When I finally go on a rampage, my many hours of playing DOOM will be justified.

Positive effects may include, but are not limited to:

* Ability to avoid multi-colored ghosts while stuck in mazes.
* Increased agility from leaping over barrels rolling down free-floating steel girders
* Enhanced paper-delivery and breakdancing man-avoidance skills.
* Knowledge that bees hate skateboarders, and frequently fly in attack patterns resembling hypodermic needles


Thank you, videogames.

MSN also concludes that the new Xbox 360 will be much, much better at teaching these skills than their rivals.

Yes, but will those politicians looking for press by railing against games recognize? Or are we sill just training kids to become mass murderers?

My guess is a big ol' NO.

/has probably killed millions of digital beings (humans, robots, monsters, aliens, zombies, nazis, animals, and every comination in between) Starting with Castle Wolfenstein and hitting every major FPS game up to and including HalfLife 2.

//hasn't had the urge to kill real people yet.

///... yet

Such an urge for me to kill real people would be much more likely to spring from the politicians claiming it's the games' fault than from the games themselves...

/

Games have been very good to me. In fact, they're the reason I studied less than two hours for me physics final...

/Never buy a new game a week before finals
//especially a game like guild wars
///still got an 87

Is it scary that the "me physical final" was unintentional?

Let's see how this thread is going to turn out after this post.

I love video games as much as the next guy. I travel to the local EB quite often, staring at promos and looking through the new titles of the week. I subscribe to a gaming magazine (God-awful me! I don't use the internet 24/7.) Agreeing with Shooter_McGavin, I've killed millions upon billions of things. (My particular favorite? Any last-second save in CTF in UT2004.) But are they real? Of course not! We've got people jumping around in their heavy metal suits on various planets and huge bedrooms without their helmets on, goshdarnit! And I can't get a shock rifle, so there!

Sure, why don't we look at the bad, too. zomg stereotyping. GTA series! Bang bang, hump hump, whack whack, stab gash ooze death explosion boom whee. Is this an inspiration for children to murder? The answer?

It all farking depends on who you are. Anyone with an active brain should realize that everyone is different. I could get a headshot and realize that I can't do it in real life because it's farking WRONG. Others will go outside and whip out their pistol, shooting watermelons or birds or whatever the hell they'd like. Some go to extremes, such as murder.

But don't ban video games because they're cited in courts.

Can we ban the Bible because it's cited in the courts?

Nope.

Would you rather be addicted to games or addicted to crack cocaine?

Good for America!

The best video games have lots of hot chicks in them.

/fires up pn03 and whistles innocently

It can't possibly be worse than watching television (unless you like C-SPAN)

It's unsurprising that in a growing digital world which values multitasking and the careful allotment of resources the playing of video games would serve as a second (and valuable) education to those who partake. About 2-3 weeks ago I saw a similar article about TV watching, which claimed that since TV shows of today often have multiple sub-plots and stretch stories out across several episodes, entire seasons, or even longer, they stimulate one's mind toward complexity and analysis in ways that television from our parents' generation did not. (There isn't much complexity in an episode of "I Love Lucy".) This is likely all true and beneficial.

However (sensed that one coming, didn't you?), if the video games and TV are replacing literary influences, i.e. READING, then the benefit does not outweigh the loss.

Why is reading (and writing, eventually) important? Not only because it makes one more literate and able to articulate one's thoughts, but because it textures the mind. The more literate, the more in touch with one's own language one becomes; the more clever, careful, fine, accurate, and nuanced one's thought, the more control it attains. Put crassly, the more words one knows, the more thoughts one can have. (Compare the reverse trend in 1984 where the fewer words, the fewer thoughts.)

Why does this matter? (1) Problem solving and team-working skills are useless if one cannot articulate the problem and/or does not know to what end the team is operating. (Although sinister leaders might prefer otherwise.) (2) The greater one's control over language, the more one can influence others. Imagine Churchill's speeches to London as they were being bombed. They wouldn't have had quite the same effect if all he'd been able to say had been "Chin up! We'll win one of these days."

The finer one's language, the finer one's awareness of reality, and that can only be to the good.

/Not in any way contemning videogames. I love them, particularly RPGs. But let's not in our recognition of their usefulness forget the importance of that which they often replace.

plus, for the price of a spas-12 you can get an x-box, playstation 2, AND enough games to keep you from going postal for a year.

The following is for boneheaded parents everywhere who think that video games are corrupting their kids rather than their crappy ass parenting:

Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up?

Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americansat least, as measured by I.Q. testswere getting smarter. This fact had been obscured for years, because the people who give I.Q. tests continually recalibrate the scoring system to keep the average at 100. But if you took out the recalibration, Flynn found, I.Q. scores showed a steady upward trajectory, rising by about three points per decade, which means that a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third. Some of that effect, no doubt, is a simple by-product of economic progress: in the surge of prosperity during the middle part of the last century, people in the West became better fed, better educated, and more familiar with things like I.Q. tests. But, even as that wave of change has subsided, test scores have continued to risenot just in America but all over the developed world. Whats more, the increases have not been confined to children who go to enriched day-care centers and private schools. The middle part of the curvethe people who have supposedly been suffering from a deteriorating public-school system and a steady diet of lowest-common-denominator television and mindless pop musichas increased just as much. What on earth is happening? In the wonderfully entertaining Everything Bad Is Good for You (Riverhead; $23.95), Steven Johnson proposes that what is making us smarter is precisely what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture.

(continued)

He_Hate_Me

That's the article. Well done.

One wonders, however, if they account for the changing nature of the IQ tests? The article does not address this, and I find it curious.... Are IQs really going up (at least, as much as suggested), or are we becoming more adept at measuring them in all of their varieties? I am suspicious.

Also from the article:
"Reading is a form of explicit learning."

This is only true at a basic level. Once past the biology textbook stage, reading becomes interactive between the text and the reader. The text must be evaluated in terms of its point-of-view, its author, the socio-cultural standards of the time, the intended audience, the reader's point-of-view, the reader's socio-cultural standards, and a number of other angles. And the particularly intelligent authors write in such a way as to actively invite re-reading, rethinking, and contemplation of the work in terms of other parts of the work or other words. (Google "Strauss" or "Straussianism" and you'll likely find an explanation of this.) And as nuts as Straussians can go with their reinterpretations, some works, like Plato's dialogues, are obviously intended to invite a dialogue between the text and the reader.

It's a cute attempt on the part of the article's author to play up the good of video games at the expense of reading, but really one can give video games their due without removing from the written word its.

Or perhaps the article's author should have reformatted his book into a complex TV show or video game, for the better benefit of his audience.

one of these im gonna go in there and its just gonna be:gugagugaguga!

Idiocy is more responsible for murder than video games.

Case in point: kids who shoot other kids always have the balme put on video games, but nobody ever makes a big huge deal of how drug dealers murder hundreds of people daily.

Duh, of course it increases intelligence. Why do you think fundamentalist christians want to ban it? kiddies might start questioning the logic of worshipping a being evil enough to condemn billions to hell for worshipping it wrongly.

</flamebait>

isn't this a repeat?

He_Hate_Me
Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up?...

Gladwell's review of the book is interesting. But let's take a reality-check here. If anything is responsible for the gradual, long-term (multi-decade) increase in basic cognitive abilities, it's almost certainly improved nutrition and healthcare, not pop culture and videogames. Especially neo-natal and post-natal care. The brain is like any other organ. Healthier environments, healthier pregnancies, and generally healthier kids will mean smarter populations.

Now, whether these trends will continue, that's another matter. But the developed world has benefitted gretly (esp. since WWII) from vastly better healthcare. That probably has everything to do with it, not tougher episodes of "The Sopranos" or "24."

Obviously spelling not one of them?

aWesome! So when the Covenant attacks, I will know just where to go to get the overshield and rocket launcher before launching plasma grenades and using my active camo!

/halo2rocks

I believe that videogames have no connection to violent behavior, and I'll kill anyone who disagrees.

Case in point:

They should put the old school Missile Command pros in charge of the Missile Defense Shield.

video games could help hand-eye coordination. if anyone has played mvp baseball 2005, they'll know what i'm saying. from the time the computer throws the pitch i have about a second to recognize the pitch (their color coded), figure where its going (hi-low, in-away) and decide whether or not to swing and which way to hit the ball. its about the same amount of time a real player has to choose, only he doesnt get the nice color flashes i get. i'd say it sort of trains the brain to make decisions faster. it also would help kids use their brains more during the summer. i'd definitely wouldnt recommend video games over reading to keep the brain busy, but at least theyre thinking.

i also know nascar drivers use videogames to help them because the games are so real to life it helps their reaction time to certain things.

"We just finished level 3 and you need to tighten up the graphics a little bit."

ttfb:

Holy crap! Your post was almost impossible to read. Take some english classes or something man!

I went back up and read the post to which this comment refers, and I have this to say:

My name is FarkmeBlind and I approve of ttfb's message

I dunno, I don't think it was that hard to read... Except for the "zomg stereotyping" part. Whatever that means.

I've always gotten a kick out of the idea that, whenever someone who goes on a murder rampage, all these ass-tards come out of the wood work and blame it on the many hours that the perpetrator spent playing Doom (or Quake or UT or whatever)... The reason for my amusement stems from the fact that, while I've played all of those games, I know NOTHING about real weapons.. so, in my head, I always envisage a hapless nut job, hell bent on killing as many folks as they can on their video game inspired murder spree, spending the whole day running backwards and forwards over the top of a box of ammunition in an attempt to load their weapon.

Everytime I visit any article linked to on msn, I am always greeted with a page full of garbage, anyone know why?