This story was originally published in our September/October 2022 issue as “(Virtual) Reality Check”. Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this.
My husband and I were eating with our son Eddie who was then two years old when a couple walked in with a young boy wearing headphones staring at an iPad as we walked. Throughout the meal, the boy was glued to his screen while his parents chatted amiably as if he weren’t there.
“What’s the point of having a kid if you don’t talk to him?” I said to my husband.
We have vowed not to buy our son any electronics until he is 30. And video games, one of the main reasons kids want these devices, would be banned.
So far we have kept to this agreement, although it has not been easy. When other parents went out to dinner and handed their child a phone, we had to entertain our child. We brought a backpack with crayons, markers and spiral sketchpads with thick paper. We lugged around Jenga, Uno, and Yahtzee. We drew pictures and built mini-forts out of jelly bags—all to keep our son from playing video games, which I saw as poison from the devil.
In fact, there is a body of research, such as an October 2018 meta-analysis, showing that children who play violent video games are more aggressive. Another September 2020 article in The International Encyclopedia of Media Psychology notes that repeated exposure can lead to desensitization to violence, making people less empathetic.
Video games can also be addictive, so addictive that the World Health Organization included a disease called “gaming disorder” in its International Classification of Diseases; The American Psychiatric Association considers this a condition warranting further investigation. And a 2020 study published in Developmental Psychology followed 385 adolescents over six years and found that 28 percent of gamers tended towards increased levels of depression, aggression, shyness and anxiety at the end of that period.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise, says Douglas Gentile, who has studied developmental psychology and media violence for 30 years. Games can have a significant impact, and children are impressionable. Whatever the content of the game, kids are likely to learn it, says Gentile. If it’s a violent game, they can learn aggression skills. However, the same applies to useful video game elements such as reading or arithmetic. If it’s a pro-social game, they’re likely to learn pro-social skills.
“Whatever you practice, you will learn whether you want to or not,” says Gentile. But the worst problem with gaming, at least for our kid, is one I didn’t anticipate: alienation.
It took a while for Eddie to make friends at school. Now in fourth grade, he’s finally formed some bonds, mostly through sports. But in their free time, all of his friends play video games and my son doesn’t. He felt like an outsider before he made those friends, and now my ban inadvertently keeps him isolated — not just from his classmates, but from the rest of modern society, it seems.
(Image credit: Illustration by Kellie Jaeger/Discover)
A digital dilemma
About 76 percent of American children play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association, the trade association for the U.S. video game industry. Not only was my son missing out on playtime, he didn’t know how to play. During the pandemic, a classmate had a virtual birthday party where everyone was invited to play Roblox. My son and I couldn’t even find the virtual room where the game was being played. When I frantically texted other moms asking them how we could find his classmates, my son got angry and then angry.
He’s since found a way around my ban: he plays video games at friends’ houses. I was annoyed at first until one day he came home and told me how lucky he was to be in the herd. Read also : Is Amazon Prime Video raising its prices?. He started crying as he remembered how much of an outsider he had felt. “Now I can play with everyone,” he says.
I was traveling with a different parent last week and was complaining about not being able to raise my son the way I want. If I forbid him from playing video games, he wouldn’t be able to go to friends’ houses because they do that after school, or he would play next to them in isolation while they play. Either way, he would miss important bonds.
“Don’t do to him what my parents did to me,” my friend said. Her parents forbade her from watching television and eating sugar, prohibitions that denied her any cultural connection. “They made me feel like a maniac,” she said.
Video games are now such a part of the social fabric that they’re not played like growing up without a TV, says Nick Bowman, gaming researcher at Texas Tech University. Nowadays, when people talk about their childhood, they also remember playing video games with their parents and siblings.
“It’s a family ritual. It’s a friendship ritual. The data suggests these are the things people will remember 40 years from now,” he says.
Bowman also notes that game research has evolved. For the first 20 years, studies focused on potential harms such as addiction and aggression. Today, games are valued for their artistry, their educational potential, and their ability to make people feel things. It’s not that video games don’t have negative effects. But the myopic focus on those negative effects now seems overdone and outdated, he says.
“They don’t reflect the reality of the millions and millions of people who play games every day and don’t experience any of these negative effects,” says Bowman.
Good or bad
I delved deeper into research and saw studies that shed light on the benefits of gambling. On the same subject : The Netflix Video Game You Want To Play. People who play video games can learn how to make good decisions, says James Paul Gee, a linguist at Arizona State University and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
Most games involve simulations where decisions have to be made and players can see the consequences of their decisions, Gee adds: “It turns out that learning good decisions correlates with knowledge. If they know how to make good choices in life or in problem solving, you can give them [any] knowledge test and they will master it.”
C. Shawn Green, a cognitive researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says asking whether video games are good or bad is like asking, “What effects does food have on the body?” Different games have different effects on players , some good and some bad. Action games, for example, can help how we perceive and respond to stimuli around us, his research shows.
Because action games require players to respond to stimuli anywhere on the screen within seconds, playing can improve their ability to discern important information in a crowded scene. Players also learn to move from one task to another more quickly, a process that can take up to 200 milliseconds, Green says.
“Basically, your brain switches tasks,” he says. “Playing these types of games will reduce switching costs.”
Beyond the virtual
On a recent shopping spree, I noticed the young man at the counter wrapping my groceries in paper bags. Read also : Support the team’s mental health after a violent news event. He did it with such care, making sure he chose the right item and placed it in the bag in the direction that would achieve maximum efficiency.
“Do you play Tetris?” I asked.
He added that he plays a lot of video games. So I asked him what I fear most about my son’s gaming: Are the games so exciting and overstimulating that everything else in life seems boring in comparison? He thought about it for a moment, with a pause. He then said he really wanted to be a surgeon – a goal that was far more important to him than any video game. Interestingly, he added that playing the game might help as his fingers are now so nimble that it has improved his sewing skills. Studies prove this.
As I left the store, I wondered if my son had something in life that he liked more than video games, something that made real life as exciting as virtual. I knew immediately what it was. It was the company of friends. He is not addicted to video games. He’s addicted to companionship.
