Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game

While I was mowing my lawn, I started thinking about what I’d been reading in Gee’s book about his perspective on games and I started adding things up; reading, playing, learning, researching, remembering a local news piece I saw last week (more on that later), thinking about how the military values gaming experience… and I realized that gaming might be a good thing!

Huh?  What?  Bloody he|| No!  No chance, no how… were my next thoughts.  But indeed, there is enough research for me to conclude that yes, there are positive benefits to the person and most importantly -- their mind -- by taking part in the playing of video games.  I had to swallow my early misgivings of gaming and think about how I am actually learning while I play video games.

Later I got into a conversation with my 15 yr. old daughter about all the stuff I’ve been reading and studying about games.  I told her about the Pain Squad example from Brian Burke’s book Gamification.  I explained that I feel like I am learning anytime I’m playing.  Learning the ins-and-outs of the games I’m playing through trial and error.  While playing, I am constantly learning and making adjustments to try to achieve better results.  She mentioned that it is amazing that we are capable of learning very complex/difficult tasks in a short amount of time when playing games.  Not just amazing, astonishing.  I showed her the Dino Hunter game and she picked it up right away and was dropping dinosaurs with accurately placed rounds.   

I am finding that I play better when I am really into it; raised heart rate, supreme focus on the objective, and serious concern for what my virtual player character is doing or feeling.  Moment by moment my brain is making a ridiculous amount of calculations and corrections while I adjust to what the game is throwing at me.  However I may have thought in the past about gaming is forever changed.

I mentioned that I watched an interesting news piece last week.  The story was about a study that found that video games can be beneficial to children’s health.  The study found that children who play video games an hour or less a day scored higher in mental and social health assessments then kids who did not play at all.  Interestingly, “life satisfaction scores” was one particular area they saw differences in scores. Life satisfaction score? Sounds like a happiness scale.  We don't play games because they're fun or make us happy.  So maybe the study’s just a bunch of malarkey.  You can read the associated article here.