I agree that playing a game might not improve a class of skills in general like coordination or problem solving, but I don’t think it requires much study to determine improvement of skills directly used.
For example, to improve your reading skills you need to practice reading. If a game is providing reading material and motivation to read, it will improve reading skills.
Games can also drive motivation in other areas. In the early 90’s when I started computer gaming, you actually needed to know how to use a computer and understand them to some extent. Half the time I spent gaming was spent figuring out how to get the computer to do what I wanted which lead to a life long interest in technology. Sadly, like the parent poster mentioned, that is probably no longer a thing.
> Half the time I spent gaming was spent figuring out how to get the computer to do what I wanted which lead to a life long interest in technology.
I remember the old days of "extended memory" which meant you needed slightly different configuration files for each game. That meant if you wanted to play a bunch of games, it made sense to learn how to write a bat script to config according to what you wanted to play.
You also had a terminal which gave a "computery" vibe, like you were doing something serious, because why else would the interface be so austere? Command lines are like magic incantations, and some people are just drawn to learning how they work.
Nowadays that entry route is gone, there's not much peeking below the OS desktop anymore on something like a phone or tablet. On desktop it seems like Steam just abstracts away everything else that you'd care about, though I'm not a heavy gamer anymore.
My first computer was a 486 33mhz w/ about 250MB HD . I could only keep a couple games installed at a time, meaning i was always installing and uninstalling. Then I had to play with the autoexec.bat and cmd.com files . Then I broke it. Then i had to fix it cause my mom was still making payments on the computer (like it was a refrigerator with a 10yr lifespan) ... This is how I got into computing. Come to think if of it I owe her some "interest" on how much she invested in my career. :)
+1 for breaking autoexec.bat (on a 386). And getting yelled at by my dad, who needed it for work.
Thankfully, this led to a great decision when he upgraded -- his old machine became mine. If I broke it, well, that was my problem, and I should learn how to fix it. Cue ~10 year old me learning about the Windows / DOS boot process.
In summary, we should encourage kids to play games, but make them harder to install and more prone to break your operating system, because it makes kids smarter.
That's an interesting idea. If I have kids maybe I should tell them "you can play any game you can run on Linux. Here's an Ubuntu CD, helpdesk is at google.com. If you get really stuck tell me what you've tried so far and I'll give you some suggestions on what to ask Google. Oh, by the way, if you'd like to write your own games, I'll be happy to help you."
For the last 15 years or so I have insisted most people I mentor, even young teens, build a new primary computer from parts and build Gentoo on it including the kernel.
When it boots successfully and can connect to the internet we then move on to helping them do any daily task they once did on Windows or MacOS, including gaming, art, schoolwork, etc on the new system.
Most choose another distro eventually once they know how to patch any software when needed, but some stick around and go on to develop operating systems themselves.
By the time you have kids that are old enough to play games, if you do, then you’ll probably know that this is an impossible conversation. The process will instead be to create a mystique out of your own habits, which the child will find intriguing.
That was me. I was given a Linux laptop, shown how to connect to the Internet (from a terminal), and basically told "good luck". 15 years later, I am happily working on embedded Linux systems.
I would encourage you to also spend time teaching and mentoring them even if they havent tried. Kids thrive on this kind of attention, and feelings of support.
I have definitely lamented how easy it is for my kids' generation to play games, compared to the memory optimization techniques I had to employ to even get them running ;)
> Ooh, if I LH the mouse driver and allocate a little more EMS it should work, but don't forget to load DOS=high,umb!
1/6 of my friends (we all own 286, 386 and play computer games) got into programming and became a software engineer. The policy is against online games. I am actually looking to setup a computer without internet for my 8 year old. I want him to learn about computers, but internet is definitely not something I want him to explore now.
Hah! You've just described my childhood, hacking autoexec.bat and config.sys to get games to work. Each game needed a different hack. Had no idea what I was doing back then, it was more a case of discovering the correct incantation until stuff worked without the graphics juddering too badly.
There is also the value of the skills being learned. Learning about extended memory may have been of value to some people in the day, but it had negligible value a decade later. It may have launched a few careers, but it did not have lasting value. Learning how to create batch files had more value since those skills were transferable to similar domains (e.g. Unix administration and software development).
That being said, people rarely discuss technical skills as a benefit of gaming. Things like resource management are more often brought up. Maybe there's some benefit to games in that respect, but I suspect most people learn about resource management within the context of games and very little of that is transferable to the real world.
This isn't to say I'm opposed to using games for education. I have certainly taught concepts in mathematics using Minecraft. Yet it does take a higher level of awareness of what you are trying to learn (or teach) than going through the mechanics of playing.
Understanding low level architecture of that time (and early memory management) and first steps of the boot process is definitely something that has been useful to me since then. DOS batch files scripting no so much...
I beg to differ about XMS. That particular technology may have only been relevant for a decade, but the idea of using a harder-to-access storage to supplement cheap-but-limited storage is everywhere. L1 and L2 cache, data warehouses, cloud storage, and so on. I value learning about that abstraction early on. I’d agree it’s not singularly career changing, but I don’t think knowing any one technology in the software industry is.
XMS wasnt a supplement, and its behaviour wasnt analogous to a cache. It was a 32 bit wrapper that would allow 16 or 32 bit* dos applications to access all "extra" memory that 32 bit systems usually got installed. The access was commonly provided via emulating the EMS mechanism - a 64k or 128k block to be paged within the fist 2^19 bytes, or by providing a 32 bit address for a usable block.
*32 bit and protected mode (ring3) support was provided usually via DPMI, an interrupt service managed by a TSR (daemon), or VCPI, a more complex privileged system. Some DOS extenders could also provide this functionality for their own binaries, notably the very popular DOS4GW.EXE, the Watcom dos extender. Yes, the name of the file reflects the physical address limit of i386 systems, 4GB. (note that when working with linear addressing, the max addressable range is quite superior due to the paging mechanism).
I do truly hope that this is a case where multiple starting points ultimately end going to the same place, largely. There are multiple entry points and what was a good entry point when we were young is not the best way anymore.
For one thing, now there are fairly easily reprogrammable boards that can do things like power motors for which you need to learn real programming just to start, even if you're using an example.
I am worried that a level of comfort with computers that we may have due to being there during the evolution will be gone, I certainly learned to type over 120 words per minute by playing a MUD, far more important than my actual honest-to-god typing class. I think-type, which is a result of endless text conversations and emails.
Are those fundamentally important skills? Why? At some level if they are skills which are needed there will be a reason to learn them.
My childhood story too. We ended pretty knowledgable, effective and borderline dangerous when the watered down systems arrived later.
I'd put in the same category the edition of saved games to change your amount of money to FFFFFF or the epic shenanigans required to setup a LAN party.
For some games sure, but those games now make up a subset.
Look at the 'casual' games which are optimized via AI to hold attention and trigger repeat use. It may not be much of a stretch to consider these drugs for the human visual/rewards system rather than videogames. And these attention-grabbing tools are only getting better as we collect more data and develop better algos.
If your goal is to learn a skill, there are better ways to go about it than gaming. The problem in learning that gaming helps with isn’t learning efficacy —- it is motivation.
As a child, I simply wasn’t interested in novels and enjoying playing games would be a prerequisite to having the motivation to write one.
Depends on the person. I learned quite a few good habits from video games, particularly how to become more focused, driven, and patient. After getting fairly serious with a competitive game in my mid thirties, I found it translated rather unexpectedly to other pursuits. I am unsure if I would have found these parts of myself otherwise; I certainly hadn't before, and I had no shortage of variety in my hobbies or rigor in my career(s) prior.
I agree. Games feel like chose-your-own-adventure books, which were novelties and not nearly as engaging as a well-written book to read and visualize and anticipate.
A great way to help a child read throughout their life is to read to them every day, enjoy stories together and apart, and not to push too hard in any direction (they may enjoy different things, no problem). Asking open-ended questions helps, too, with time to consider and respond.
When playing various games you have to manage a budget, reason about logistics, get an intuition for basic physics, understand numbers and basic math formulas etc. There are so many skills you learn there that are seen as very important. How can passively reading a story book even compare to actively being forced to practice and learn these things?
I learnt English thru video games. I would not be here without them. But arguable, modern games with lootboxes and metrics are way worse than 90s offline games.
Exactly. I want to let my kid experience something similar. So I gave him (6 years old) my desktop pc. He is now playing around with windows settings. Of course looking for games on Steam. But he at least doesnt touch his Nintendo switch anymore.
Video games gave me the motivation to learn English, about machining, CAD, PCB design, economics and programming. Anyone who is against leisure is falling into the existential trap of capitalism. What is the meaning of doing productive work inside a video game? Since productive work is now leisure you actually run into the existential problem all the time. The video game runs into deflation all the time. People are highly productive, reducing the need of other players to be productive.
In fact, the very thing we beg for is an increase in the money supply. We are hoping for inflation. Meanwhile in the real world everyone is scared of that inflation thing. My latest project is literally pumping NPC vendors with basic resources to create money out of thin air to generate inflation. The paradox of creating money is that it makes people work and end up doing more "productive" work.
> If a game is providing reading material and motivation to read, it will improve reading skills.
Eh. No, that's not quite how that works. If you look at north american elementary school level reading, you may notice that books are often categorized by levels. Some of this has to do with complexity of sentence construction, some has to do with vocabulary, and some has to do with subject matter. The gist of the educational philosophy around reading is that one doesn't get better at reading by plowing through reading material at high volumes, but instead one needs to gradually level up by going through materials of appropriate complexity. One specific problem that teachers look for - especially in kids that advance quickly - is "skimming without understanding", for example (i.e. reading words/sentences phonetically, but without understanding their meaning/context).
Game text is usually not structured with any didactic value in mind (other than maybe appropriate usage of furigana in Japanese in consideration of target audiences). A lot of game categories don't even require any reading beyond recognizing words (which is somewhere between kinder and 1st grade level reading skill)
Also, even in games where text actually matters, you're typically spending a large amount of time doing other things (killing monster or whatever). In addition, the notion of games-as-reading-material ignores a fairly common phenomenon: a lot of people simply spam `A` to skip over dialogues - and even get stuck on one-off gimmicks that rely on reading the text carefully for instructions or clues.
To be clear though, practicing pre-acquired reading skills can help in the sense that repetition legitimizes, but IMHO that's a bit different than improving beyond a current level, and not necessarily all that different from what you get from reading cereal box/shampoo labels or reading comic books.
So what I think is a really strong counterpoint to your argument is the simple fact that watching movies in a language is generally considered a great way to learn said language. That's passive learning in a similar manner to what you would get out of reading in a video game.
It fails to train you in actually synthesizing speech though. So you need a structured approach as well, similar to what you describe, to fill out the many other facets of learning.
But it's still insanely valuable to do so.
reading things likely makes you better at reading things
Well, I think doing things way above your level "works" sometimes in the sense that there's a subset of things that a learner happens to be most receptive to at any given time, and immersing yourself at the deep end is a bit like brute forcing through the entire subject matter until something happens to stick. But this is inefficient and not guaranteed to yield any results at all.
I have some insight into language learning myself, having had both positive and non-positive experiences. On the one hand, yes, games and movies did help me pick up english vocabulary, but this is because I also studied english from an early age in school, the fact that English borrows vocabulary heavily from romance languages (with which I am fluent), and perhaps most importantly, the fact that I've immersed myself in it quite deeply during my teens, often preferring to read and write in english. Ironically, though, learning through entertainment media left me with some curiously weird learning gaps. For example, I only learned in my 30s that "down" (as in Final Fantasy's "Phoenix down") refers to a type of plumage and not some weird in-universe usage of up/down/left/right.
Now contrast this experience with this: As a kid, I also learned Japanese (though not to the same extent as english, let alone the extent required to master it coming from a romance language). At one point, my dad brought over some Japanese RPG games from a business trip to Japan, and while I did have basic schooling on hiragana/katakana, the teen-level kanji from the games was way over my head at the time, and I ended up learning virtually no Japanese from those games (I had to quite literally sit down to actively study kanjis to make any sense of what the game text said). I also consumed quite a bit of anime and not a whole lot stuck with me either, due to a lack of what I can "active practice" (i.e. my exposure to the language was mostly on a as-needed consumption basis, with little to no active effort to write or speak).
In short, I do think games can help nail down stuff you've learned elsewhere, but upleveling language skills from games alone is very difficult.
> For example, I only learned in my 30s that "down" (as in Final Fantasy's "Phoenix down") refers to a type of plumage
For what it's worth, that's not at all what I'd consider a weird gap. As an educated 40-year-old native English speaker, I think it's possible I've gone my entire life without speaking aloud the word "down" in the sense of plumage. I'd only expect a non-native speaker to know it if they spent some time focusing on animal terminology.
Yeah, after writing that comment I thought about it a bit more and realized that I have used the word "down" in the context of pillows before. But that may have been one or two conversations in my life.
> Game text is usually not structured with any didactic value in mind (other than maybe appropriate usage of furigana in Japanese in consideration of target audiences). A lot of game categories don't even require any reading beyond recognizing words (which is somewhere between kinder and 1st grade level reading skill)
> Also, even in games where text actually matters, you're typically spending a large amount of time doing other things (killing monster or whatever). In addition, the notion of games-as-reading-material ignores a fairly common phenomenon: a lot of people simply spam `A` to skip over dialogues - and even get stuck on one-off gimmicks that rely on reading the text carefully for instructions or clues.
This is a consequence of modern gaming trends and by no means an issue with video games themselves.
There are a lot of game categories that provide or even require extensive reading. We don't have to accept _all_ games a beneficial; it's not like we use magazines and tabloids to teach reading comprehension either.
There are games where killing monsters isn't the primary goal, or even if it is a significant aspect of game play can be averted by finding alternative solutions, usually through the in-game lore.
Deus Ex was a great example where several bosses could be entirely side stepped by reading emails throughout the game (though to be fair, only a few of them actually required _reading_ the email as opposed to simply discovering it). Arcanum is another that if you pieced together enough of the backstory and paid attention to the dialog you could talk the final boss down. There are even more out there, as you mention, that offer hints to puzzles and gimmicks, some of which even present it as a riddle ensuring you read and understand the text rather than just found it.
Sure, a lot of people will skip these things and save-scum or post on message boards to get the answer, but that's not much different than CliffNotes everyone used.
If you want to use video games in school do the same thing we do for books: Select the games the offer quality reading and evaluate based on comprehension rather than completion. You can even require students submit save files to verify they took the reading path.
There's no need for mental gymnastics, it's a lot easier to simply argue that educational games are educational. But this doesn't contradict what I said: that most games are not structured in terms of didactic value.
I do, however, want to specifically call out the learning value of an R-rated game: if you are learning to read from it, that says absolutely nothing about age-appropriate didactic value of the game. At that level, the game ought to be making you solve quadratic equations or something along those lines for us to even begin entertaining the idea that they may provide any actual didactic value.
Grammar/spelling/usage is almost all about memorizing and copying others, so engaging in tasks that use those skills will definitely get you further faster than a step-by-step progression. I was reading and writing at a level far beyond my peers in elementary school, not because I was smarter, but because I actively read books for fun.
For example, to improve your reading skills you need to practice reading. If a game is providing reading material and motivation to read, it will improve reading skills.
Games can also drive motivation in other areas. In the early 90’s when I started computer gaming, you actually needed to know how to use a computer and understand them to some extent. Half the time I spent gaming was spent figuring out how to get the computer to do what I wanted which lead to a life long interest in technology. Sadly, like the parent poster mentioned, that is probably no longer a thing.