Playing video games can improve our lives | Hacker News Reader

Playing video games can improve our lives

techu4ria.com

20 pointsIraqCombatVet19 comments

It’d be great to have the original papers. Here we have an article that mention other articles that mention other articles that sometimes give a reference for the original paper.

Unfortunately it's much more interesting to source more popular websites than the actual original studies that nobody cares to read unless it's for academic purposes.

There is a darker side to video games that people don't take into account.

As per the article, games are highly stimulating. For children and even adults (me in particular), time slips away and 12 or more hours have been spent playing games. This is especially pronounced with ADHD.

No matter how much good video games do for the brain, 12 hours remained fixed in front of a console or PC is not healthy. There have been cases of DVT due to bad sitting positions and maybe 4 hours spent on a game.

The other issue is that, if you are prone to hyper focus, you ignore your responsibilities, including using the toilet or eating. For so e people, games ARE that captivating.

As a funny but also quite sad story, my fiancée bought a second hand PS3, which I protested. Each successive weekend, I spent around 24 hours each completing game after game. She wasn't pleased. Mainly because I ignored her, contributing absolutely nothing to household chores, and partly because she was excited to play the games.

A good deal is that I can play games if I want to once the kids are in bed. I have Half Life 2 half completed, which is a bloody captivating game. I do, however, try to focus on other highly stimulating activities that don't entrance me for large blocks of time.

As a side-note, programming has a similar effect. I'd argue that was far more productive. This actually led on directly from gaming so I can't complain much.

EDIT: my autocorrect seems to be on a rampage lately. This one takes the biscuit though: "using the toilet of eating".

Having played lots of strategic and competitive games in the course of my life, I definitely spent a lot of time on it, and also experienced everything you said and more.

Nowadays, in order to keep my focus on more productive tasks, I tend to force myself not to play, and also not to start playing any new game, because once I get started, it is hard to stop.

Although the compulsiveness level might vary largely between individuals, I believe that this kind of compulsive behavior is specially true among MMO players. The social factor that MMOs bring is just too addictive, even for the least competitive and compulsive person.

I have to say that games brought a lot of good things to my life, such as starting me in programming, friends, a lot of brain activity, great moments and raw fun, but there is a dark side, yes there is, and sometimes I wonder if it is worth it. It might depend on the situation of the individual.

Exactly this. My poison in my teenage years was a small MMO with it's own development platform. Developing content for it became part of the game. I learned the basics of pixel art, good level design, story development and, of course, scripting from this game. It became an easel.

It's interesting that I too have shifted to strategy game as I've got older. HL2 is just a nostalgia thing, I'm not partial to shooters. My biggest problem games are Europa Universalis IV and Crusader Kings 2 (now that I use Linux) and used to be Civ5 and Vic2 on OS X. With EU4, I got so into it I probably spent half the time watching DDRJake (who us totally insane at EU4 - took vassalised OPM Athens and recreated Alexander the Great's empire).

Classics like AOE2 and Caesar 3 are a good past-time too.

With treatment for ADHD, I can certainly resist a lot easier. I'm now getting more urges to program and build things, which I seemed to have lost from my youth after work grinding me down.

> time slips away

It doesn't help that many modern games explicitly use Operant Conditioning to keep people playing. MMOs and "free to play" games are notorious, but you will find Skinner Boxes in a lot of modern games.

Extra Credits has a nice overview, which includes a few design suggestions which games can use instead of hooking players with a reward schedule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

Also, it's not just games - you will find Operant Conditioning style reward schedules in some "social media" businesses, too, which can waste someone's day just as bad as any game.

I notice this with social games especially. The whole levelling, achievement and overblown rewards system is designed to give a dopamine kick regularly, up until you need to pay to proceed. It's almost like a drug. In fact, that's how cocaine works.

With ADHD, it's even worse. The mind craves stimulation as there's a distinct lack of dopamine in an area of the brain. Games amongst other things give this area nice kick, which is why we see hyper focus.

Yeah, there is a darker side to everything from eating and sex to sports and reading books.

Example: Books have influenced people to commit all types of crimes including murder.

In my experience, there's a strong correlation between aptitude at video games and success. This is just my small, possibly skewed sample, but my closest friends I've met through playing WarCraft 3 as a teenager at a competitive level all became high-income, successful, happy people, usually in tech or finance.

I whole-heartedly believe playing video games early on helps nurture a strong competitive drive, discipline, and self-motivation. It probably depends on the game, too. I was playing Civilization II as a 9 year old, played strategy games like StarCraft and WarCraft competitively as a teenager, and eventually played online poker for a living. I don't know if simply playing Candy Crush would yield the same results.

I played competitive Starcraft and then Warcraft III with several friends. One still works as a cashier in a grocery store. One works in IT support. One works for the gov't as a bureaucrat.

I also played WoW with a lot of people. Out of ten people who I still keep in touch with, none did exceptionally well at making money.

All of these games were major addictions for me, and I'm kind of glad I'm out of that phase. If some of the people I played with spent as much time doing anything else as they played video games, they would have moved mountains.

But perhaps that is not the point. We had a lot of fun, and it was a very enjoyable time for everyone involved. And maybe that is the most important thing.

I'm bemused by the finding that playing video games makes one better at identifying blobs on a video screen.

My journey into computing basically started with PC gaming. I wanted to be able to start my DOS games whenever I wanted, instead of relying on my mom to do it for me. I had to learn what the drive letters were, and how to start the various games. I eventually became totally enthralled with computers, not with games, but the nearly infinite number of settings, executables, easter eggs, etc. This continued through my adolescence, when I learned all about computers so I could build a good gaming PC with the meager funds that I had saved up.

I used this experience to open my own IT support business in high school, and later started with Ruby and Rails in college. I've been doing software development since 2008 now, and I think games helped out a lot, not even considering the cognitive changes.

I'm not really sure how a scientific study would show that one /ought/ to do something like "play videogames".

Surely what they really mean is " playing videogames found to have some collection of benefits, by some measures"?

Everything on the list of benefits for gaming also exist on the list of benefits for playing traditional sports. Sports also have quite a few benefits that games don't have, like increased bone density.

Well said Pope.

except dark souls. dark souls rip your soul apart, tear down your reflexes and abolishes your mind. it's fun thoug.

Ah Dark Souls. Best therapy ever! : )

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