I credit RuneScape with teaching me the value of delayed gratification and basic economics. I credit competitive Halo 3 with teaching me team building and strategy skills. I credit StarCraft with training my mind to travel at warp speed.
Honestly. My video game experience was instrumental to my success so far in life. This is not surprising to me.
I learned one of the most valuable lessons of my life from RuneScape. My brother and I, playing for years, had amassed something like 100k gold between the two of us. We wanted more gold and were reading a guide online about to get it. The guide recommended a simple process of buying and selling coal in a kind of arbitrage trade. My brother and I were torn if we should try it, reasoning that if it were so easy to make money then everyone would do it. But, on the other hand, the guide seemed like it should work.
In the end, we just followed the guide, and it worked exactly as promised. In literally a day we 10x'd our RuneScape gold to well over a million and had basically unlimited funds from running the coal trading arbitrage the guide described for as long as we played the game.
It's hard for me to put this lesson into words exactly - but it's something like if something seems like it should work explore it and find out if it does. But also something like "Don't discount something for being too obvious." This has helped me in my career where it seemed like there were obvious opportunities for something that were in front of me so I just did the obvious thing and wound up getting richly rewarded for it. This kind of idea was on my mind in most of major life decisions too.
It's an old joke: An economist is walking down the street when he steps on a $100 bill lying on the ground. He spots it, but decides to keep walking and doesn't pick it up.
“After all,” he thinks to himself, “if that had really been a $100 bill, someone else would have picked it up already!”
One wonders if the effect you're describing isn't the reason that self-directed entrepreneurship seems to be on a sharp decline in the developed world. Believe the media, let alone the internet, and one would imagine we have 8 year olds building nuclear reactors and curing cancer, in their basements. So how can this hare brained scheme you have ever possibly work? Surely somebody else would have done it by now.
Many times, the best solutions are very simple. These often seem obvious in hindsight, but were at the time either non-obvious or dismissed prematurely.
In the same boat and it is great until I run into a more complex multi-faceted problem, pick a solution and end up 30 miles down the road before I realize I need to backtrack and try a different one.
If my childhood had more books and boredom I might have the patience to spend longer in the planning stage and less enthusiasm for the drinking coffee and pounding out a solution stage.
I rarely regret just getting things done. Excessive planning is a much larger issue. I find it's usually better to just do something twice rather than spend too much time thinking about it.
My two biggest childhood hobbies were reading and video games. Frankly, grand strategy games like the Civilization series and simulation games like SimCity taught patience and planning much more effectively than any of the books.
What the books taught me was how to write clearly, if with a somewhat unorthodox style. Turns out that's extremely important for a software engineer.
Learned Java as a first language to write bots back in 2009. Present day, I’m 1.5 yrs into writing a market analysis/flipping site for OSRS, and it’s been a great way to play with time-series stuff, sysadmin, and front-end.
Gotta credit a good chunk of career success to RuneScape as well.
I'm happy you got all of that from video-games and in no way I'm advocating against video games for everyone.
But, in my life, I credit sports for everything you said.
With the added benefit of a healthy neurology and biology in general. Something video games - and the digital world, as a whole - have been demonstrated to be detrimental. I mean, by serious studies.
Studies don’t investigate something as complex as the total impact of video games or anything else in all contexts.
You get individual studies of the impact in terms of say specific reflexes or some aspect of depression for some subset of games, but you would need a comprehensive set of studies for every single context to build a holistic picture which we simply don’t have.
Occasionally it’s enough to find major downsides such as with smoking’s really negative health impacts and say it’s not worth it. But for most things, including video games, there isn’t a single overwhelming downside just some negatives and other positives.
People want a black and white world where they can say “_ is good/bad,” but in the real world meat, carbs, video games etc isn’t that simple they are good and bad at the same time. Many people would be better off by reducing meat and carb consumption but that doesn’t mean a worldwide ban on consuming them is a good idea.
I agree that the digital world can have detrimental effects, but I don't think it's alone in that. I have many friends, a brother, and a wife who also credit sports for all of the above, with the added benefit of a the trauma and lifelong pain from the injury that forced them to quit. Books honestly seem like a complete win. Hopefully my daughter will benefit from the safest parts of all 3.
I credit Civ I with my almost failing my GCSEs, but I guess I did okay in the end. But then I have in the decades since avoided games I could happily play all night :).
Same here. I credit competitive gaming scene for teaching me all kind of skills. I was never a sports guy. But when I start to watch how ppl train, compete, strategize and work in a team, I realized that so many meta attributes are crucial for one's success
I credit Age of Empires 2 for teaching me about managing an economy and medieval history. I credit Age of Wonders for teaching me what strategy really means.
Lots of other great games helped me build my English skills, most of all The Legacy of Kain series.
I used to play a lot of RPGs on the gameboy, but my English was still not good enough so I avoided reading. Sometimes I had my gameboy and a dictionary and I'd translate NPC dialogue one word at a time.
I remember Final Fantasy 1 on gameboy had a surprisingly open world and I could walk all over the map, and it had random monster encounters. I'd be fighting a lengthy turn based battle about every 20 steps, and it could be way above my level, and I was completely and utterly lost!
I spent so much time on that game. But I never progressed far into the quest. Playing it as an adult I realized one random NPC says there's a hidden cave to the east, and if you never read it's pretty much impossible to find.
Similarly in Pokemon, bumbling through caves in the dark until I go out the other side through sheer luck and grit. Turns out the move Flash just lights up the cave.
And Age of Wonders taught me that building a Wonder always let's you win. But I also yet have to find an opportunity to use it. Maybe I will build one in my garden and WIN!!!! I just need a 1000 wood, 1000 Food, 1000 Gold!!!
Some games do but I've seen people roam aimlessly in FPS~ games (say assassin's creed, GTA), without even much fun, to the point I was questionning the potential benefits.
Later in life I also realized how 'real life' is a lot subtler than it appear. Using a weapon, being far out in the woods, crafting tools .. which are all things I did in video games but had no relation to the real life versions.
I was a Master SC2 player and strongly disagree with this. SC2 is heavy on execution and ops, which are not good 0 -> 1 skills. SC2 also has very short feedback loops and no long term consequences.
The things I will say it has going for it is that it has an extremely steep learning curve and you have to grind. Though many other games also have these attributes at a sufficiently high level.
The reality is that most people who are very good at video games wouldn't be able to maintain the long-term discipline or focus to run a company, nor be able to handle the responsibility of leading a team.
I sunk a decade into civ 2. Oh man, the memories. I wish gog would acquire rights to release that abandonware with soundtrack and everything. Running it yourself requires running it on top of win3.1 in dosbox now days, and it's still janky. I would legit pay $60 for a perfectly working copy.
/s I credit Civilization 1 as well. Or should I credit my parents who had PC/XT at home when the price of PC/XT was that of 3 new (soviet) automobiles? /s
My son started playing games (with me) at 4 yo (partly because we were all locked indoors for months on end).
Anecdotally - and providing you use some discretion as to choice of game - I’ve found it absolutely fascinating to watch both the pace of development of problem-solving skills, and some of the frankly astounding leaps of logic and intuition young kids are capable of. I vividly remember one rock-moving puzzle in Breath of the Wild that had me stumped until he piped up with a proposal that turned out to be the correct solution. Fascinating stuff.
Fun question! I would suggest the following (in no particular order), subject to the proviso that you do need to be sat next to them to help manage frustration, especially in the beginning (although my personal take is that they shouldn’t be left to play by themselves at all at that age) - particularly as they learn the controller, general video game conventions, and the specifics of each game:
- Breath of the Wild
- Animal Crossing
- Stardew Valley
- Minecraft
- Super Mario Odyssey
- Super Mario 3D World
- Rayman Legends
- Ratchet & Clank
- It Takes Two
- Slay the Spire
- Journey
- Spiderman and Miles Morales
My son’s favourite superhero - far and away - is Spiderman, in large part thanks to the PlayStation games. Pretty great role model. Kids find swinging through the city utterly exhilarating.
It Takes Two was such a fantastic, memorable experience for both of us - he still talks about it months later. It does require quite a lot of a kid, though - better for when they’ve got a year’s experience.
And trying to catch all the insects and fish in Animal Crossing kicked off a passion in him for the real things, to say nothing of what it taught him about animals generally, time and seasonality.
A Nintendo Switch is probably a good place to start, although as he gets older I’m encouraging him to move more over to the PlayStation (partly because it’s so much cheaper over time!).
Switch Joycons are great for small hands, too, although most kids seem to be able to manipulate a full-size controller by age 4-5.
At young ages, I say give them an old-school Nintendo, or N64 etc. Little/no advertising, monetization of your kid's attention, whatever. If they're not on the web or at school yet, they won't even know they're missing out on more modern systems.
Or some similar setup where there's no online, no monthly charge, no pay-to-win, and instead the child gets to play a carefully crafted game, hopefully an awesome one.
I also think (offline) minecraft is great at that age.
Cuphead is absolutely the best game I ever played with my kids. This is one of the only games that allows you to play together with your family/friends offline. No screen split. I haven't seen such a gem for many, many years.
Cuphead is the game that can easily inspire people to become game developers.
Fun fact: the entire game was hand-drawn. The authors took the inspiration from the cartoons of 1930s.
The Freddi fish games by Humongous Entertainment are really great at that age. They are simple point and click adventures by Ron Gilbert with fun characters and a lot of interaction on the screen. Easy to get for cheap on Steam or sometimes in bundles and I've been impressed with how quickly it developed puzzle solving skills with my nephews.
Once the child is a bit older, the Pajama Sam serie is also great.
Spelunky HD! Easy to understand and control, terribly difficult to master. I started my oldest on it when she was 4 and she beat it for the first time around age 6. Now she tears through it like a ninja master. She also enjoyed Bit Trip Runner 2 when she was 3-4 yrs old.
I have tried a lot of stuff, and I believe Lego Marvel Super Heroes (or other similar Lego games) are absolutely perfect for a small kid. There are infinite lives, and you can play co-op where you can do all the hard stuff while they enjoy the ride. Eventually they will learn by seeing you do stuff, and they will learn and want to do it too. It is truly amazing, a very forgiving game for a 4yo.
As a side note, my son learned this using a fight stick, since "move the stick in that direction to make your character go to that direction" is easier for them to comprehend and associate than using a dpad. Also way easier to hold with hittle hands.
In general, most Nintendo made and published games tend to be great for kids of all ages. Captain Toad Treasure Tracker for problem solving, Mario Maker 2 for dexterity but also once they get comfortable with the game they can make their own levels and express themselves, Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening for the same reasons the above person noted Breath of the Wild. Switch Sports is great for getting your kids into sports that you might not normally have access to (like volleyball).
I’ve found that the same games I was playing around that age are actually still fun - Commodore 64 games. Basic, non-distracting graphics and simple joystick controls make things easy for young kids.
I'll add the classic comment here: "correlation does not mean causation".
Maybe it's the kids with better cognitive performance that like videogame better. I wouldn't find that unlikely considering it's more mentally stimulating than other "real-world" activities.
Also, I personally learned to code by writing bots for an MMORPG, so I definitely owe my career to videogames.
"researchers stress that this cross-sectional study does not allow for cause-and-effect analyses, and that it could be that children who are good at these types of cognitive tasks may choose to play video games."
Video games are more mentally stimulating than non-screen-based activities (building a fort, catching animals, reading a book)? People with better cognitive performance prefer more external mental stimulation? I didn't know any of that.
Your classic comment certainly stands, though. It could easily be that e.g. the large gender difference between the gamer and non-gamer groups alone can account for the difference. Many likely confounders aren't mentioned in the study at all.
But whether or not there's causation involved, this study tells us precious little about gaming and "cognitive performance" in general, since the stop-signal and n-back tasks they used have obvious connections to gaming but very little relevance to most other areas of cognitive functioning (of course kids who play video games for hours every day will probably respond quicker to which way an arrow on a computer screen is pointing).
Plus I am not sure that this is "better" cognitive performance, vs just "different". Perhaps kids who don't play video games are better at e.g. music? The article doesn't go into that.
Likewise I am not sure that video games are necessarily more stimulating that other real-world activities. Sure there are lots of boring things we make kids do, but there are also other joyful things that they really like too which are "real world" (adventure playgrounds, lego, swimming parks etc)
Causality also doesn't need to be unidirectional. Perhaps cognitive performance has an impact on video gaming, but video gaming likely also has some impact on cognitive performance.
I owe my career to World of Warcraft. Started running my own server in 2008 when the burning crusade was released on my ADSL connection for friends, then I started "scripting" shit in C++ (server software is a good framework (CMaNGOS)), so while it was compiled in it wasn't really like writing C++, never had to think about ownership, threading, lifetimes etc...
Eventually I stared messing about more inside the framework, now I work as an SRE for a streaming service. Never pursued software development as I thought I was too stupid, and now pay would be too shite as a junior dev :)
In a sense Blizzard entertainment just happened to "save my life" (I'm certain I would have a dogshit life without this, many reasons).
I think more games should embrace modding like Blizzard games do/did with maps, workshops (while not being minecraft).
Blizzard doesn’t embrace what you did, running a private WoW server. If they could have, they’d have shut you down. Certainly though it sounds as if your server was simply too small for them to ever notice. They focused their legal efforts against large private servers that sold access.
Always amusing when I see yet another person who started their coding journey writing RuneScape bots, seems like a really common path within a certain demographic.
(I'm assuming RuneScape here because it was the largest bot community I was aware of but I suppose there could be others)
I'm another one who was introduced to tech through gaming (RuneScape) and to programming largely through RuneScape macros. There are literally dozens of us!
I had an access to personal computers in my school after classes, most of the time we were gaming. After some time teacher said that games are not allowed anymore except ones we wrote ourselves. That's how my software engineer career started.
Maybe it is more of a gender difference. I have yet to encounter a boy who doesn't like some kind of videogame but not so for girls...
But this would mean that intelligence in not distributed equally among gender.
I agree that intelligence is not a prerequisite for interest in games. Pretty much every boy in my school when I was growing up liked games and wanted to play them, and many of them were as thick as a plank.
I would also add that it's impossible to find direct causation in psychology or sociology because it's impossible to have all the variables when it comes to humans. So this is the best we can get.
Careful now. Self-assortment into those who don't play at all and those who play at least three hours per day? There's good reasons to think those weren't otherwise equivalent populations in the first place. I'm buying "associated" but any sort of claims about effects from the games are going to have to come from elsewhere.
There are enough signals in this paper to warrant caution, although the paper has a careful title, as well as abstract. I congratulate authors with that, but it hasn't stopped this crowd from overinterpreting the results.
First, they don't measure general "cognitive performance," they measure something very specific, this one: https://www.cambridgecognition.com/cantab/cognitive-tests/me.... That task is very close to video gaming. I know of another study that shows that FPS gamers have a somewhat better peripheral vision. It makes sense that playing games improves reaction time and control on some tasks.
Second, the difference between gamers and non-gamers on this task is very small: 299ms vs 307ms. That's really far below any interesting effect. Effects in fMRI are not interesting: it is unknown what a larger signal in a certain area means. You cannot draw conclusions from it.
Third, the statistical logic is the classic NHST with all its problems. They even commit the error of drawing conclusions from lack of significance.
Fourth, they don't give specifics, but potential confounds were modelled with some linear modelling. It's highly unlikely that the effects of those external factors are linear, and there aren't many of them. There are however some really large difference between the groups (parental income, sex, and watching video/streaming).
Concluding, there's no reason to suppose the effect must be attributed to video gaming, and certainly not that it is positive for general cognitive performance.
Would you assume the same thing about playing a musical instrument or playing a sport? What is playing video games except practicing cognitive performance? It works spatial reasoning, logic, dexterity, problem solving, reactions, etc.
> Would you assume the same thing about playing a musical instrument or playing a sport?
Yes, of course. Musical ability is well known to be closely associated with mathematical ability. Musical achievement is not known to be closely associated with mathematical achievement; people tend to do one or the other.
But this already tells us that playing an instrument will predict better cognitive performance for reasons unrelated to the work you do to learn the instrument.
I would not assume that playing a sport predicted better cognitive performance, but I obviously would assume that playing a sport intensively predicts better athleticism -- independent of the effect of practicing sports -- than avoiding sports does.
Yes, but for different reasons. Playing an instrument or sport means you're more likely to have a non-poor family with parents who have time to spend with you.
Absolutely. Saw a study a few years ago that finds that school music program participation is significantly correlated with parental wealth, which raises all kinds of confounding factors depending on what's actually being measured (e.g. Was the kid 10ms slower because they didn't get a good breakfast? Or mom got home late from her 2nd job and interrupted her family's sleep?)
One thing I remember from childhood is playing console games at houses of friends who owned consoles. They would be masters of the game and I would pick up a controller and from lack of experience feel completely lost and useless at the game and lose interest quickly. There's seems like there would be a self selection where those who can fall into the learned behavior of the game/reward cycle (console or phone easy access) can get lost in it for quite a time barring supervision. The study itself also mentions confounding things like higher percentage of gamers in study being male (so maybe gender plays a larger role than chance), weird memory effects like the video gamers being better for a short time at start of testing but falling off rapidly versus non gamers being able to continue at a higher level. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
It’s true that correlation isn’t causation but I think, in moderation, games do improve cognitive skills. If it becomes something the kid does all the time, then I think the lack of balance does more harm than good. Moderation is all things.
I dont understand what you're getting at. What are the "reasons to think" that the populations are not equivalent? The study controlled for parental income, sex, age, BMI, IQ.
I doubt those controls are sufficient, individual-level IQ measures are very variant and likely incomplete, so there still could easily be pre-existing differences the controls can't sort out
I’d be a very different person without games when I was young. Got me into programming, thinking beyond my immediate reality… etc. More stimulation is probably good for development, that’s how pathways form, I have been told.
Call me armchair “points out the obvious parts then gets pessimistic guy,” but we’ll likely never actually know if it’s a correlation in the time period that’s more consistent with like… the nutritional availability and parenting habits. Or for that matter The Osbornes going off the air?
I suspect that a lot of our policy actions must be suspiciously based on suspicions until we make a major breakthrough in neurology or statistical analysis. Do what works for now.
Seems like brains that are engaged have better outcomes than passive ones, let’s do that for now!
I’d be a very different person if I played more video games when I was young.
I spent a lot of my time outside exploring and playing games with my friends. Later in college when a lot of my peers were playing counter strike all day long I got into programming because I always wanted to learn how to do it.
I lived in apartments with not many play opportunities during my childhood, but virtual worlds provided pretty much that play environment for me (of course, with different risks and less whole body physical activity). The game was Tibia (it still exists), and it required a lot of planning, had all elements you'd want children to be immersed in, like:
in-game mysteries (is it possible to solve X or Y quest, get a certain item, and so on?), some of which persist today (probably the remaining ones can't be solved),
social interaction: you needed to trade with players for almost everything -- buying all equipment, even to use magic you were required to trade unless you could make them yourself),
in-game economy, mechanically, the game wasn't too hard, it was very well balanced; a big element was finding where you could be more efficient to sustain your own advancement through the game; trading was a major gameplay element,
making friends: for many, this was really the point of the game, just meeting people, talking for hours, finding where they came from (often distant countries I'd have no opportunity to visit); most activities greatly benefited from a group, although you could solo;
coordination: you needed a really good attention and coordination to play in certain situations; most of all, you needed to understand your capability and the requirements to make sure you didn't lose weeks or even months of progress (the death penalty was something like 10% of your total playtime!).
It's hard to overstate how much growth it afforded me and by brother -- the lessons are too numerous to cite, from interacting with people to managing risk on everything you do. We did recognize, even at the time though, that it could get us 'hooked' in a bad way -- and that the game was ultimately limited and there was a life outside (other activities) with a greater horizon. My brother just quit completely one day to never return; I always kept visiting the world out of curiosity and nostalgia. It really felt like having a wild virtual childhood. I still think about people I've met in that world some 20 years later.
Unfortunately, some of the aspects that enabled this experience have been degraded significantly. The greatest loss was probably due to cheating and bots. Cheating was already possible, maybe right from the beginning, but it took a long time to develop and become widespread. At one point though, almost every serious player was cheating, and a significant portion using bots to automatically achieve high levels with low risk (or just amass fortunes and transfer to "clean" characters). Seeing no great alternative, the developer (Cipsoft) started to understandably introduce the various cheating systems (automatic aiming and item usage, etc.) into the game itself, reduce death penalties, and so on. It also copied other games that have automated markets and so on, and for a while bots almost ruined the game (only much later they got a deal with BattleEye that significantly improved the situation -- but the game was already changed). The game now is much less wild and much more like a single player experience.
One very interesting aspect of the game is how much this wilderness is important but still very troublesome. The risk is what teaches risk management; but it also enables other player abuse. The possibility to kill and get killed was very scary (of course, maybe not as scary as many IRL risks), but it also built serious trust, when you had to trust your friend wouldn't turn against you for personal gain, find who to trust, etc.. It really showed what's ugly about humans at the same time as what's really amazingly beautiful -- some of the most kind and selfless people I've met were playing that game (and also a handful keen to set you back a long time just for pleasure). I think one way or another everyone that played it learned the value of cooperation in some way. I thought it was my yardstick of civilization to see if people would kill for fun when "it's just a game" (with serious in-game consequences for your victim) or act cooperatively -- I thought the ideal game was not one where you can't kill one another, but one you can, but almost no one does (I never subscribe to the notion that in game killing was "a fun part of the game" -- although I did see the allure of the loot; after all, not killing was also part of the game; in any case, you could always stop playing or opt for non-pvp servers, which most of my IRL friends did -- but I refused).
A very interesting experiment just in life, is the least I can say.
Note: There is a spiritual successor of the classic game going on in https://medivia.online/ Be warned -- this kind of game is as much of a time sink (and perhaps as addictive) as it sounds; but if you feel ready for this sort of experience, it seems still possible; I haven't ever played Medivia.
Discarding all the moderate users seems like a design flaw. A possible effect on cognition is a fairly natural question for regression.
Maybe you saw it in the text but, "This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommend that videogaming time be limited to one to two hours per day for older children."
The thought process I can sort of imagine is that the tests are fairly costly and the hypothesis they're testing is that more play than the official recommended limit should decidedly give detectable impairments to cognition. (Seems they could have rejected that, if they'd had comparable groups in the first place. Now I'm not sure what it says)
There's already some people who they seem to have testing data for that aren't included in the final comparison, the numbers don't add up between available people with scans and total in the data. The only reason I can see is that they have between one and three hours if video games per day.the
This appears to be the study, though I'm not entirely sure [1] and it reads:
Screen Time Survey
This threshold was selected because it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommends that video-gaming time be limited to 1 to 2 hours per day for older children.
Yeah, I saw their excuse for focusing on over three hours a day. I don't understand why you dump that data rather than use it somehow, like a third cohort.
Video games are like the cheapest way to keep a kid busy for low income working parents. I guess they could send the kids outside but people nowadays start asking questions if a kid is caught outside while single mom is working for 3 hours or something.
Given infinite money I think many of those parents would send the kid with nanny if needed or whatever to organized sports, piano classes, etc.
It would be natural to do so since you assume in these time-reported things that people are not precise about the actual amount. If someone will report (x-1,x+1) h then it makes sense to just bucket into low and high so that, if there is an effect, it is initially apparent.
Why does everyone assume consoles? PC gaming is still a thing. And a study published now would have been done before gaming video cards became unaffordable.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t read the article but I learned a lot from video games and by extend the internet when I was a kid.
It thought me that if you work on something, you will get better at it, and you will be rewarded. This is not the case for a lot of other things in the life of a teenager. If you work hard at school you aren’t really rewarded, you just have to pass (binary outcome) and if you do an extra project it’s not like you get extra points. If you take a student job, you don’t get a raise when do a good job, you just get more work. If it wasn’t for video games the lessons I would have learned was that you should do the bare minimum not to fail/get fired. Which is a really sad attitude to have.
> This is not the case for a lot of other things in the life of a teenager. If you work hard at school you aren’t really rewarded, you just have to pass (binary outcome) and if you do an extra project it’s not like you get extra points.
Thank you for saying this. The point itself is something I knew and concluded on my own, but the way you phrased it made me realize that, as a parent, it will be my job to provide a structure on top of school, that rewards my kids somewhat proportionally to effort. As opposed to parents giving near-binary (5+ is good, 4 is meh, 3 sucks, 2 or below and the belt is out) rewards otherwise uncorrelated with effort, which was my experience as a kid, as well as others in my cohort I talked about this with.
Readit News
Honestly. My video game experience was instrumental to my success so far in life. This is not surprising to me.
In the end, we just followed the guide, and it worked exactly as promised. In literally a day we 10x'd our RuneScape gold to well over a million and had basically unlimited funds from running the coal trading arbitrage the guide described for as long as we played the game.
It's hard for me to put this lesson into words exactly - but it's something like if something seems like it should work explore it and find out if it does. But also something like "Don't discount something for being too obvious." This has helped me in my career where it seemed like there were obvious opportunities for something that were in front of me so I just did the obvious thing and wound up getting richly rewarded for it. This kind of idea was on my mind in most of major life decisions too.
“After all,” he thinks to himself, “if that had really been a $100 bill, someone else would have picked it up already!”
If my childhood had more books and boredom I might have the patience to spend longer in the planning stage and less enthusiasm for the drinking coffee and pounding out a solution stage.
I rarely regret just getting things done. Excessive planning is a much larger issue. I find it's usually better to just do something twice rather than spend too much time thinking about it.
What the books taught me was how to write clearly, if with a somewhat unorthodox style. Turns out that's extremely important for a software engineer.
On the other hand how to inspire people and the importance of operational doctrine has been massively important.
Also spreadsheets..
Also the value of realtime market information.
I love reading about eve, but I can't imagine ever having enough free time for it
The best skill in life
I credit RuneScape with teaching me to write Java code to write bots to do the work involved with the delayed gratification.
Then eventually created a GP selling business online.
Also led a PvP clan and ran a PHP forum for it.
The RuneScape metagame was where I acquired real-world software development skills.
Gotta credit a good chunk of career success to RuneScape as well.
But, in my life, I credit sports for everything you said.
With the added benefit of a healthy neurology and biology in general. Something video games - and the digital world, as a whole - have been demonstrated to be detrimental. I mean, by serious studies.
You get individual studies of the impact in terms of say specific reflexes or some aspect of depression for some subset of games, but you would need a comprehensive set of studies for every single context to build a holistic picture which we simply don’t have.
Occasionally it’s enough to find major downsides such as with smoking’s really negative health impacts and say it’s not worth it. But for most things, including video games, there isn’t a single overwhelming downside just some negatives and other positives.
People want a black and white world where they can say “_ is good/bad,” but in the real world meat, carbs, video games etc isn’t that simple they are good and bad at the same time. Many people would be better off by reducing meat and carb consumption but that doesn’t mean a worldwide ban on consuming them is a good idea.
- AoE for laying the groundwork of my love of history and archeology.
- Skyrim for making me finally learn how to create 3D art, which I still do as profession today.
- All those weird Japanese games that tell you that you don't have to conform to the predefine notion of what should and shouldn't be videogames.
Of course it doesn't replace real learning. It's hilarious when some gaming-addicted argue that 'videogames made me smart! see that research!'
Hell no Bob, smart people out there spend most of their time learning and play videogames just occasionally.
Lots of other great games helped me build my English skills, most of all The Legacy of Kain series.
I remember Final Fantasy 1 on gameboy had a surprisingly open world and I could walk all over the map, and it had random monster encounters. I'd be fighting a lengthy turn based battle about every 20 steps, and it could be way above my level, and I was completely and utterly lost!
I spent so much time on that game. But I never progressed far into the quest. Playing it as an adult I realized one random NPC says there's a hidden cave to the east, and if you never read it's pretty much impossible to find.
Similarly in Pokemon, bumbling through caves in the dark until I go out the other side through sheer luck and grit. Turns out the move Flash just lights up the cave.
Later in life I also realized how 'real life' is a lot subtler than it appear. Using a weapon, being far out in the woods, crafting tools .. which are all things I did in video games but had no relation to the real life versions.
Makes me curious to try runescape though
watching eSports showed me how big difference mentality and attitude makes
H3 taught real social skills and teamwork.
The things I will say it has going for it is that it has an extremely steep learning curve and you have to grind. Though many other games also have these attributes at a sufficiently high level.
The reality is that most people who are very good at video games wouldn't be able to maintain the long-term discipline or focus to run a company, nor be able to handle the responsibility of leading a team.
Roguelikes produces explorers and risk-takers.
Anecdotally - and providing you use some discretion as to choice of game - I’ve found it absolutely fascinating to watch both the pace of development of problem-solving skills, and some of the frankly astounding leaps of logic and intuition young kids are capable of. I vividly remember one rock-moving puzzle in Breath of the Wild that had me stumped until he piped up with a proposal that turned out to be the correct solution. Fascinating stuff.
- Breath of the Wild - Animal Crossing - Stardew Valley - Minecraft - Super Mario Odyssey - Super Mario 3D World - Rayman Legends - Ratchet & Clank - It Takes Two - Slay the Spire - Journey - Spiderman and Miles Morales
My son’s favourite superhero - far and away - is Spiderman, in large part thanks to the PlayStation games. Pretty great role model. Kids find swinging through the city utterly exhilarating.
It Takes Two was such a fantastic, memorable experience for both of us - he still talks about it months later. It does require quite a lot of a kid, though - better for when they’ve got a year’s experience.
And trying to catch all the insects and fish in Animal Crossing kicked off a passion in him for the real things, to say nothing of what it taught him about animals generally, time and seasonality.
A Nintendo Switch is probably a good place to start, although as he gets older I’m encouraging him to move more over to the PlayStation (partly because it’s so much cheaper over time!).
Switch Joycons are great for small hands, too, although most kids seem to be able to manipulate a full-size controller by age 4-5.
Enjoy!
Or some similar setup where there's no online, no monthly charge, no pay-to-win, and instead the child gets to play a carefully crafted game, hopefully an awesome one.
I also think (offline) minecraft is great at that age.
The recent puzzle game Railbound is fun, with some very tricky puzzles.
* * *
Instead of video games though, let me highly recommend the physical logic puzzle games by the company SmartGames, most of which are excellent.
Raf Peeters, one of their puzzle designers, has a nice website with some back story about many of them, https://smartgamesandpuzzles.com
Cuphead is the game that can easily inspire people to become game developers.
Fun fact: the entire game was hand-drawn. The authors took the inspiration from the cartoons of 1930s.
Once the child is a bit older, the Pajama Sam serie is also great.
As a side note, my son learned this using a fight stick, since "move the stick in that direction to make your character go to that direction" is easier for them to comprehend and associate than using a dpad. Also way easier to hold with hittle hands.
Some games we recommend (platform we played it on):
Cave Story (PC, was free on Epic)
Shovel Knight, Treasure Trove Edition (PC, Steam)
Castlevania Symphony of the Night (ios, ipad)
Minecraft (ios, ipad)
Let me guess.... The kids who were experienced in responding to visual cues on computer screens scored better (－‸ლ)
Maybe it's the kids with better cognitive performance that like videogame better. I wouldn't find that unlikely considering it's more mentally stimulating than other "real-world" activities.
Also, I personally learned to code by writing bots for an MMORPG, so I definitely owe my career to videogames.
"researchers stress that this cross-sectional study does not allow for cause-and-effect analyses, and that it could be that children who are good at these types of cognitive tasks may choose to play video games."
Your classic comment certainly stands, though. It could easily be that e.g. the large gender difference between the gamer and non-gamer groups alone can account for the difference. Many likely confounders aren't mentioned in the study at all.
But whether or not there's causation involved, this study tells us precious little about gaming and "cognitive performance" in general, since the stop-signal and n-back tasks they used have obvious connections to gaming but very little relevance to most other areas of cognitive functioning (of course kids who play video games for hours every day will probably respond quicker to which way an arrow on a computer screen is pointing).
Plus I am not sure that this is "better" cognitive performance, vs just "different". Perhaps kids who don't play video games are better at e.g. music? The article doesn't go into that.
Likewise I am not sure that video games are necessarily more stimulating that other real-world activities. Sure there are lots of boring things we make kids do, but there are also other joyful things that they really like too which are "real world" (adventure playgrounds, lego, swimming parks etc)
If you ask me, I'd better walk. But I can't.
PS
Walking releases brain-derived neurotrophic factor, playing FPS does not.
I absolutely think that it's your PoV that's correct rather than the articles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjYy4Ksy1E
Eventually I stared messing about more inside the framework, now I work as an SRE for a streaming service. Never pursued software development as I thought I was too stupid, and now pay would be too shite as a junior dev :)
In a sense Blizzard entertainment just happened to "save my life" (I'm certain I would have a dogshit life without this, many reasons).
I think more games should embrace modding like Blizzard games do/did with maps, workshops (while not being minecraft).
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First, they don't measure general "cognitive performance," they measure something very specific, this one: https://www.cambridgecognition.com/cantab/cognitive-tests/me.... That task is very close to video gaming. I know of another study that shows that FPS gamers have a somewhat better peripheral vision. It makes sense that playing games improves reaction time and control on some tasks.
Second, the difference between gamers and non-gamers on this task is very small: 299ms vs 307ms. That's really far below any interesting effect. Effects in fMRI are not interesting: it is unknown what a larger signal in a certain area means. You cannot draw conclusions from it.
Third, the statistical logic is the classic NHST with all its problems. They even commit the error of drawing conclusions from lack of significance.
Fourth, they don't give specifics, but potential confounds were modelled with some linear modelling. It's highly unlikely that the effects of those external factors are linear, and there aren't many of them. There are however some really large difference between the groups (parental income, sex, and watching video/streaming).
Concluding, there's no reason to suppose the effect must be attributed to video gaming, and certainly not that it is positive for general cognitive performance.
Yes, of course. Musical ability is well known to be closely associated with mathematical ability. Musical achievement is not known to be closely associated with mathematical achievement; people tend to do one or the other.
But this already tells us that playing an instrument will predict better cognitive performance for reasons unrelated to the work you do to learn the instrument.
I would not assume that playing a sport predicted better cognitive performance, but I obviously would assume that playing a sport intensively predicts better athleticism -- independent of the effect of practicing sports -- than avoiding sports does.
but with cheap phone games, maybe not. hmmm...
Call me armchair “points out the obvious parts then gets pessimistic guy,” but we’ll likely never actually know if it’s a correlation in the time period that’s more consistent with like… the nutritional availability and parenting habits. Or for that matter The Osbornes going off the air?
I suspect that a lot of our policy actions must be suspiciously based on suspicions until we make a major breakthrough in neurology or statistical analysis. Do what works for now.
Seems like brains that are engaged have better outcomes than passive ones, let’s do that for now!
I spent a lot of my time outside exploring and playing games with my friends. Later in college when a lot of my peers were playing counter strike all day long I got into programming because I always wanted to learn how to do it.
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in-game mysteries (is it possible to solve X or Y quest, get a certain item, and so on?), some of which persist today (probably the remaining ones can't be solved),
social interaction: you needed to trade with players for almost everything -- buying all equipment, even to use magic you were required to trade unless you could make them yourself),
in-game economy, mechanically, the game wasn't too hard, it was very well balanced; a big element was finding where you could be more efficient to sustain your own advancement through the game; trading was a major gameplay element,
making friends: for many, this was really the point of the game, just meeting people, talking for hours, finding where they came from (often distant countries I'd have no opportunity to visit); most activities greatly benefited from a group, although you could solo;
coordination: you needed a really good attention and coordination to play in certain situations; most of all, you needed to understand your capability and the requirements to make sure you didn't lose weeks or even months of progress (the death penalty was something like 10% of your total playtime!).
It's hard to overstate how much growth it afforded me and by brother -- the lessons are too numerous to cite, from interacting with people to managing risk on everything you do. We did recognize, even at the time though, that it could get us 'hooked' in a bad way -- and that the game was ultimately limited and there was a life outside (other activities) with a greater horizon. My brother just quit completely one day to never return; I always kept visiting the world out of curiosity and nostalgia. It really felt like having a wild virtual childhood. I still think about people I've met in that world some 20 years later.
Unfortunately, some of the aspects that enabled this experience have been degraded significantly. The greatest loss was probably due to cheating and bots. Cheating was already possible, maybe right from the beginning, but it took a long time to develop and become widespread. At one point though, almost every serious player was cheating, and a significant portion using bots to automatically achieve high levels with low risk (or just amass fortunes and transfer to "clean" characters). Seeing no great alternative, the developer (Cipsoft) started to understandably introduce the various cheating systems (automatic aiming and item usage, etc.) into the game itself, reduce death penalties, and so on. It also copied other games that have automated markets and so on, and for a while bots almost ruined the game (only much later they got a deal with BattleEye that significantly improved the situation -- but the game was already changed). The game now is much less wild and much more like a single player experience.
One very interesting aspect of the game is how much this wilderness is important but still very troublesome. The risk is what teaches risk management; but it also enables other player abuse. The possibility to kill and get killed was very scary (of course, maybe not as scary as many IRL risks), but it also built serious trust, when you had to trust your friend wouldn't turn against you for personal gain, find who to trust, etc.. It really showed what's ugly about humans at the same time as what's really amazingly beautiful -- some of the most kind and selfless people I've met were playing that game (and also a handful keen to set you back a long time just for pleasure). I think one way or another everyone that played it learned the value of cooperation in some way. I thought it was my yardstick of civilization to see if people would kill for fun when "it's just a game" (with serious in-game consequences for your victim) or act cooperatively -- I thought the ideal game was not one where you can't kill one another, but one you can, but almost no one does (I never subscribe to the notion that in game killing was "a fun part of the game" -- although I did see the allure of the loot; after all, not killing was also part of the game; in any case, you could always stop playing or opt for non-pvp servers, which most of my IRL friends did -- but I refused).
A very interesting experiment just in life, is the least I can say.
Note: There is a spiritual successor of the classic game going on in https://medivia.online/ Be warned -- this kind of game is as much of a time sink (and perhaps as addictive) as it sounds; but if you feel ready for this sort of experience, it seems still possible; I haven't ever played Medivia.
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The gender difference is huge though, the nongaming cohort had 288 males and 840 females while the gaming cohort had 372 males and 307 females.
Also, I'm a bit confused why they just dumped anyone with between one and three hours of videogame playing a day.
Maybe you saw it in the text but, "This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommend that videogaming time be limited to one to two hours per day for older children."
The thought process I can sort of imagine is that the tests are fairly costly and the hypothesis they're testing is that more play than the official recommended limit should decidedly give detectable impairments to cognition. (Seems they could have rejected that, if they'd had comparable groups in the first place. Now I'm not sure what it says)
Screen Time Survey
This threshold was selected because it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommends that video-gaming time be limited to 1 to 2 hours per day for older children.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Given infinite money I think many of those parents would send the kid with nanny if needed or whatever to organized sports, piano classes, etc.
Source on that? Video games (console or pc) is very expensive and not something low income folks can generally afford for their kids.
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It thought me that if you work on something, you will get better at it, and you will be rewarded. This is not the case for a lot of other things in the life of a teenager. If you work hard at school you aren’t really rewarded, you just have to pass (binary outcome) and if you do an extra project it’s not like you get extra points. If you take a student job, you don’t get a raise when do a good job, you just get more work. If it wasn’t for video games the lessons I would have learned was that you should do the bare minimum not to fail/get fired. Which is a really sad attitude to have.
Thank you for saying this. The point itself is something I knew and concluded on my own, but the way you phrased it made me realize that, as a parent, it will be my job to provide a structure on top of school, that rewards my kids somewhat proportionally to effort. As opposed to parents giving near-binary (5+ is good, 4 is meh, 3 sucks, 2 or below and the belt is out) rewards otherwise uncorrelated with effort, which was my experience as a kid, as well as others in my cohort I talked about this with.