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Comment by lucasfcosta | Hacker News Reader

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.

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From TFA:

"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).

This was mentioned in the article.

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 play Serious Sam to better focus on other tasks. I do so because I cannot walk long hours as I did before for exactly same purpose.

If you ask me, I'd better walk. But I can't.

Walking releases brain-derived neurotrophic factor, playing FPS does not.

As an allegedly gifted child: School was boring/not challenging enough. While video games progressed as fast as made sense.

I absolutely think that it's your PoV that's correct rather than the articles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjYy4Ksy1E

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.

Yeah in the WoW case they didn't embrace it, but Warcraft and Overwatch has workshop solutions, that's what I was referring to. (Understand since I didn't mention it that it wasn't obvious, wrote the reply on my phone).

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.

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