Video games as developmental and educational aid: "Teachers, leave those kids alone"

This is something I had on my mind to write for a very long time. My first contact with computers was when I was very young at 7-8 years old. It was a time when a PC had almost a prohibitive price in my country, so I would go to my parents workplace to play. I have grown with no screen time limitation, no tablet time reward for being good or anything. I could have just spent as much time as I wanted, provided that I had finished my homework or other tasks that were "mandatory".

Nowadays I am looking at parents and their interaction with their children and the way that video games are viewed as detrimental, violent or useless activities that nobody should engage in, let alone adults. Because yes, I admit it, I am playing a few games a year and I am always getting judged for doing so. My problem is not about being judged, but the fact that the judgement is being done without actually considering what a game actually is, or what the interaction with a game is all about. So let's dive deep and explore this bond and explore the studies that support my view.

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Preconceptions about gaming

The usual opinion about gaming is that games are violent, and pull out the worst in kids, by affecting their subconsciousness and making them aggressive. This has proven to be false, DOH, by a lot of studies, led by this study from the University of York. Sometimes parents want games to be banned for exploring the wrong themes or showing violence.

Another common misconception is that games are useless and they represent lost time from the developmental process. "You just move around, killing everything" is what I heard the most.

To address these problems we need to understand what a game is, how children or adults interact with games, and most important of all, how educators (be it parents or actual teachers) should learn to include them in the teaching process.

Don't generalize. There are games and games

Not all games are the same, there are games made by indie developers (small teams of people building them out of passion which usually feature an emotional bond with the player to keep them motivated to play and are generally viewed as more innovating and artistic, since it's hard to make it on the market otherwise) and there are games made by very big companies, which rival most of Hollywood's productions. Hundreds if not thousands of people might be involved, over a few months or years.

These companies use writers for the story, designers for the game mechanics, real actors with motion capture systems and most often than not psychologists and scientists to study the engagement and work closely with game testers to offer a tailored experience which is paced just right to offer a rewarding experience.

Each game undergoes a rating system and is targeted at a specific audience age and type. So exposing your child or even yourself to one of these games is most often than not going to be a good experience which will make you feel at least the same as viewing a whole season of your favorite movie on Netflix, since a game usually takes a minimum of 5-10 hours to complete, with some taking weeks or months if you want to complete everything that the developers wanted you to explore.

Parents don't see games as educational, based on the lack of time dedicated to watching their child actually playing.

This is one of the most widespread situation that I see and it comes from the parents' lack of time for the children combined with the fact that screen time is seen by them as a way to get away from the children for a moment and take care of their house chores or just relax. Parents exasperated of how much time their children spend on Minecraft and how that is dumbing them down as they "hit rocks with pickaxes all day". They didn't seem to have spent more than 15 seconds at once trying to understand what the game mechanic is, and what the goal of the game is.

A shift in mentality

Like in any enterprise, in order to teach people, you need to have educated educators. This means that the parents or the adults must engage in gaming in order to get closer to their children (current, future, or just as an experience). The family dynamics should not consist of designating screen time as a reward, a time to unwind and idle the brain. Psychologically, by doing this, children associate the screen time to being as purely recreational and not engaging so they have an incentive to get most out of it by playing games that instantly gratify gamers, instead of trying to understand or experience the games. By having a limited time to play, the children will skip cutscenes (the main storytelling mechanic) in order to get more action time, this way robbing the game of the story and social and emotional interactions. WHOA! Social and emotional interactions with a scripted character? Is that even healthy? We'll get to that.

So just how serious can a game be?

From my experience let me tell you that, as an adult who never played any game, you will have a hard time even completing the game, while your child will probably make fun of you having finished it well before. This is because a child's mind is much more flexible and easier to adapt and interact to new stimulus than the mind of the usual parent.

I have even tried it myself with adults who were scolding me on spending time on the computer. Playing a split screen simple game using a mechanics that would take 30 seconds to understand, and they would have no idea what to do. It indeed looked much easier when I played it :) and they couldn't even synchronize themselves to jump a boulder.

There are games out there that focus and grow certain abilities in children, like problem solving, overcoming social difficulties and even shyness. We are not even going to get into detail about the studies that show that reaction times in children playing fast-paced games correctly reflect their gaming experience and translate to real life situations. And in the US, where adults had access to video games at early ages, are more prone to playing with their children than in the other areas. There is a study that actually found out that video games helped children with dyslexia read better.

Games can have more genres, like a book can. They are classified by game mechanics into genres with some of them crossing borders or innovating more:

• Action games - fast paced games in which reaction time and fast decisions need to be made. Usually these games are fast paced and offer a feel of accomplishment that is hard to get just by reading a book or watching a movie. These games are really engaging. Sure, in most of them you have to shoot bad guys, aliens, zombies or a mix :D . But a healthy child's mind is built to absorb this as an experience, not as a model to follow in life.
• Strategy games - slower paced games in which planning is rewarded. Many times these types of games involve playing cooperatively or competitively with other players, teaching your child to be a team player and plan things in advance, many times create alternative and backup plans, create mental plans which can change and update as enemy tactics change. There are professional players that issue 400 commands per minute (I don't condone professional gaming, but I am just presenting the huge number of decisions a player can make).
• Adventure games- slower paced games with fast paced sequences, where players have to solve puzzles, develop relationships and do quests, develop social traits and behavior and learn the dynamics of consequence, since the games in this genre often have alternative endings and alternative dialogue options that follow your moves. Some games use reputation systems that make it harder to advance if you betray everyone around you or try to steal from your friends. Usually covered by a huge story, with some games having romance threads or deep friendship relationships that will make you want to reload a save game even if you have to replay 10 hours or the game if your favorite companion has died as a consequence of your actions.
• Simulators - slower or faster paced games ranging from racing simulators to farming simulators, flight simulators, space simulators and even mechanics simulators or car repair simulators. Anything you want to simulate was probably simulated before. Cognitive benefits are the most here, as playing a game teaches the child about a real life system that will follow him for the rest of his life. I am the living example, as I am a devoted simulator games consumer. Knowing how cars brake and how weight distribution works in turns while trying out clutchless rev-match shifting without damaging your car are among the things I have learned in games. Playing Flight Simulator from Microsoft was also a happy experience, it was actually proven that a player can actually land a jet (on a professional simulator).

_{Video demonstration of how accurate a plane cockpit can be simulated. Creative Commons video on Youtube.}

Managerial Simulators - These are by far the best games to be playing to develop cognitive functions and it will get heaps of insight out to the child. I have actually tested it with a 11-12 year old niece, who would appear to have little interest in such games, and she ended up asking me loads of questions about civics and financial systems that I took for granted. While playing a game revolving around managing a full city (Cities Skylines) she became accustomed with aquifers, water flow and pollution, garbage pollution in general and giving people what the want it, BEFORE they actually request it. since it would keep them happier this way.

_{Cities Skylines creator talking about how the game was used in real life at a TED Talk, licenced under Creative Commons.}

Survival games - a new trend of games that revolve around crafting items using basic and raw materials, with the sole purpose of surviving and thriving given the conditions. It might be a zombie apocalypse or just a plane crash in the deep north. These games can teach you how things are being created and is a great tool for insight for children learning how the world works.

_{Trailer of The Long Dark, a survival game.}

Adult games - haha, not that type of adult games - which are created solely for adults and explore serious themes of loss, agony, hard choices and understanding, taking and living with hard choices. They are heavily story driven and can influence your day. I tip my hat here to Life is Strange and This War of mine.

There are more genres available, I have just covered the basics, but exposing your child or yourself as an educator to those genres, you will benefit the most from what they have to give. Sure, nothing is good without moderation, so while all the games are useful, they shouldn't replace human relationships and the child should play with moderation. This is usually done by oversight, which can be done in the background and stepped in if the bounds are overshot.

Prohibitive actions towards gaming through not understanding what they stimulate is throwing the child into unregulated and unsupervised territory.

The ever so present statement "No video games, read a book instead!" comes to mind. I have never heard it being said to me by my parents, but I hear it everyday when games are mentioned by a child in front of the parents. It shuts the child up and psychologically creates a divide between them and the parents. This behavior is something I have identified in the wild before as bullying.

Why not be the one that supervises the games the child plays, and why not offer him the RIGHT games that are able to shape his character on the long term.

Why can't this be regulated by parents? Introduced as a hidden learning time. Why not say "it's time to play video games"? Spend time with him as he plays those games, find out more about him and about his subconscious as he plays through some difficult parts, or you can try to collaborate in a cooperative game of survival. Putting real world teachings into the game time is one of the most effective way to keep him open to learning, and it will happen without even realizing. And you will have fun, too.

Preventing addiction

The easiest way to prevent addiction is through constructive game and time management. Most of the time game addiction happens because of poorly managed game selection. For example, engaging in endless mass multiplayer online games that have their sole purpose to suck in new players and keep them busy for the payment of monthly subscriptions and replacing real activities like parties and cooking or mundane socializing in online guilds, is clearly undesirable. A child can't escape it (most of the adults can't either) but after reading a game review and understanding how the game mechanics works, a trained adult can easily spot that addiction is engineered in the said game. Remember that big game producers are investing a lot of money into this lifestyle mechanic of the game.

Don't treat girls differently than boys. Don't give girls Barbie games, come on.

Do you want to raise the perfect housewife that will then need to find a husband to rely on or an independent human being? They can manage a city planning game as well as a boy does. Don't undermine her trust in herself or think that she can't learn or has no need to learn car mechanics. Make a list of games that she likes and some that you think are good and play them together.

In the end, it all comes down to education

Don't block children from gaming, don't bully them, don't treat gaming as a mindless activity since you will influence your child's perception of it. Spend time and find a game that would be educative for him, play with him, teach him install it, talk with him about the basics of the mechanics, spend time watching how he does. Play cooperatively, ask about his progress. Answer his questions and reward him for applying the knowledge in real life. Be part of the experience with him as you will have access to experiences that you can't get otherwise. Get educated and then use your education to pass the good games and skills along.

What games did you play and what did you learn from them?