Quick, somebody call Jack Thompson! Tell him it was all a mistake!
The American Psychological Association, meeting in at a convention in Boston, revealed a eries of studies that show video games have a series of positive effects on students in the classroom and surgeons in the operating room.
According to the Associated Press, a study of fith, sixth and seventh graders found that playing video games helped them improve their problem-solving abiltiies and cognitive and perceptual skills.
Another study showed that “surgeons who played video games were 27 percent faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37 percent fewer errors than those who didn’t.”
A bump in the road remains. Other studies showed students who play violent video games did tend to be more hostile than non-violent game playing kids.
Nevermind, don’t tell Jack a thing.
As a researcher studying the positive experiences of gaming, I often find myself caught in the middle of the debate of the effects of videogames. It is reassuring that some researchers are recognising the benefits of gaming rather than dedicating all the attention to the violence aspect of games.
A large body of research in the lab, comparing violent vs non-violent videogame playing has shown that those people in the violent condition had higher levels of aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviours following game-play. Although this may seem like good evidence what we need to consider, however, is that this type of research tends to be conducted on people who don’t actually play videogames!! Therefore their whole experience of gaming is different, thus the effects are highly likely to be different.
Research needs to adopt a wider approach and study the gaming experience on actual gamers in order to show better evidence of the positive effects which gaming can offer.