Video games play with young minds

MOST people will have never heard of Kamloops, an exquisitely beautiful city in British Columbia, Canada.

Surrounded by achingly beautiful mountains and lakes, it began as the crossroads for the fur trade and now is the preferred "sea-change" destination for Canadians.

It's the last place on earth I expected to learn about the latest research on video games.

Most Australian families own a video game console, be it PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo Wii.

Most boys are playing an average of 13 hours a week, as opposed to a much more modest five hours for girls.

What should attract the attention of Australian parents is the finding that the more their children play, the less likely they are to do well in school.

It would appear the fast-moving, interactive and fun virtual world is finding it difficult to compete with homework and text books.

Researchers found an inverse relationship between academic performance and time playing games.

And a Yale University study has found that while not all games are evil, boys who play violent video games are more likely to engage in serious, real-world types of aggression.

One of the conference speakers, the renowned author, psychologist and physician, Dr Leonard Sax, argued these games were more damaging than watching equally violent TV.

Watching television has someone else perpetrating the violence, whereas in video games the death and destruction is inflicted by the player.

But it's not all bad news, and studies have demonstrated that regular players of video games have reaction times two-hundredths of a second faster than non-players.

This hardly offsets the reported negative effects on behaviour, cognition and mood, and it is unclear what advantage this might have.
So, what are mums and dads to do?

The experts suggest that before buying the game, go to the department store and play the game yourself.

Does the game involve some of the characters trying to harm others? Does this happen more than twice every 30 minutes? Is the harm rewarded in any way? Is the harm portrayed as humorous and are realistic consequences of the game absent?

If yes, and your children are still young, buy a different game, one that doesn't reward anti-social aggression.

There should be no place for that in any home, especially not those in Kamloops.

News-Source: News.com