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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't a criticism of video games and if you are suggesting I am underestimating something, I got myself off the street a few years ago of my own efforts.

I still play plenty of videogames. It's something I can drop at will as I get my act together, make the connections I need to make, etc. I like games and my kids always joked "Video games are our only education."

But the reality is I would rather have a life and if I had more of a life, that fact would drive a lot of my activities and there simply wouldn't be time -- or need -- to play games for hours.

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You're so right - video games shouldn't even have been mentioned. As human ingenuity goes, there's infinite ways to "waste time".

I've spent many hours with the family playing MineCraft, and it's an amazing way to teach things like not being selfish, being cooperative, etc. to children because they experience the effects or lack of in compacted real time without permanent real-world impact.

I homeschooled my sons. After seeing how vastly superior Gungan Frontier and a similar Sim game were to my "pen and paper" style simulation in my college class on environmental biology, I went through their games and decided which games I would count as educational and for which subject.

Their joke grew out if conversations that went something like this:

Son blurts obscure historical factoid.

Me: "Where the hell did you learn that?!"

Son names video game he learned it from. Punchline: "Video games are our only education." (Vin Diesel movie line, so another excellent reason to say it to me.)

They now have a blog where that's the descriptor, basically.

Personally, I owe my English skills to videogames. While I later continued with proper education, the basics of grammar and vocabulary (as well as many incredibly subject-specific words) I've learned from, in order: Star Trek: Generations, Fallout, and StarCraft. I fondly remember me sitting in front of the first of these games with English/Polish dictionary and translating things on the screen word for word.

Based on the sound of his typing -- which sounds like his dad typing and I know his typing speed because I met him in typing class in high school -- my oldest son probably types at about 80wpm. This is thanks to online games with chat functions. You need to "talk" fast to coordinate with your teammates and stay on top of your duties in the game.

That's very true. Another related phenomenon that improved my typing speed is games that require execution of a lot of complex actions very quickly. Playing them competitively essentially forces you to master random access to your keyboard. In StarCraft, after grokking the core mechanics, your next primary improvement would be raising your APM (actions per minute). In terms of an OODA loop[0], most players are constrained by the Act part. So if you wanted to win, you had to master the art of issuing keyboard+mouse commands at a rate of 3 per second (= ~180 APM, which isn't even progamer level).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

I was Director of Community Life for the oldest set of gifted support email lists on the internet while I was a homeschooling parent. It was common knowledge in those circles that the best way to improve typing speed for kids was to encourage them to get involved in things like online games.

My son was already a gamer. He hated his typing program. I told him he could quit doing practice typing as one of his assignments if he exceeded 35wpm -- which is my typical typing speed and I had a typing class in high school and can type about 60wpm when I am focused and yadda.

I also told him online gaming was a known way to hit a better speed and that's likely a factor in him going that route. He was gleefully happy to give up typing practice as one of his formal lessons.

I've always hoped this was a common knowledge, but unfortunately it somehow never reached my parents or my teachers.

> He hated his typing program.

I remember those typing practice programs. I always hated them. Super boring, couldn't stand them for more than 2 minutes.

Much later on (and well after I've achieved high typing speeds) I've discovered The Typing of The Dead - a House of The Dead clone where you shoot zombies by correctly typing words. For me, that was the ultimate typing program: it gave the same exercises, but in the context where I could spend hours in front of it. I suppose that was an early form of what we know today as "gamification".

I don't remember what typing program he had. Each of my sons had their own typing program because they had different learning styles.

I was very goal oriented. If they could meet the standard, they could move on to do something else instead. Where they exceeded grade level expectations across the board for some subject, I let them do whatever they felt like doing as "gifted enrichment."

For science, I got my oldest anything he was interested in -- books to read, magazine subscriptions, whatever he wanted -- because at age 13 he was talking slow and repeating himself a lot to explain the Theory of Relativity to me. This was enormously helpful in getting me through some of my later upper class college classes.

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