So it's confirmed? Gaming > Socializing? /s
They state
> Socializing via social media, text, and video chat
Is socializing via social media mean talking in a chat? Or does scrolling your instagram feed and liking your friend's posts count as socializing?
Or scrolling Twitter and liking/replying to your friend's tweets? That could be considered socializing too?
So that's why they described it as " ocial media, text, and video chat". Their data comes from the ABCD study. I didn't look much further. https://abcdstudy.org/
Intelligence does not directly correlate with either success in life or happiness (I believe intelligence is negatively correlated with happiness).
Also, be aware that Scientific Reports is, if not quite a predatory journal, a very low bar. They publish tens of thousands of articles every year, while charging vast fees.
In general, these guys have correlations, not causation. Children's IQ - and gaming habits etc. - develop as they age, so controlling for baseline IQ is not enough to make a correlation with later IQ and gaming causal. It seems much more likely that smarter kids game more, e.g. because they live in richer households. (No, controlling for SES isn't enough to rule this out, for much the same reasons of measurement error as for the genetics.)
If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.
The Porsche comment is snide, but actually exposes a similar error in your critique. Sure, a tax return-derived measure of income would be superior to measuring if someone owned a luxury car. But, if you found yourself in a situation where all you had to go on for measuring economic wellbeing was (luxury) car ownership, your analysis is likely to improve by including it rather than excluding it, unless the measure itself had serious other issues with its accuracy.
Likewise, for SES, it is an imperfect measure, but it is the best we have for measuring social position in a concise way.
Having worked in research and universities for a while, the type of critique presented in this post is one you often see of new graduate students. They are able to tear down problems with research very well, but tend to overlook whether the study itself was still informative, or whether the opposite finding is likely to be true.
For example, suppose we wanted to know if video games or watching videos on the internet are making you dumber. A study like this may not convince you it's making you smarter, but it presents decent evidence they're not making you dumber. You can point out how the measures aren't perfect, but that is far from saying the opposite is true or the observed trends are completely spurious.
That's correct, it is a flaw of the entire analysis, not the PGS in isolation. Yes, the polygenic score, when used to define 'genetic intelligence', will be biased towards zero and will miss a lot of the genetic intelligence. What then happens is the video-game playing becomes a measure of intelligence (genetic or otherwise), capturing what the polygenic score (and other covariates) miss. The logic then works in reverse: the reduced correlation is precisely why the residual confounding works. The worse your 'measurements' are at measuring the underlying trait, the more wiggle room there is for your 'outcomes' to actually be correcting the 'measurements' and not vice versa. See "Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... , Westfall & Yarkoni 2016. (More examples: https://www.gwern.net/notes/Regression )
What OP shows is not that video game playing causes IQ, but IQ causes video game playing. The choice to play video games (or not play them, because you are bad at learning) is an additional 1-item long IQ test and helps corrects for the error.
(And we do in fact know that video gaming & IQ correlate, so nothing new there. We also know from all the brain training randomized experiments that the causal arrow doesn't run in the direction they want it to run. OP is very wrong, including in claiming that the Flynn effect justifies believing in their effect - it actually is a criticism of their claimed causal relationship between IQs have been steady or falling even as video gaming increased massively.)
I disagree that this study presents decent evidence of anything. I don't claim that the conclusions are false. But they haven't backed them up. There are lots of ways that the observed trends can be spurious. I mentioned some. The study is very weakly informative.
I think you’re misunderstanding how they’re being used (or I am). I think they’re trying to control for genetics via polygenic scores, not trying to establish a relationship between those scores and intelligence. The analogy is that you’re measuring the effect of the price of kids’ socks on their intelligence, and saying the observed effect isn’t due to parental income in some other way, because you’ve controlled for parental income(by controlling for whether there’s a porche in the driveway).
Video games, like all things, should not all be treated equal. I could certainly see problem solving skills developing from world building or highly complex games (Civ, PoE, etc.). In fact, most (but not all) highly successful games have depth, which requires time investment and problem solving. The difference in games can be as varied as comparing a marketing pamphlet to Asimov's novels.
I don't dispute your take on the quality of the research though. I would even go further and speculate it would be really really hard to come up with meaningful tests due to game variance. So most anything on the subject is likely fluff.
So I decided to start again. I noted down the cost of all the necessary items: Residential, city, industrial zones, cost of building roads, power plant, and utility lines, and of course water. I put the game on pause, took out a notebook, and started calculating a somewhat optimal city with the initial budget I was provided.
I built the city very quickly, and this time round I didn't run out of money, and took the game all the way to archologies. I did skimp on fire stations and a disaster destroyed most of the city, but it still survived overall.
I don't think I could have succeeded without that level of planning.
I’m a big grand strategy fan, mostly Paradox games rn, and I almost feel like these are worse for me because the depth keeps me engaged longer (and honesty waste a lot of time) compared even to something like a shitty copy/paste mobile game employing dark patterns because those get so boring so quick. Whereas if I start and eu4 or ck3 campaign and actually play it, it’s almost certain my brain will be shot to hell to for a few days.
As far as scientific reports goes its a fine journal, its run by nature. It's not on the same planet as the predatory journals that spam inboxes. I worry that people will read your comment, assume you speak from authority, and discount any work they might see coming from that journal when we both know that good science can be found in scientific reports, and that impact factor is more strongly correlated with "sexy" or expensive science than good science anyhow.
The reason the method is not robust is that the typical polygenic score explains only 10% or less of the variance of its target phenotype. That leaves 90% of the variance unaccounted for by the control, which means your error term will be correlated with your focal dependent variable, violating the requirements for regression to give an unbiased estimate. I don't think these claims are controversial. We know polygenic scores are noisy. We know what happens when your control variables are noisy.
The fact that lots of people do it doesn't, sadly, make it work. Lots of social psychologists run trials with an N of 35 (though they're addressing this critique, to their credit). Lots of historians fail to specify their hypotheses and to search for disconfirming data. Economists spent the 80s and 90s running cross-country regressions, before realizing that they had, in aggregate, more independent variables than cases. And so on.
The commenter may have a bias, but most prior research shows us the opposite of the study.
I also saw the poor experimental design and had a similar thoughts. Basically, this research looks poorly done and like an effort to prop up the gaming industry (and / or validate the authors pre-suppositions).
There are toys, and games, that make you dumber. Especially games designed to emphasize the addiction loop and monetize inconvenience. Case in point: Angry Birds.
It used to be a very fun, silly, physics-based game. Now, it is infested with pay-to-unlock consumables that in some cases are required to get all three stars on a level (because you can't knock everything down without an explosion and the default roster of birds for the level doesn't give you that).
The simpler a physical toy is (a ball, simple blocks) the more likely it is to contribute to a child's development. The insidious "I-need-another-outfit-Barbie" on the other hand only trains frivolous spending. Even Lego sets vary in the kind of play they foster.
Playing with toys and games can have cognitive benefits, but, digital or otherwise, there's a quality spectrum parents have to be aware of.
Sounds like we're training kids--through video games--to be fantastic CAD engineers and plumbers.
”Scientific Reports is an open access journal. To publish in Scientific Reports, all authors are required to pay an article-processing charge (APC) of $1,495.”
The New Journal of Physics, a respected open access physics journal, charges $2225.
https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/journals/new-jo...
*Not really a problem if you correctly believe science should be more than publishing sexy results.
You know there are more video games styles than FPS right? Strategy games teach patience and discipline, EVE online teaches economics, even the much dismissed 'mindless' fps teach teamwork.
I think it's likely that at least some games do increase intelligence relative to other activities (i.e. mindlessly watching tv) but less so than others like reading.
I think this is probably more key than you think.
Mindlessly watching junk food TV is not going to help you a lot. It's not very "nutrient rich" (to continue the expression) in terms of knowledge gained.. but you will probably gain some.
Watching documentaries and, crucially, actively watching them is probably very good in terms of how much you learn.
You can say that for almost every human study that's not drug based, or very short-term.
* There are tons of randomized controlled trials of policy measures (malaria bednets, minimum income). Many measure long-run outcomes.
* Natural experiments can measure long-run effects. In economic history, sometimes that means centuries.
* Many other designs are plausibly causal. The right instrumental variable, or a regression discontinuity design. In some cases, even a simple diff-in-diff with panel data. This design, nope.
Obviously though the benefits aren't there if people just mindlessly play the same game all day.
Do we think this study would be improved if it did not control for genetics at all?
In any case, it's a weird thing to control for in a panel study. Why not just use per-person fixed effects? That would eliminate all effects that are constant across individuals.
Or, a randomized controlled trial. If it has an effect worth caring about, then it's worth running an experiment on. A real positive or negative effect would be a big deal for policy.
Maybe it's the games you play (CoD) that make imagine that game-playing develops no reasoning skills.
Play something else (starcraft, for example).
The arguments included in it are no different than many of these new studies coming out. If you grew up to be a latchkey kid and had your fair share of TV/video games/etc, it might give you perspective into things you never thought about.
One of the things he mentions is that TV is passive, and puts you in an alpha state where your brain stops trying to respond because there’s no point in responding.
My partner and I do watch a few hours of TV every night now. But we don’t do this “alpha” thing, at least not exclusively. We pause frequently to comment on or joke about what we’re seeing. To the point that I think sometimes a 30 minute show will take us an hour to get through.
The way it works is one of holds the remote and pauses whenever they want to, and if the other wants to pause they just say “pause!”
I wonder how that changes Mander’s analysis. For us it make TV a pretty fun interactive experience.
And this way of watching was largely impossible when Mander did his work, because you simply couldn’t pause TV. Although you could pause a VCR or DVD.
I’m curious how widespread pausing is. I certainly feel that even solo TV watching is a more interactive experience than TV watching was when I was a kid. Alone, I’ll pause to Wikipedia things or to go find related media.
Ridding myself of TV over the last 2 years has been extremely hard. I'm down to watching a maximum of an hour a night. Most times I don't even try nor care to. I have seen significant improvements to my own life, but most importantly I see the effects it has had on my young kids and how much more creative they are because they aren't sitting in front of a TV watching shows like I was when I was their age. It was the only thing I knew as a parent taught by mine and I had to challenge that for myself.
Moderation is the key to everything, but this book woke me up to things I wasn't aware of and figured I'd share.
"A latchkey kid, or latchkey child, is a child who returns to an empty home after school or a child who is often left at home with no supervision because their parents are away at work."
My point is there is (at least) another important category of program that the researchers missed: creator software. I've also made simple songs with them with garage band, but the UI is still rather difficult for them to use it on their own. I was inspired to take this approach because my first introduction to computers was Logo on an Apple IIe, and Seymore Papert's beautiful work left a lasting impression.
I believe this research is severely lacking.
Where I grew up there wasn't anyone around I could ask those kinds of questions of. I know that's not the Netflix / ipad world that the study is talking about or nessecarily exists today. But I suspect that bifurcation still exists.
Some people try to bring this modification friendly things back, with BBC Microbit, RasPi and so on. But in the end you need to be motivated - and playing better was huge motivation for me!
The docs were so sparse and the communities so small that it really was a much different experience than today. I have fond memories of it, but that might just be me looking back with rose colored glasses.
I would have killed for stack overflow though! But there is a sense of self directed mastery that you don't get when you are so much more familiar with how fast the bodies of knowledge are.
The closest I get to that these days is trying to hack code on a plane :)
"We believe that studies with genetic data could clarify causal claims and correct for the typically unaccounted role of genetic predispositions. Here, we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic status."
"The contradictions among studies on screen time and cognition are likely due to limitations of cross-sectional designs, relatively small sample sizes, and, most critically, failures to control for genetic predispositions and socio-economic context. Although studies account for some confounding effects, very few have accounted for socioeconomic status and none have accounted for genetic effects. This matters because intelligence, educational attainment, and other cognitive abilities are all highly heritable."
To me, it’s pretty obvious. The kids problem solve when gaming, and are obviously engaged. When watching TV, they look like zombies.
I think my wife’s biggest hang up with games is that she was always told that they rot your brain. Also, our kids talk about games, but never about TV which she interprets as games being more addictive. I interpret it as games being more interesting and engaging.
(A) Polygenic scores for behavioral traits may be estimated in GWAS where the null assumptions (e.g., that mating is not conditioned on the trait being estimated) may not be valid[1]. That is on top of the issues that we usually face for other phenotypes (e.g., more routine population stratification due to geographic history).
(B) The authors did not describe the (genetic) ancestral background of the children being studied. Current techniques are biased across ancestries, for most traits, when using polygenic scores[2]. Certainly adjusting for 20PCs in the final model, as the authors seemingly did, would not be expected to make the scores comparable unless all of the children are from a close ancestral group.
With these sources of stratification, the polygenic score represents more (and less) than the trait that you're hoping it estimates; it also encodes population stratification.
As such, I hardly think this study can be interpreted.
That being said I do wonder about how I would have turned out had my childhood not been spent hiding under the covers at night with a small light devouring novel after novel and instead been inundated with social media and other distractions.
Today it's hiding and using the "smart"phone
I would love to know what "watching videos" means here. There's a big difference between educational YouTube (Kurzgesagt, Physics Girl, Vertitasium, etc) and TV.
Having kids do projects is super helpful. 1) It builds their confidence in their ability 2) It shows the world (e.g. college admission boards) how they are valuable 3) It can become a way for them to be their own boss 4) It allows them to figure out what they want to be 5) It keeps them busy and out of trouble
Of course, if you push too hard the other way, your kid may just hate the skill and drop it. I knew a lot of people who were forced into piano lessons, and got very good at it too. Many quit over the years due to that resentment once their parents gave them the choice, and today never play any music in adulthood. Such a shame.
TL;DR - the complexity of media has been increasing over the past decades, which means that children spending time with digital media are benefiting from it relative to past generations.
As an example, playing a modern AAA video game is much more mentally stimulating than playing Pong. But also, watching an hour of a modern TV show, or even a modern reality show, is more challenging mentally than watching classic TV from the 60s and 70s—there are many, many more plots and relationship dynamics to track and speculate about.
Long hours of gaming and imbibing this translated over into the real world where it became harder for me to put in effort because I had to see rewards accumulate as a score somewhere and that wasn't happening.
Walking into arcade filled me with joy. Trying to decide which game to play. Imagining if I'm going to finally beat Wonderboy on one coin. Playing Kabal with my brother.
I was a good kid, but I would STEAL money from Mom's purse occasionally to satisfy my arcade craving.
Wow!
Ad absurdum: if watching the Kardashians for two hours a day doubled your intelligence (however you decide to measure that) would you do it? Would you have your kids do it?
But I'm not really concerned about general intelligence. As a parent I feel I have some input into their intellectual growth (to the extent environment allows). I'm far more concerned about the impact of social media on their emotional wellbeing. How they interact with others, and how they view themselves.
In Australia the Government is trying to regulate social media companies. For example, last year it introduced an "anti-trolling" bill, which would require companies to reveal the identities of anonymous trolls. And this is only the beginning of what in my opinion is heavy-handed Government overreach that will not improve the online experience of young people.
Despite being a fairly libertarian person, I'm open to a discussion on banning social media for people under a certain age (16? 18?). And then getting rid of all/most regulations on content.
Not saying this is something we should do right now, or that it's definitely a good idea. I'm just saying I think it's a discussion worth having.
So I wouldn't call games "not addictive". If anything, watching something on TV is often less adictive because you are told a story with its introduction, climax and ending(up until the Netflix ruined everything with it's endless shovelware).
IMHO, the key is moderation. A day with diverse activities is a day well spent, kid or adult.
Today, if I play Sid Meier's Civilization, a day or two would be completely gone and I will be disconnected from the reality and I will need to re-adapt to the real world. I suspect, excessive gamings primary risk is developing unhealthy understanding of the world in the area where the game simulates the real thing.
Addiction is a peculiar thing. Anything that makes you feel good is inherently addictive. People get addicted to biting their fingernails.
Is it bad to be addicted to reading? Or working out? If gaming is making your synapses fire faster, if for nothing more than to increase your IQ score (which is based on speed), is it a bad addiction?
Addiction is a compulsion to do something you would not chose to do. It really depends on that something whether it's good or bad for you. Addiction is something everyone will have to deal with at some point in life. Learning it from gaming is probably not a bad thing.
The moment games include advertising they optimize for all the wrong things. I won’t let my kids get free games on iPad, etc for this reason alone.
The downside is the games never go on sale so you aren't getting any deals but the upside is that you can give your kid just about any Nintendo game and not worry about shenanigans around loot boxes, ads and other crap they stick inside games now.
Until now I hadn't realized how sensible Apple's rules around children's games had been, notably: no internet connection required, and no ads.
That was ten years ago, and I still don't know if I struck the right balance. Parenting is hard. If you have young kids today it's a good idea to understand what games are popular and what their business models are.
It depends strongly on kind of game, and especially on the business model involved. Gacha games, free-to-play, and similar models are very much optimised around addictiveness. Personally I've found that story-based finite games, i.e. the ones you play through and then you've experienced it, are much better in those respects. Unfortunately those seem to become much more rare these days.
If I had a kid they'd have a laptop running Linux with all the open source games (and some of the older Nintendo ones on emulators) and probably a collection of older films on DVD.
Are you not just seeing what you want to see? Maybe from your wife's perspective, the kids are carefully to observing and learning a wide range of human emotions, social dynamics, new idioms and music from Disney+, whereas in their games they're learning a few tricks that they repeat ad nauseam to get some trivial rewards from their digital Skinner boxes?
People used to say that about TV too.
I always feel a bit personally attacked when people claim videogames are just bad for you full stop. I'm really passionate about games, I grew up playing NES, and just never stopped. I almost always have a new game waiting to play for when I'm finished with what I'm currently playing.
Sample size of one, but I don't think my brain is rotten. I have a pretty successful career in software, I have a close partner, I have a social life. I have other hobbies too, but it's my main one.
Don't get me wrong, I know my gaming takes time away from other stuff I could/should be doing, like building side projects or getting enough exercise. But TV does the same, so in a choice between the two I pick gaming any day
One rule I made to myself is simply don't encourage anything just for dopamine rewards. I try to mix things with effort, contemplation, or interaction. Doing something like this specific rule: No more than 1h playing Minecraft alone. If you want to keep playing, ask Dad, Mom, or your cousins to play together; the same for Watching videos.
in what may be somewhat more of a hot take, i would argue that there is an incredible amount of educational value to be found even within the most meritless garbage games as they are still fundamentally systems to be dissected and solved and learning the maximally efficient way to do something worthless is a skillset that transfers quite handily to the valuable things in life. also unlike tv, games have a lot of potential to be immensely collaborative [or competitive] and social. some of my fondest childhood memories were going to my friend's house and co-oping diablo with one of us controlling the mouse and the other controlling the keyboard. there are many far less ad-hoc ways for kids to share games and even singleplayer is a highly rewarding shared experience.
For the record, my kids do play games, I never did complete ban. But, the gaming does not seem to be superior, does not zombify them less nor leads to more inventive play after session finished.
By comparison, I've never had a local game of Mario Party remotely as heated as the average experience in a competitive, online game. Not even after Chance Time did the unthinkable.
The downsides of Disney are a little more subtle, too.
Both have obvious benefits: Grimm Brothers tales are still culturally relevant for a reason, even if you can probably find useless brain fodder on Disney+; and video games can totally teach some stuff to your kids.
Just let them choose what they want I guess?
Reasoning through combat strategy, even in the age-inappropriate context of gun battles, exercises higher level thinking that clearly remains off when watching Ryan’s world.
To be fair, the article does say watching videos had a positive effect as well.
That's all they really are when you remove the theming and look at the actual mechanics of the game. the mechanics aren't screwed up or morally bankrupt or anything like that, they are the same games we've always played of racking up points or moving an object across a playing field or something like that. It's probably the reason why the fps formula is so successful, it plays almost like the games we already like kinda like basketball (with deathmatch) or football/soccer (with capture the flag or assault style gamemodes moving some object offensively or defending as a team).
They spend a decent amount of the week doing after school clubs/sports - so sometimes they fancy an hour of playing Mariokart or wii sports or something - I prefer that because then we can join in as well.
(Otherwise they love watching Ninjago - which tbf I don't mind that much!)
That makes them more noisy, not less. PGS predictive power for EDU/IQ is always maximized at use of all SNPs. Restricting to the arbitrary subset of genome-wide statistically-significant SNPs in Lee would drive it from the 7% or so they have to <1%, IIRC.
Also, neither of your two problems are the problem here, as the biases there would not be expected to drive a correlation between video game playing & IQ (what sort of within-ethnic interaction would you need for that and why is it plausible?), and would mostly serve to simply not control for intelligence (and quantitatively, because the PGS here is a small fraction of the variance, even gross biases which somehow did manage to drive correlations between those two variables, would still be unable to meaningfully affect the estimates).
Using only genome-wide significant SNPs reduces the amount of variance explained by the polygenic score, which is what you describe and I agree with. My comment about the concern about "noise" is with respect to a sibling comment ("Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects.") That is the "noise" that I was addressing. And just as you say, the noise is, essentially, a worthwhile cost to pay since it should not be directional, and so we use various approaches to include thousands or millions of SNPs in these scores.
> Also, neither of your two problems are the problem here
I don't agree. These problems occur very clearly in any mixed-ancestry analyses, and they have to be carefully accounted for or else they induce between-ancestry bias. It's not a function of the phenotype itself (i.e., I'm not making a comment about intelligence); this is true for all polygenic scores.
It's interesting with the internet too, even though there should be a lot more stories in the zeitgeist at once given its wide reach, sometimes due to its virality, one storyline is able to dominate everything at once and suck the air out of the room. Did we really need a dozen article about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in everything from Reuters to The Atlantic for seemingly two whole days? If you only got news from twitter that might consume your entire feed. If you got your news from the newspaper, that would at most just consume one article or two out of many others of pages of printed material. It would also be limited to probably one section of the many different sections of the paper all covering different news topics.
I think that falls within the purview of gambling.
Imagine if e.g. basketball players never practiced but just played for all the marbles at the most competitive level every day when they stepped on the court. You would have chaos and exhausted players.
It's not that hard to find good games. Even our moms managed to know Nintendo. We were annoyed that every video game was a "Nintendo" to our moms, but thinking back on it, that meant mom walks into game store and asks for Nintendo, can't go wrong there.
Chess is a particularly bad example because you can memorize openings.
In Fischer random chess, the starting positions of the pieces are randomized, so even advanced players will agonize over the opening move.
(I myself I am a bughouse chess person, it's a very different beast on the same board. It's full of adrenaline, hope, fear, anger, grief, in 2 minute long runs.)
On the other hand you could literally have a game to see how long you can keep pushing a big read button (dopamine inducing effects and sounds included of course!).
The variance is huge. We couldn't make a blanket general statement about brain development from tabletop games that include say Snap / War, Checkers, and Chess. And that's not even a sliver of the variance video games gave.
P.S. I'm by no means a gaming advocate. IMO video games are becoming (have become) Vegas 2.0 and I could list a huge number of potential negatives.
> could literally have a game to see how long you can keep pushing a big read button
Could? Did. Even Progress Quest counts for this sort of thing, and it was a parody in 2002. There's also the classic game of Simon Says which is basically keep pushing shiny buttons but less entertaining long term, since "number goes up" only goes as high as your human memory instead of a computer's. The biggest modern twist that some will find a negative is something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14UerIOvZKM (literal red button) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kkGu7yIi98 where the time "wasting" is magnified beyond just the gamer but also to an audience.
Sure, but as far as I know there isn't much value (beyond personal interest) in studying high level chess (and from what I've seen, it's detrimental when people start obsessing over it). You're putting effort into getting better at playing a game.
A lot of people become software developers without being addicted to games. Great software developers bring things on the table that they learned doing stuff that is not software development, gaming is one of those but people are capable to do so many great things.
Nerding over something is cool but when it becomes an addiction, it's dangerous.
It's funny, because people put a premium on creativity and inspiration for their children, but that level of engagement is indistinguishable from that of addiction to gaming. Even without gaming in the picture, it's not uncommon for parents to get leery at the prospect of their kids spending all their time on books or a musical instrument.
They want to see a balance according to their preferred level of allocation to every activity, but still see savant-like engagement. It's absurd. Geniuses are geniuses because they go into the deep end. You can make the case that it might be possible to manipulate the environment to the extent that obsessive engagement will likely follow one path over another, but ultimately it's not up to you, and I don't see one as objectively more important than another.
IQ tests are not based on speed?
Likewise, tell me -- what would be a good instrument for estimating a causal effect of video game playing? What measure would plausibly affect intelligence only through video game playing? Where is there a natural experiment that allows for an RD design where young people on one side of the discontinuity play video games and the others do not?
We get it -- you've taken a causal inference or econometrics course and want people to know it.
There are many experiments on video game playing. Most of them are short run, obviously. But never underestimate researcher ingenuity. Here's a cute paper which uses as an instrument "did your roommate bring a video game to university"? Not beyond critique, but plausible: https://economics.uwo.ca/people/stinebrickner_docs/paper2.pd.... It's also relevant because the dependent variable is how much students study, and their resulting performance.
More to the point, if anyone seriously thinks video games will raise kids' IQ, and can persuade funders of it, they could simply give the treatment group an Xbox. That would be expensive - say $20K-ish - but much cheaper than the benefit of an extra IQ point or 2, over millions of children.
Grand strategy and 4x games always feel like too much depth, to me. I know I could do better if I pause and manually place every worker/micro everything. But that's overwhelming. I could try to be clever and only optimize where necessary, but the game is paused, there's no tradeoff for analyzing everything other than my time. Just give me the meaningful choices, game!
But I could go on and on about the very real ways I apply those losses to my work life. I do think they have a huge benefit.
IMO, the biggest problem with modern video games is how many of them are designed to keep you playing virtually forever. I think a game like Zelda (maybe not BoTW, but definitely OoT) is great for children, because it teaches problem solving and rational thinking, and it has a natural time limit! You might play it incessantly for a few days, but eventually you'll reach the end and need to seek out a new experience.
I'm surprised, you seem to have spent enough time around kids (and were a kid once yourself), yet you think "replay value" (which is inflated for some games by not having a definitive end) is at all a modern thing, or even necessarily a bad thing. This extends beyond games. Do you realize how many hours of Frozen have been watched, over, and over, and over? Or how many hours listening to Baby Shark? Or whatever's going around now? Or whatever was going around when you were a kid? (Insert favorite classic Disney movie? Tetris? Cribbage? Chutes and Ladders? Minecraft?) Kids love repetition -- humans in general like repetition a lot. Heard of the Hero's Journey?
Don't underestimate OoT either! If a kid liked OoT enough to reach the end, it's unlikely that they'll just move on immediately unless they're literally forced onto the next shrink-wrapped "brand new" experience by someone. (To be sure, if I'm ever a parent myself, I will consciously do a bit of that pushing to try avoiding letting them repeat the same thing like some popular movie too much, but I'd be a hypocrite and a fool to think I can or should prevent all of it. Besides, it's remarkable how many times you can watch/be all but forced to watch something even as a young teen (cough Napoleon Dynamite) and yet retain almost no memory of the thing's details as an adult.)
OoT is a real-time interactive simulation, such things are naturally just fun to immerse in, even after you've beaten Ganon / "reached the end". But besides just continuing to 'hang out' aimlessly in the game, there's all the stuff they could aim at in order to "100%" the game, or just go back through optional/missed stuff in general/at leisure. (But everyone who plays OoT needs to get the Biggoron's Sword!) So the kid could do that, even talk to friends playing the same game (socializing skills even with a 1p game!) and trade notes or experiences, or compete on times for various races, or they could develop their own random aims, like a quest to smash every pot. Or start a new playthrough but with some difference. Or they might discover the speed running scene and get into that, or just generally see the crazy nonsense people have done to that poor game's code. Again, don't underestimate games like OoT, Super Mario 64, Dark Souls, Megaman X, or Chess, either; having an "end" doesn't protect them from being the object of people's time spending/wasting.
I would absolutely expect a child to play OoT well past beating Ganon for the first time, but there is still a limit to how much you can do. Compare that to something like Destiny, which is basically designed to be a bottomless pit you could grind forever!
> So the kid could do that, even talk to friends playing the same game (socializing skills even with a 1p game!) and trade notes or experiences, or compete on times for various races, or they could develop their own random aims, like a quest to smash every pot. Or start a new playthrough but with some difference. Or they might discover the speed running scene and get into that, or just generally see the crazy nonsense people have done to that poor game's code.
But all of that stuff is great, because now they're creating their own experiences for themselves, getting creative, perhaps even socializing. It's basically the virtual equivalent of traditional unstructured play, which we know has all sorts of educational benefits.
I don't know why children like to e.g. watch Frozen a million times, but I imagine it's because they actually discover something new with each watch. As long as they're driven by intrinsic motivation, I think that's relatively healthy, at least compared to an XP bar that gets higher with each Frozen rewatch!
Definitely not the wider market, but I wouldn’t think it unfair to describe the mobile gaming market like this. There have recently been a number of AAA PC games ported to mobile which makes me actually realize the power of the hardware in my hand, and also wonder why every other mobile game I see is a rip off puzzle game concept that’s been done a million times over.
Destiny doesn't really help your case, I think. The most objectionable thing they do (as I hear it, I skipped it), at least relative to things like it (Warframe), is exploit fear-of-missing-out psychology; they remove previously released content. (Like adding an ad to a site to exploit/monetize viewers, this is not a neutral design choice, and has driven people away from the game entirely rather than what seems to be the default assumed effect of any psychology exploit (except 'make things beautiful'?) of sucking out their will and owning them.) But over time they've not just cut stuff, but added new content. So there are eventually fresh(er) experiences even if you hit max level/acquired everything/etc. like an MMO. Until they dry out anyway, and the problem solves itself, because ultimately an infinitely increasing XP bar just isn't enough to keep most people interested.
They did make an actual title cut to the sequel for Destiny 2 and that's where further new content went -- has it since had enough content added that another timeline could have legitimately packaged it as Destiny 3?
Besides all that, it's legitimately a game, quite more than a glorified slot, it's a full simulation, and has a satisfying core gameplay loop -- the same one refined through the earlier Halo games.
Similarly, though not as core, it's also just satisfying to have Link roll around everywhere. Adding lootboxes to OoT would be beyond tasteless and obscene, but the product would still be quite a bit better than an actual glorified slot, because there's enough game design there alongside, there's something beyond just plain 'give money maybe win prize'. Japanese crane games / ufo catchers are more in line with glorified slots than a game with typical distasteful 'games-as-service' monetization strategies.
That ties in with your earlier deleted edit I still thought worth addressing. I see the concern on glorified slots, but I don't think it's really worth worrying about. In video games, even some hypothetical one with master manipulator levels of thought to make it indefinitely addicting, it's ultimately not chemical injection in basis to form a true dependency on the average human, and so the next thing comes out sooner or later and voila, newness, change. Is the 'Destiny is a dead game' meme close to the truth? It certainly seems a lot less popular than several battle royales, and those too will decline.
Casinos are in comparison much more niche, have little competition and innovation (look at their dull slots with no redeeming game design to them at all), have physical chemical associations (booze and smokes minimum) driving a bunch of it (their psychological playbook is laughably weak in comparison to something like Genshin Impact), and of course must be enabled by real money. The last factor is the simplest barrier to keep kids from getting addicted to casino-style crap, free-to-play dominates. Now maybe it's sad if trends like lootboxes or gachas or battle passes continue (or perhaps in your mind also trends of games designed with elements to never end), but it's far from concerning, especially when games lacking such crap continue to be successful...
I was trying to game on my brother's iPad (M1 chip) and realised that iPad even though powerful are absolutely trash when it comes to the free video gaming market. Filled to the brim with advertisement, slot machines, lootboxes, paid powerups to levelup. Only acceptable games were paid like Minecraft, terraria, Limbo etc. But they cost too much on the iPad. I won't advise strangers on how to raise kids but a steam deck ( if its available in your region ) with parental settings on has a huge list of games which go on sale very often or Nintendo switch would be a great option for kids to play.
I tried so hard to find good free games on my brother's ipad but I realised, thats not what an iPad is good for. Its Excellent for video content consumption, reading, surfing web but not gaming period. I remember a time when there were lots of beautiful video games on my nexus tablet but the switch to freemium model has completely turned the mobile market into a dumpster fire.
IMO it was addictive, but only to certain personality types. Mine is definitely one of them. Others would see a difficulty spike and/or the amount of re-treading they need to do to make progress as a deterrent.
Recent games are more addictive in a way that appeals more widely.
In reality for certain personalities (myself included) that focus on mastery is actually the addictive bit, and I think its a productive addiction all things considered. Im not addicted to the mind-numbing aspect of playing, I'm addicted to the huge amount of knowledge I need to gain in order to succeed. Its the same reason I was drawn to DOTA and Magic later in life.
Of course, the incentives were also a little different. Old arcade, for example, games wanted you to drop in more quarters. So they had to find ways to make you lose. But not just lose, lose when you're just close enough to the next level.
One more level
Just after this boss
I think single player games now are just as addictive as they were then. Especially when you look at indie games (Shovel Knight, Death's Door etc).
The moment interaction with other players happens is when I feel a higher bump in addiction can happen. Loot boxes, seeing a cool skin etc.
Politics aside it does seem that presidents have been pitching their language lower and lower to appeal to a broader audience. I recall reading about how Obama simplified the vocabulary of his speeches from college level to 10th grade, to 4th grade to 2nd grade: https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2010/01/29/professor-obama... https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/01/27/keeping-it-simp...
On the flip side though George Washington's first inaugaral address goes to the other extreme where it's impenetrably verbose: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/have-pr...
Anecdata at this point but I fear the OP might be right - we are simplifying our language over time.
Actually in competitive scenarios, e.g. tournaments, there are. Add to the fact ranked play is generally better behaved.
Speaking of parents, from my experience playing hockey, they are usually the worst offenders. Yelling at not just the refs, but the kids too. I've seen intimidation in more than one occasion.
At any rate, concern over the prospect of kids being "angry" is a weak take.
As someone who coaches elementary school sports players, I can tell instantly the ones who play online competitive video games and those who don’t. Sample size is maybe only ~40 kids, but I’m convinced.
Maybe it improves behavior later but the ones who do are initially the worst sports I’ve seen in my life. I have to spend time before every practice and game reiterating stuff like “it’s not ok to pretend to teabag the other players”.
I’ll agree parents have changed a lot since I played. I think the poor example they set influences this generation of parents.
The exactly same way as with adults - whether they feel angry does not matter. Whether they demand everyone else to tip toe around them after/during playing, whether they loudly swear or hit the table with fists does matter.
It is kinda messed up, when you adjust the price based on the available money of institutional affiliations or donors. It is just more profits for journal and nothing for authors, while forcing authors to pay.
Which are those? The journals that I expect to still be up are the ones that require actual payment for publishing.
> Starting with HICSS-50, all HICSS publication will be archived and disseminated at no cost to all readers worldwide through ScholarSpace. A complete set of HICSS proceedings will also be made available in the digital library of the Association of Information Systems (AIS).
What is the justification for this assertion? If polygenic scores are simply "noisy," then, as the GP mentioned, they may be good enough when used in aggregate. There can be a lot of signal in noisy data. Ask any ML practitioner.
Again, noisy data can still be useful. For instance, generate a perfect single-variable normal distribution, sample along the x-axis and perturb each point randomly in the y direction either up or down. Depending on the range of random values used to move the sampled points, you can still see the underlying distribution even though the data is noisy.
Two possible arguments you might make:
1) The data is noisy and the paper's authors haven't collected enough data to account for the amount of noise. Usually people will do something like null-hypothesis significance testing to measure this.
2) The noise isn't uniformly random and has some underlying bias that is affecting the results.
This has not been my experience at all. It's very easy for me to play a few rounds of rocket league and keep my daily game time to under an hour. When I play stuff like Zelda BOTW though, I have to use the parental controls on myself or else I'll spend half of my day on it.
The PlayStation doesn’t seem to do that, although my son gets in trouble more often when it’s time to end because there is a higher level of effort to get out. But it doesn’t seem to zombify him.
However I think it speaks that everyone has a different approach and solution to how they play games. It then becomes interesting to see what they play and how they limit their self.
I personally believe in huge gains from gaming, based on personal experience (so obviously n = 1, read further accordingly).
Platformers train hand-eye coordination and pattern recognition, strategies teach resource management, RPGs about optimization and adopting growth mindset, racing games require long-time concentration, puzzlers and adventure games test your logic.
In general, games require you to: - learn a set of tools - master them - conquer objective
while also prevailing in face of adversity.
I never regretted the hours I spent gaming and I feel they contributed very much to my softeng career (not directly though).
Even within the same game genre that barely translates. People good at Starcraft I struggled with Starcraft II, people great at Warcraft made little headway in Starcraft II (e.g. WCIII players like Grubby or Happy).
Given that, claiming that things even further removed than those other games, which closely resemble one another, requires quite a bit of proof. It does not look like the skills transfer well even between similar games.
> while also prevailing in face of adversity.
I don't think we agree on what "adversity" is. You are just playing a game, and your brain knows it. If someone has the same brain reaction to the game avatar being in virtual "danger" to his actual body being in mortal danger than I'd like to see that, and I think most people would think that is not normal or healthy.
You don't need to defend yourself, if you had fun playing than that's more than enough. I don't understand why you want to drive yourself to seeing more in it than that.
That might be true if you're comparing the top 0.1%, but someone who played a lot of Starcraft would be miles ahead of any newcomer in both Starcraft II and Warcraft III.
Your example is like saying that a world-class sprinter would struggle to be a world-class cyclist. Yes, that's true, but the aspects that do carry over - cardio and muscle development - would immediately put them in the top 5% of the field even if they never win the Tour de France.
Even being good at Starcraft I in 1998 wouldn't make you good at Starcraft I in 2003. People uncover certain optimizations and strategies over times that are quickly adopted by everyone, to the extent that playing the same a good player in 1998 would get you dubbed a "noob" in 2003.
WC3 => Sc2 is a much greater leap than sc1 -> sc2 but still there was decent carryover. Grubby was still a GM or high masters player, even if he was no longer elite.
Sure - and joining the high school football team teaches teamwork, self-discipline, dealing with adversity, appearing before crowds, nutrition, fitness, etc etc
So what?
I think you meant good faith. They didn't use it as an example though, it was just rhetorical.
Most people aren't going to program 10 hours a day. But they might program 8 hours a day and then do 2 hours of entertainment. Maybe those 2 hours of watching TV were better spent gaming in terms of contributing to other aspects in life. Maybe those 2 hours of gaming could've been 2 hours of drawing instead.
If we're talking about incrementality, we'd better question why almost every software company is still treating their employees like idiot savants when games show us how quickly people can learn drastically different concepts, as long as presented correctly.
This is happening at home, presumably where it's the parent's place to discipline.
If observed more then once, the parent will conclude exactly what you see in this thread.
I get a few hours after they're in bed and before I go to bed in which to cram cleanup, catching up with my wife, and other bits of essential life maintenance.
It does get easier as they age. Our youngest is three, so I have a while before the "hanging off my legs" phase is done, but I can remember the era of newborns, when I could be interrupted at any moment, and I couldn't count on an entire hour to myself at any point during the day or night.
(FWIW, a big part of making this work is shifting your mindset to appreciate the little things and recognize how precious they actually are. At this point I cherish being woken up by a wailing toddler and rocking her back to sleep, because I know I won't get many more moments in my life when she's a tiny little bundle snuggled up and cozy against my chest, and it's truly magical when I manage not to be hung up on anger over being woken up at 3 AM.)
- Parent of a 2,4,6, and 8 year old
My kids are 18 and 14, and I've done my best to encourage creating things instead of consuming things.. but sometimes they need some down-time, and so do I.
It's going to be harder to keep these boundaries as your daughters grow older and their natural personalities develop. They'll likely take interest in whatever their friends and social peers are doing, and the two of them may go off in wildly different directions. Stay engaged and be ready to adjust your parenting techniques as the girls grow older.
But seriously, additional children come with their own pros and cons. Plus, of course, there's the thing about wanting more than one child.
It's all over far too soon. Make the most of it!
Kids below a certain age can't do this stuff on their own anymore in a lot of places. Your neighbors will call child protective services on you.
This leads to kids being raised indoors, or only in enrolled events, because parents can't spend all of their time outdoors with the kid.
Then when the kid is old enough to be outdoors on their own without supervision they don't want to be because they have been raised indoors.
I'd check your local laws around this. I know people in my city have been investigated for Child Neglect for letting their 7 year old walk to the mailbox alone.
Yes, that's how insane we've become about kids.
Check your local laws, because having child protective services called on you is not a good time.
Europe tends to be on the better side of the things because the cities are not gargantuous. Amerikan suburbs thanks to the early driving age probably situated fine too but I hear that helicopter parenting is widespread in the USA, so maybe they have the opportunity but don't use it?
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just bad weather can be an opportunity for children too. What about doing art? Lego ? Even cooking something fun?
Recently my friends kids were going mad because they wanted to jump on the trampoline but she wouldn’t let them because it was raining. I really couldn’t see the logic behind it. I’d just let them go for it.
If they’ve been outside doing stuff all day I can’t see how they’d need more stimulus, maybe a bit of TV / relaxation is good for them ?
The comments seemed framed as if it was TV or games, that’s all.