Analog]

no

ditto

[Darren Dirt]

[QI* Mode On]

The correct answer is No.

Because it's not just *children's* brains.

[/QI Mode On]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8ayD71cXYs <<< He's Roger, by the way. Enjoy his digital heroin.




*Quite Interesting. British comedy panel show. That makes you feel stupid as you learn stuff. Which, at times, Cracked does too, so I guess this works.

[Mr. Analog]

[Thorin]

Is this ...  Is this it?  The oldest thread resurrection?  Have we set a new record?

[Darren Dirt]

Sometimes I even impress myself.