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Video games, good or bad?
Some parents may not agree, but video games are being increasingly seen as an important social and cultural force worthy of serious study. Researchers are developing video games designed to help students retain more of what they learn in the classroom.
There was a time when movies and television were considered as a waste of time, the breeding ground for laziness and stupidity among viewers.In time, films and TV were recognized as enormously influential. Now, on college campuses across the US, courses are offered in the history and appreciation of film and TV. Both media are reviewed as art forms in newspapers, magazines, books.
“When a new medium arrives, young people are the early adapters,” says Dr Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and one of the nation’s leading video-game thinkers.
“Parents are spooked by it because it was not part of their world when they grew up. It gets blamed for all sorts of things. But at the end of the cycle, among the people who grew up with it, there is a reappraisal.” he further adds.
Dr Henry explains: “In the case of video games, the reappraisal is being driven in part by the generation that cut its teeth on ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Mario.’ They are graduate students now, or young professors, and to them games are second nature.”
As documented in a survey done last year at 27 US campuses — 100 per cent of college students have played a game (either on the computer or a TV console) at some point in their lives and that the amount of money spent on games each year rivals that spent on CDs or movie tickets. Also, that playing video games is what many of the students do in their spare time. It’s what they do when they hang out with friends — or what they do when they want to make new friends.
“Whether we like it or not, this is the medium of our moment,” said Dr Sheldon Brown, a University of California San Diego (UCSD) visual arts professor and director of the school’s Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts.
“It is a medium that is telling our cultural story, and the fact that it is a primary tool of youth and adolescents means it will have a tremendous impact on how the next generation or two plays itself out. It’s not something we can ignore.” says Dr Brown.
Close to 100 American colleges, including the Art Institute of California branch in San Diego, offer programs that train students for careers in the video game industry. More recently, the emphasis has expanded beyond the practical. Researchers at some institutions are taking a social-sciences approach to the games, grappling with questions, for example, about the feminism of Lara Croft, the popular heroine of the “Tomb Raider” series.
Some of the US’s most prestigious universities — Stanford and Princeton among them — have had seminars aimed at assessing the larger implications of video game fever.
Prof. Brown, at UCSD, has students who use video-game imagery and technology in their art — use it as a way to highlight and comment on what is happening in modern culture.
“When you put this into the realm of art, you are asking people to look at it seriously,” Prof. Brown says. “One of the problems with video games in our culture is that they are not taken seriously, or they are done so in a patronizing way.”
At the University of Southern California, a year-old program is “looking at what the games do to the people who use them,” said Dr Peter Vorderer, a co-director and a professor of communications.
Researchers have investigated whether playing video games improves the speed and accuracy of surgeons. Research in New York has shown that laproscopic surgeons who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made 37 per cent fewer mistakes and were 27 per cent faster than those who didn’t play.
Other research, also in New York, has show that first-person shooter games — the ones that raise the most concern about possibly inciting violence — sharply improve peripheral vision and the brain’s ability to track multiple events.
Dr Vorderer reveals that USC has about a dozen projects in the works. One involves taking brain scans of players as they navigate “Tactical Ops,” a shooting game.
“You ask people why they play these games, and they usually say it’s not about the violence, it’s about competing, about playing,” says Dr Vorderer. “This is a way to see if that’s true, to see in the brain what kind of reaction is going on” when the violence is happening on the screen. Before long, Dr Vorderer and others believe, the White House will be occupied by a president who is a gamer. In the past decade, most of the public discourse about the impact of video games has focused on violence. That’s largely because the discussion has usually been triggered by violence. After the Columbine school shooting, for example, there was much discussion about whether the games played by the two killers contributed to their actions.
Dr Jenkins, from MIT, argues against knee-jerk censorship. He’s at the forefront of efforts to expand the dialogue beyond violence and explore the other impacts of video games. “If all that was ever written about movies was how violent they are, we’d miss everything else they have to offer,” he says.
Games are becoming so prominent economically, socially and culturally that it’s a mistake to ignore them, he said — and a mistake to miss the opportunity to use them in ways beyond just entertainment. Already, shooting games are used by the military in training. Some therapists help patients overcome a fear of flying or driving by having them play simulation games. Other opportunities are explored in regular conversations between industry workers and the professors and students at places like UCSD, which is close to some of the US’s leading game-development companies.
“There is some value to academia being involved in that we can help develop a higher-level conversation about the games, what they are, how they are working, what they can be,” says Dr Brown.
Dr Jenkins is part of a project called Education Arcade that is developing role-playing games that can be used in schools. One that will be tested in high schools this fall has students becoming citizens in Colonial Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution. Their guns have been seized. They have to decide what to do. It’s all based on true events, as reported in the newspapers of the day, Dr Jenkins mentioned.
The game “knocks the marble off the Founding Fathers” and makes that period come alive for students, he said. But that’s just a beginning.
“The goal is to give students an anchor point around which they can study the American Revolution,” says Dr Jenkins. “What we think will happen is that people will draw from their experiences in the game as they discuss the Revolution in the classroom.”
Notice he says, “What we think will happen.” Like so much about video games — including basic questions about why people play them, and how — the scholars just don’t know. So little research has been done. But it’s coming.
“People like me are being supplanted by a generation that has played games all their lives,” Dr. Jenkins explains. “They know them the way I knew movies.”
In time, he believes, people will be taking game-appreciation classes in college.
“A critical language is being developed,” he says. “It won’t be whether video games are good or bad. It will be about critical judgments: Some games are good, some games are bad. And we’ll understand why.”
Let us hope, back home, our IT experts and educationists are alive to the situation and keep track of the research and development being done in other advance countries.
According to a survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project; Entertainment Software Association :
— 100 per cent of college students say they’ve played a video game at one time or another.
— 65 per cent of college students reported playing games at least occasionally.
— 239 million computers and video games were sold in 2003, almost two games for every household in the US.
— $7bn was spent in the US on games (more than double what it was in 1996):
— Average age of a gamer: 29.
— 39 per cent of gamers are women.
— 93 per cent parents claim to monitor the content of games when their children play.
The writer
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