What's in a Game?

July 27, 2010 9:32 AM

I've heard it said that when children are playing, they're learning. So what is that they're learning when they're Gaming?

Computer Gaming that is, online, Playstation, whatever. Sure they might be picking up a little history, a little marksmanship, some dubious driving skills. But what of overall life skills? What is Gaming teaching them (about the world, about themselves) that's going to make them stronger, more functional adults?

posted by philip-random to education (41 answers total)

hand/eye coordination, quick thinking, problem solving... that's just off the top of my head
posted by Eicats at 9:35 AM on July 27, 2010

Hand-eye coordination. Problem solving, memory, and creativity, depending on the game. (Not that kids should be playing video games all the time. They shouldn't.)
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 9:36 AM on July 27, 2010

Obvious answer Game Theory.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:37 AM on July 27, 2010

I can speak to the skills that MMORPGs might help develop. Socially, you have to learn to work with others you might not like, as well as dividing up tasks and objectives that suit each person. You have to learn timing, strategy, and quick-thinking. If you are an officer in a guild, you have to play moderator between people, as well as organizing goals, timed objectives, and managing group money and resources.

You also learn that sometimes people are just batshit crazy and you can't do anything except leave 'em alone.
posted by rachaelfaith at 9:37 AM on July 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

Hand-eye coordination and spacial recognition, probably, but apart from that, it depends on the game. If they're playing role-playing games, vocabulary with possibly a bit of philosophy and history. If they're playing something multi-player, they're learning about teamwork and conflict resolution. If they're playing strategy games, they're learning about...well...strategy and logic.
posted by infinitywaltz at 9:37 AM on July 27, 2010

It's probably improving their reflexes, and it's great for problem-solving skills. In many cases, how to develop and shift a strategy as a situation evolves. In many online games, how to work with a group, adopt a role, and support the group to achieve a goal. Frankly, other than the physical aspect, exactly the same skills you'd gain from sports.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:38 AM on July 27, 2010

(Patience and tenacity, I suppose if they get stuck on a difficult level or whatever.)
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 9:38 AM on July 27, 2010

MMORPG teach a lot about social interaction, cooperation, and leadership.

Those and others teach manual dexterity, spacial relations, and cause and effect relationships. Some give a insight or, at least, respect for design principles. And every game as tiny bits of mythology, history, geography or something that have sneaked into the storyline.
posted by Some1 at 9:38 AM on July 27, 2010

but don't just take my word for it!
posted by Eicats at 9:40 AM on July 27, 2010

Cooperation, communication skills, logic, spatial skills, empathy, an appreciation for technology
posted by SuperSquirrel at 9:40 AM on July 27, 2010

It's worth remembering that the saying about children learning from play comes from real-world playing, e.g., with toys or baseballs, and especially from playing with others. A lot of the skills learned in those situations aren't necessarily cultivated by video gaming.
posted by philosophygeek at 9:40 AM on July 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

You might find some insight from this excellent TED talk by Jane McGonigal.

Seriously. She addresses this question. It's great.
posted by kellygrape at 9:42 AM on July 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

Confidence!

Also, the ability to try out different personas (the strong, daring adventurer or the patient problem-solver or whatever), is important to figuring out who you really are and where you fit in the world.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 9:43 AM on July 27, 2010

This book explained how todays games help stimulate kids' brains. It also goes into TV shows and other things, but it touches on gaming as well.
posted by patheral at 9:44 AM on July 27, 2010

Playing online text based roleplaying games taught me how to spell, a bit about the dangers of social dysfunction in cliques and gave me fiction writing practice.
posted by Phalene at 9:44 AM on July 27, 2010

Handling money, to some degree, at least in terms of tradeoffs and opportunity cost.
posted by XMLicious at 9:47 AM on July 27, 2010

Interesting question. I just started playing an online game. To play well requires research, planning, math and genuine teamwork. You have to calculate how many of what type of troops, what resources you'll need, how to manage multiple cities. The best players are good leaders; they get other players to help them attack, or survive attacks. People who have leadership skills improve them. I'm surprised at how complex it is. The military is using games to train people in specific skills.

I don't know if Mario and other games have the same stuff going on. 1st Person shooters(FPS) gross me out. Wii sports games, like bowling, are really fun. Computer games vary wildly. There are a gazillion review sites, with varied biases.

However, it's also very clear to me that the less time kids spend in front of a screen, the better. What kids learn from playing freely, and being physically active, outdoors, is really irreplaceable.
posted by theora55 at 9:48 AM on July 27, 2010

Drums, if they're playing Rock Band on expert. Or just rhythm in general.
posted by cmoj at 9:49 AM on July 27, 2010

Driving Sims, especially Gran Turismo or Forza, while not 100% accurate, they do give the player a very good idea of how a car performs under certain conditions.

If the particular game has a level editor, then there's level design and by extension game design.

Or, if the game has developer commentary (Valve games have a lot of them), the player learns how the game was made.
posted by hellojed at 9:50 AM on July 27, 2010

I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for, but the American Association of School Librarans has assembled a set of standards for the 21st Century Learner that has a good list of skills that children and teens need to have in 21st century America. They're not all games-applicable, but a lot of them are. You can browse through the list here (pdf). You might also want to look at the National Educational Technological Standards or the ITEA's Technology Literacy Standards or the National Council of Teachers of English's definitions of 21st Century Literacy.

There's a long sort of all-over-the-place bibliography with a lot of links at ALA's Librarian's Guide to Gaming.

Without getting too pedantic, I think people think that people aren't learning when they're gaming because they're having too much fun and/or not learning Four R's sorts of things. I think gaming teaches social skills, certain ones, in ways that are sometimes better or more age appropriate than dopey "work in groups" stuff that you do in schools. So things like learning to organize to work together to solve problems. Dealing with problem solving in time-sensitive situations. Learning to adapt to shifting tasks and shifting skill levels appropriately and responsively. Learning to commnicate in groups with goal-oriented focus. Social skills like sportsmanship, respect for others, team work, become more important in a networked world.

If you're lookign for research, that ALA page also links to studies such as "The Effects of a Consumer-Oriented Multimedia Game on the Reading Disorders of Children with ADHD" (pdf) which seem to think that playing games like Dance Dance Revolution can help kids with ADHD with reading skills etc. Nick Yee has studies the effects of MMORPGs in the Daedelus project and there are links to a lot of his published studies on that web page. In a totally different direction, games that get you moving such as the Wii are used in senior centers as ways to get sedentary populations more mobile in a way that is engaging.

I think, as a skeptic on this topic myself sometimes, that you can't overstate the importance of people doing something that they enjoy that they can also do for a job. Many young [and older] people have jobs working in the gaming industry in various ways which is a completely legitimate way of interacting in workforce culture in the US. If they're anything like me, getting to work with computers every day seems more like puzzle-solving and problem-solving and therefore FUN not the grind grind grind that a lot of people seem to greet their days with. I have friends in the gamiling industry who seem to have this sort of outlook. Not bad. I think there are arguments to be made that doing anything to the exclusion of real-world interactions is probably not a healthy way to interact with the world and I think that's what people see when they think there aren't good social and educational outcomes from gaming.
posted by jessamyn at 9:52 AM on July 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

Things I learned from gaming as a kid:

How to re-orient my brain to look at situations differently in order to solve puzzles.
Little engine that could persistence-y stuff, if I keep trying I can figure things out.
To treat things I care about respectfully (no controller throwing)
Games can help you learn about your personality and yourself, I know that I hate FPS, because I have no patience or interest in finding or utilizing cover.
How to match different gems to create rows of three.

The Idle Thumbs podcast guys talk a lot about emergent gameplay and one of the things they harp on is that games that create systems can create or reflect situations that occur in the real world. Basically if you play system based games you can learn to see influencing factors and create models of how the world works. An example, one of the commentators was playing a Civ game and ended up either choosing or randomly assigned a different religion than the other nations playing the game, eventually when the civilizations began interacting he basically ended up in the Crusades. System based games can reflect a sort of wireframe vision of reality back at you.
posted by edbles at 10:01 AM on July 27, 2010

When I play RPGs that have any kind of morality system, or ask me to make difficult choices, I find myself reflecting on my own moral choices.

Should I take the reward, or let the poor villagers keep it? I need the cash, but they need to eat.

Why did I feel justified killing that mercenary, but not this one? The former was threatening a civilian, but the latter had surrendered his weapon.

Some people will play through an RPG like that multiple times, so they can see how things work if they're "evil". I actually cannot do this. The minute I try and make an evil choice, I have to quit and reload. I connect to the characters as people, and for me to abuse them or treat them badly is (in my view) morally wrong.

I am not sure if I learned this from games, of if it's an example of me using a game to poke around in my moral sense. Either way, in a well-written game, there's a lot more going on than hand-eye coordination.
posted by lholladay at 10:09 AM on July 27, 2010

Systems thinking.

There's the surface level - I need to get from here to here without the guard seeing me.

Sure, but what you're really trying to do is work out some sort of optimized path that that maintains some variable below a critical threshold only you never get to see the variable, know the threshold or know the inputs that change it. It's a black box where you have to come up with hypotheses and run experiments.

OK, now cross out all the computer game words and write in something about antigen antibody kinetics in complex mixtures and you have the story of my life.

Hmmm, now that I think about it, after you've had to reload the game twenty seven times because, "Oh Bullshit! How the hell did he see me that time!?!?!" your also getting some pretty strong negative feedback about allowing your hypotheses to turn into dogmas. I need to more of my coworkers on Steam.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 10:10 AM on July 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

I have lots of friends who study games and learning as academics. The research is pretty solidly behind games as being potentially effective teaching tools. You have to let go of the content-transfer model of teaching, ie classes give you facts that you remember and apply to later situations. Games are very poor at that, and the history of "educational" games has historically focused on that. Think Reader Rabbit or Mathblaster. Those games were primarily about either gating gameplay based on knowledge to motivate learning in other contexts, or about teaching you facts and making you apply them.

Instead, you should think of games as giving people frameworks for thinking. Games encourage thoughtful data-based decision making. RPGs are all about balancing statistics and abilities, and picking the right team to solve a problem. That kind of analysis and decision making is a broadly applicable skill. There's also game ecosystems. Playing a game doesn't mean you sit at home and go through each level. Players are immersed in social structures around games that teach them about reading, writing, and interacting. Players frequently look up information about a game online, which is part of the process of learning an expert discourse about something. That process is something people will need in the rest of their life, when they go into a new industry and learn that community's discourse. In terms of writing, gaming gives people a clear context in which to write and an audience to write for. That's the core of writing, and giving people things they're passionate about to write about does more to motivate writing than any class on literature.

I'm cribbing these arguments very extensively from the wonderful and passionately argued Jim Gee Book What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Jim is a brilliant guy, and comes from the world of hard core rhetoric but has really sunk his heart into making the case for games and learning to a skeptical world. I have a ton of respect for the work he (and his academic children) do. You can find more academic work in this area coming out of Wisconsin.
posted by heresiarch at 10:11 AM on July 27, 2010 [7 favorites]

Oh, I just remembered, I tutored a little kid who was having trouble learning to read once and so I introduced him to a Zork-type text adventure. He seemed to be better able to stay interested in that than reading a book.
posted by XMLicious at 10:13 AM on July 27, 2010

How to fail. And fail again. And fail again. Without serious life consequences or risk to actual bodily harm. It's a great skill for anyone to develop.
posted by judith at 10:13 AM on July 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

Everything above, plus I developed yet another avenue for art and music appreciation (I doubt there have been studies on that, but to this day, aesthetic elements remain part of the most powerful motivations for me to play video games, along with factors similar to those involved in reading a novel). There's some beautiful art and great music out there, which can both be appreciated on its own and stimulate interest in the use of technology for aesthetic purposes.

There's also quite a lot of reading involved in certain game genres, such as RPGs, which is why I recommend them to my English learners. Both computer/video game RPGs and tabletop RPGs contributed to/reflected my interest in world religions and history as a kid, since they're riddled with references to historical and legendary/mythological/religious figures. You can be dismissive of "a little history" if you like (that's the tone I picked up, anyway), but I don't see why many people find it easy to dismiss if there are references to history and mythology in video games (and comics books, etc.) but praiseworthy if it occurs in children's literature (I know the OP didn't go there, but it's a dichotomy I've observed often). There's a range of accuracy and depth of reference in all of those media and genres. As a kid, all of it contributed to my own interest in looking up names and other references in actual nonfiction works to learn more about them and find out where they came from and what the real story was.

Of course, repetitive play of any kind to the exclusion of other forms of play is undoubtedly going to hamper learning, but I think that's true whether a kid does nothing but play baseball in her spare time, nothing but build Lego houses in her spare time, nothing but climb trees in her spare time, or nothing but play video games in her spare time (no matter how physically active the games were). Culturally, though, we'd be a lot harder on the kid playing with the Legos or the video games.

Oops, where was I?
posted by wintersweet at 10:17 AM on July 27, 2010

If they're gaming online, they are learning how to call people some pretty nasty things, in fifty different languages. And occasionally, a few more versatile words and phrases.
posted by rokusan at 10:24 AM on July 27, 2010

In one study, surgeons who had (at some point in their lives) played video games at least three hours per week "made 37% fewer errors, were 27% faster, and scored 42% better overall" at laparoscopic surgery tests than surgeons who had never played video games.

Also, a presentation about that study lists "superior eye-hand coordination, faster reaction times, superior spatial visualization skills, [and] increased capacity for visual attention and spatial distribution" as positive effects demonstrated by earlier studies (slide 8).
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:30 AM on July 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

Dealing with physical and conceptual abstraction.
posted by davejay at 10:32 AM on July 27, 2010

Some people have touched on this already, but my oldest son has pretty much learned to read and do math from video games (we jokingly call it "The Morrowind Curriculum."). Another skill he has worked on through video games is managing frustration, perseverance, knowing when taking a break gets better results than continuing to make attempts, stuff like that.
posted by not that girl at 10:33 AM on July 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

For my kids, playing video games has helped them with: persistence, reading skills, frustration tolerance, cooperation, creative thinking, dexterity, managing competitiveness, coping with failure, confidence, patience, problem-solving, planning, organizing, world-building, sportsmanship, thinking about risk vs. reward, the importance of practice, the ability to look deeper than what's right in front of them and consider non-obvious solutions to problems... and of course how to look up tips and tricks online when none of those solutions work. Admittedly, so far their games have tended to be mostly Mario-based, though Lego Harry Potter, Guitar Hero, and DDR are favorites as well. But still -- at least in our household, video games have definitely been a force for good. (Even though I was informed by them that the Wii game based on one of my books was "kinda lame." Playing games has helped them become discerning as well!)
posted by mothershock at 10:46 AM on July 27, 2010

I've seen kids get wicked fast at mental math from adding/subtracting/comparing when play RPGs where things are number rated. Reading, following and understanding a plot, mastering a fictional realm (all things we ask them to do in language arts classes). Many mentioned above.

I think the biggest thing I haven't seen mentioned is the ability to navigate a complex world with arbitrary rules and mastering those rules in order to "win". Which is EXACTLY what my litigator husband does, day in and day out, and there's a reason he's as good at strategy games as he is at litigation. He's very good and sussing out the underlying rule structure that drives a game and figuring out the best way to exploit that to his gaming advantage. It's exactly the same skillset he applies for his clients.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:13 AM on July 27, 2010

Computer Gaming that is, online, Playstation, whatever. Sure they might be picking up a little history, a little marksmanship, some dubious driving skills. But what of overall life skills? What is Gaming teaching them (about the world, about themselves) that's going to make them stronger, more functional adults?

I'm not a child development expert or anything, but I grew up playing video games and here is my perspective:

I think the biggest thing about games for me is that they forced me to learn things. They didn't force me to learn important things, but if I wanted to do better in a game I had to get better at whatever makes someone good at that particular game. That could just mean developing better reflexes (shooters), it could mean developing a strategy (RPG), it could mean developing tactics (war/strategy games) or solving puzzles (adventure games).

My parents wanted me to learn an instrument as a kid, and although I was never any good, I spent a lot of time learning how to read the notes move my hands and whatnot to make the right notes. I was in the school band and we never played any music I actually liked (and I didn't really like any kind of music back then), so the point for me was to try to do my best to play rather than actually enjoying it. And that generally meant practicing a certain song until I got somewhat passable at it, and then moving on to the next one.

With games, I was learning to do the same sorts of things with my hands and doing some memorization, but it was more of a fun kind of challenge and I could spend time getting good at the games I wanted to get good at. It was something I could actually interact with, there was clear feedback for what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong, and for some games I could play against my friends to compete to be the best at it. With every new game there is a new set of rules that they designer has built in the form of the gameplay, and a lot of the fun of games for me is in learning those rules. I've played a lot of the standard genres of games that I can pick up a new one and already be pretty good at it, but there are still great games like Portal that show you something completely new and challenge you to figure it out.

My job as an adult is a programmer, and I think enjoying playing games as a kid helped me develop a love for learning new things and solving new problems that helps me in real life. I get the same kind of feeling figuring out how a data structure is organized as I did when I was learning how to beat a boss level, it's all the same sort of thinking to me. I suppose spending the time I spent playing games could have been spent on something that would have been helpful in other ways, but I don't think that time was wasted by any means. I was a smart kid so I didn't have trouble learning random things, but learning how to play video games was what made learning the most fun.
posted by burnmp3s at 11:57 AM on July 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

According to one researcher, gaming teaches the scientific method.

tl;dr: The researcher, Constance Steinkuehler, found that kids playing in an MMORPG were keeping spreadsheets to track how to kill the harder monsters. Here is the paper. (pdf)
posted by frecklefaerie at 12:10 PM on July 27, 2010

I would like to echo philosophygeek above. Playing video games, while certainly valuable for a number of reasons listed above, should not be a substitute for play in general. The things a child learns on a playground (how to socialize, how to organize, how to compromise, how to set boundaries and resolve disputes, all with no set parameters) are essential to developing into a healthy human being, in my opinion.
posted by fso at 12:55 PM on July 27, 2010

I was just going to say scientific method, frecklefaerie! There's this fabulous free game, Transcendence, in which you constantly encounter unidentified objects and have to figure out what they are based on their appearance, how they interact with the environment they're in, where they're found, and how they interact with other objects of known type. You have to form a hypothesis and test it.

Since I'm mentioning specific games I want to point out Manufactoria, a game recently posted to the blue. It's not strictly educational but I consider it a really fine preparation for learning to program. The player has to construct machines which are part of an assembly line and what those machines are doing is something like sorting out the faulty products on the line from the good ones. The learning bit is that these machines are almost directly equivalent to a mathematical construct call a Turing machine, something that is studied very closely in computer mathematics. Lots of problem solving on the same level as debugging a computer program: arrangements of machines that are equivalent to a programming loop, testing machines that correspond to "if...then" statements, and it even edges a little bit into binary mathematics to demonstrate why that's so easy to do with a computer.

Finally CellCraft, an educational game that in an easy way with cute characters managed to let me recall a good bit of cellular biology from high school.
posted by XMLicious at 1:17 PM on July 27, 2010

Personally, one specific skill I could attribute to my long gaming sessions as a kid is spatial awareness (mostly in the form of pretty good map-reading skills, probably related to playing a large number of games which employ minimaps in one form or another).

Also, although this only really works with English (and possibly Japanese), games can be invaluable as a language-learning tool. As a native Spaniard, constant exposure to videogames in English when I was a kid massively helped build my language skills. In fact, I am currently employed as a professional English-Spanish translator and my specialty field is videogame localisation, so in my particular case there is little question that all that gaming at an early age certainly paid off. :)
posted by doctorpiorno at 2:32 PM on July 27, 2010

Many games train the ability to think clearly and act calmly in extremely stressful and rapidly changing situations.
How to act rapidly without acting hastily. These skills can be literally life-saving.

And I mean "literally" literally :)
posted by -harlequin- at 3:47 PM on July 27, 2010

My 4 year old learned arithmetic from Warcraft 2. "I can control 9 orcs at a time. I have 4 orcs. I need to make 5 more orcs to make 9."

Yes, I realize that this makes me a bad parent. He turned out pretty good anyway.

He also learned a certain amount of history from the Age of Empires and Total War series.
posted by Jasper Fnorde at 7:39 PM on July 27, 2010

Many very good answers here. Not that I'm surprised. Interestingly, I initially asked the question in response to a few stupid situations I'd seen recently rise up between parents (my age) and their teen age kids, but the answers here have ended up inspiring me in a whole new screenplay related direction.

Thanks all.
posted by philip-random at 9:24 AM on August 7, 2010