My oldest son, Brian, has always been “into” computers. He enjoyed this pastime as a child and continues as an adult. He now builds and maintains computer systems on his job, and acts as a consultant for top companies and governments. At home, he is helping to raise a twelve-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl. When you enter his house, there are computers everywhere. Each of the kids has a computer and games are played regularly. For fun, sometimes my son will get together with his buddies, each bringing a computer to a central location where everyone hooks up to one another and they have a gaming session that can last for days. This is difficult for me to understand. Pardon the pun, but it doesn’t compute.

 

Recently, I was editing an article on technology—specifically on video games. The games sounded educational, so I emailed the article to Brian to get his impression. He gets irritated with the fact that everything has to be “educational,” whatever that means. After all, aren’t there different types of education and different types of skills and knowledge to be gained? He emailed back to me an article that he says expresses the way he feels about video games. The article, from the July 12 issue of USA Today, is titled Video Games Not Necessarily Turning Kids’ Brains to Mush, by Kevin Maney. Maney talks about two books that espouse that playing video games might be one of the best things your kid can do to ensure future success.

 

The argument comes from Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson, a best-selling science writer who often tackles neuroscientific issues, feels that playing video games helps kids to learn valuable problem-solving skills. Games like The Sims and RollerCoaster Tycoon give kids a cognitive workout. We're getting smarter, Johnson says, and the reason is the growing complexity of popular culture—including video games. He feels that books lack interactivity and, therefore, understimulate the senses. It’s not the game content that’s important, but the mental process that is required to solve problems. At every point you have to make decisions. You have to think about patterns, long-term goals, and resources. Then you have to make decisions, get feedback from the game, and use that to readjust your decisions. Steven Johnson has his own blog, if you’re interested in learning more about his thinking.

 

Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever, by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade states that video games are changing the way that work and data are managed. The authors stress the importance of kids learning to be fluent in video games. Gamers believe that winning matters and they place a high value on competence. Game players learn about measured risk taking, have an amazing ability to multitask, and develop leadership skills.

 

So, perhaps, parents and educators should take another look at video games and discover what skills can be gleaned from them. Also, shouldn’t we consider how the techniques used in these games might be applied to future learning methods?