Video games can teach positive lessons, too.

Periodically in this blog, I have written about positive and negative effects of video games.  It is clear that video games can have both positive and negative influences on behavior.  On the negative side, violent video games can lead to more aggressive behavior in general.  On the positive side, playing action video games can make people faster and more accurate in other settings that require complex actions.

Here’s another positive effect of video games.

A paper in the February, 2010 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Tobias Greitemeyer and Silvia Osswald looked at whether video games with positive messages can lead to more positive behaviors.

Not every video game involves violence.  It is possible to create games that have action, but in which the object is to help characters accomplish goals.  For example, in one study, participants came to a lab and played one of two video games.  The positive video game was City Crisis, which requires the player to fly a helicopter through a city to rescue people from buildings and to chase criminals.  The game was exciting without promoting wanton violence.  The neutral game used for comparison was Tetris, in which players have to fit geometric blocks into a well.

The participants in the study played these games while a female experimenter looked on.  After a while, a male confederate entered the room and played the role of an ex-boyfriend of the experimenter.  He started harassing the women, saying that the woman had been ignoring him and that now she would have to talk to him.  He talked loudly and kicked a trash can.  If the participant made no move to help (such as saying something to the man or looking for another experimenter), the man left after 2 minutes.  The measure of interest was whether the video game player helped the woman.

When people were playing the video game that involved helping other characters, over 55% of them chose to help the woman.  When people were playing the neutral game, fewer than 25% helped the woman.  The authors report four studies overall in this paper that suggest that people are more likely to be helpful when playing video games that promote positive behaviors than when playing either games that are neutral or violent. 

To examine why people might be more helpful when playing positive video games, one study asked people to list all the thoughts they had while playing the games.  People playing the positive video game wrote more thoughts related to helping than people who played neutral games.  In addition, the number of these helpful thoughts predicted how likely people were to help later in the study.

So, this research suggests that playing video games that involve being helpful can promote helpful behaviors beyond the video games.

Of course, in the end the difficulty is getting people to play video games with these positive messages.  But at least there is research to suggest that if people do play these games, it does have a positive effect on their behavior later.

The positive effect of action video games: Speed of visual processing

Periodically, I like to look at the effects of video games on thinking.  A few months ago, I posted a blog entry on the influence of video games on kids’ grades.  In the months after getting a video game system, kids show a drop in their grades.

I like to be even-handed, though, and so I want to talk about a positive influence of playing action video games on thinking.  There is growing evidence that playing action video games increases people’s ability to process visual information quickly and to make decisions based on that information.

Action video games are the ones in which there is a lot of activity on the screen, and the player has to take quick action in these situations.  Many of these action video games are Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty are violent.  The action has to be taken so that the player can avoid being killed in the game.

A paper in the December, 2009 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science by Matthew Dye, Shawn Green, and Daphne Bavelier looked at differences between people who play video games extensively (at least 5 hours a week) and those who play rarely if ever.  They first analyzed 89 studies from a range of experimental tasks that required people to do things like search for a target shape on a computer screen or to quickly identify shapes on a screen in different conditions. 

They found that video game players were much faster to perform these tasks than non video game players.  One way you could be faster in any task, of course, is just to sacrifice accuracy for speed.  You could respond quickly, but be willing to get some number of answers wrong.  That is not what is happening here.  Video game players are just as accurate as non-video game players in these tasks, they are just faster.

Maybe this is a bias in the sample of people tested.  Perhaps those people who play video games a lot are the ones who happen to be able to do things quickly.  After all, if you tend to be slow in making decisions, you probably won’t have much fun being blown up regularly in games like Halo. 

To address this possibility, the authors also reviewed a number of studies in which people who were not video game players were either assigned to play action video games for 50 hours over 9 weeks or to play entertaining non-action games for 50 hours.  Later, all of these experiment participants performed visual experiments like searching for patterns on a screen.  In this training study, the non-video game players who played action games ended up being able to perform these tasks faster than the ones who played other games.  These studies suggest that there is something about action video games that speeds people’s ability to process and use visual information.

Finally, you might think that these action video games just make you more impulsive.  That is, perhaps people who play video games just respond very fast to all information on a screen.  That doesn’t seem to be true either.  The authors also reviewed a study in which there were some trials where items on the screen signaled that you were not supposed to respond.  Video game players were also quite good at keeping themselves from responding when that was appropriate. 

So, video games don’t make people trigger-happy, they just make people faster at processing and using visual information.  There are some tangible benefits to playing action video games after all.

Video games make a lousy gift.

Because it is back-to-school time, it is interesting to think a bit about another drain on kids’ time—video games.  What role video games have on kids’ performance in school? 

There is a lot of correlational evidence suggesting that video games are bad for schoolwork.  That is, kids who play lots of video games tend to do more poorly in school than kids who do not play that often.

Correlational studies are the most obvious studies to do to address this question, because it is straightforward to get information about school performance about a group of children and then find out from their parents how often they play video games at home.  Of course, the problem with correlational studies is that there are many factors that could be causing the results that go beyond what was measured.  Maybe the kids who play the most video games at home have the least parental supervision, and so they don’t do well in school.  Maybe the kids who are struggling most in school are the ones who seek out video games as a way to escape the frustration of homework.

A nice study in the April, 2010 issue of Psychological Science by Robert Weis and Brittany Cerankosky tackles this issue head-on.  They found a sample of boys between the ages of 6 and 9 who did not yet own a video game system, but whose parents were planning to buy them one in the near future. 

They got information about reading, writing, and math performance in school about all the boys as well as information from parents and teachers about behavior at home and at school.  Two groups of boys were created.  The groups were set up so that their current level of school performance was about the same. 

One group of the boys was given a PS2 game system and three age-appropriate games.  The other group did not get a game system.  After four months, the researchers got information about current reading and math performance, behavior, and an assessment from the parents about how the kids were spending their time.

Reading and writing performance of the boys given the PS2 was significantly worse than that of the boys who did not get the game system.  There were no statistically reliable differences in math performance. 

Other statistical analysis found that the difference in reading performance could be explained by the amount of time that the boys spent playing video games each week.

Why was language performance hurt, but not math performance?  Between the ages of 6 and 9, there are many opportunities for kids to get extra practice with language.  Just having a conversation with parents can improve language use.  In addition, kids can sit at the dinner table and read a book.  Parents can spend some time reading to their children.  The video games cut into this unstructured reading time.  There aren’t as many opportunities to practice math outside of doing schoolwork directly, and so math performance was not hurt. 

What about behavior?  There was a tendency for the kids who got the video games to exhibit more behavior problems in school than those who did not get the games.  This difference was small, but it should be of some concern, because the boys in this study had only had the games for about 4 months when the follow-up measures were taken.  These initial differences could get larger over time.

What does this mean?

The problem here is probably not the video games themselves.  The problem is that video games are very enticing.  Kids can sit and play video games for many hours.  In that time, they engage in few real conversations with others, and so they end up with much less practice reading and using language. 

As a parent, I know how hard it is to resist buying a video game system for your kids.  Obviously, if there is no game system in the house, that will limit the amount of time that your kids play games.  If you do decide to buy a game system, then it is important to have strict limits on the amount of time that it gets played to leave enough time for the kinds of interactions that enhance learning.