Does video game playing really make us smarter?

In the 2009 Entertainment Software Association ‘Essential Facts about The Video Game Industry’: it showed that 68% of American Households play video games, adult gamers have been playing for an average of 12 years, 25% of all gamers are under the age of 18, 63% of parents think that playing video games is a positive part of their child’s life, in 2008 video games sales went up from 8.7 billion to 11 billion dollars and 43% of Americans plan to buy more video games in 2009.

With that sort of data it is clear to see that video game playing is now a major part of how we spend our leisure time and according to the figures it’s not going to go away any time soon. If anything gaming will become the pastime of choice for many more people.

If that is the case then it would be nice to know that all that time couch surfing and flicking a game controller is actually good for us in some way.

We constantly hear about all the negative stuff, you know, it’s bad for your eyes, it’s bad for your physical health, violent game playing makes people more aggressive, it makes kids fat, it stops people from socializing, too much game playing is bad for your posture.

This is potentially very alarming and as a parent and player myself I would actually quite like to get some real facts. Some hard core research about how playing video games really does affect us.

Ferguson, C. J., Cruz, A. M., & Rueda co-authored a research paper Gender, Video Game Playing Habits and Visual Memory Tasks that showed playing violent video games or first person shooter games actually helped develop visual memory recall and in the paper by MacKenzie, A. H. (2005) The Brain, The Biology Classroom & Kids with Video Games, the American Biology Teachers , show that during the period that people have been playing violent video games U.S. crime rates have actually gone down.

At Cognitivefun.net there is a group of free online games that can definiteley help your brain improve. Brain training activities have been around for a while but these online and free games actually help overall cognition. Rather than just training the brain to be better at the particular game you’ve been practising these games develop overall cognitive improvement and thay have the added bonus of being designed by neuroscientists so that has to be good. Careful they’re addictive!

References

Cognitivefun.net. (2008-2009). Retrieved Jan 2, 2010, from Cognitive Fun: http://cognitivefun.net/

Entertainment Software Association. (2008). 2009 Essential Facts about the Video Games Industry. Retrieved Jan 15, 2010, from Entertainment Software Association: http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2009.pdf

Ferguson, C. J., Cruz, A. M., & Rueda, S. M. (2007). Gender, Video Game Playing Habits and Visual Memory Tasks. Laredo, Tx: Springer Science + Business Media.

MacKenzie, A. H. (2005). The Brain, The Biology Classroom & Kids with Video Games. The American Biology Teacher , Vol.67, No.9, pp.517-518.