Computer games good for IQ

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 31 May 2003 - 0:00 PDT


Depairing parents may have cause to smile, says David Williamson

SCIENTIFIC proof that computer games enhance the capacity of the human brain will make parents groan in despair instead of clapping their hands in delight.

Children's hobbies and pastimes are clearly divided into the things they should spend more time doing, and those activities from which they should be banned.

Joining the Scouts, collecting stamps, playing football and helping the elderly cross roads are applauded. If children do not express a desire to pursue such wholesome interests, a mother or father will often attempt to encourage them to do so with a mixture of mild bribery and disguised coercion.

Spray-painting walls with aerosols, experimenting with body piercing, dressing in black and playing computer games for hours each day may be acts some avant garde parents celebrate, but such legal guardians are rare.

Instead, computer-games are regarded with suspicion. The titles are expensive, the subject matters often pornographically violent, and the act of playing is generally a solitary activity.

Yet research from the University of Rochester published in the world's most respected science journal, Nature, offers compelling evidence that playing first-person computer games radically enhances visual attention skills.

This discovery may be instrumental in rolling back the prejudice felt among much of modern society against computer entertainment.

Widespread alarm at the popularity of computer games does not come as a surprise. Most important artistic movements and inventions have been vociferously attacked as they began to mesmerise the populace.

During the reign of the Puritans, the theatres were closed. Tea-drinking was initially condemned on the grounds that it was rooted in Eastern superstitions.

Thomas More furiously opposed William Tyndale in his plan to translate the Bible into English for the edification of the masses, and many religious groups today advise their members to boycott television.

The fact that gaming is frowned upon may be merely indicative of its importance to our culture. In other words, it is not going to go away.

Work by Dr Daphne Bavelier which shows that regular players of first-person games are 30-50% better at taking in everything that happens around them is the first in what may well become a flow of revelations about the positive effects of navigating make-believe environments.

This dramatic impact on people's skills of perception has led scientists to ponder over the possibilities of how computer games may help rehabilitate stroke patients and help keep the elderly sufficiently alert to be safe drivers.

Many stroke victims lose skills of processing the data in their field of vision, and older drivers have been found to have difficulty in keeping track of the traffic which surrounds them.

If computer games can radically improve their abilities, soon there could be calls to have 3D sensations such as Lara Croft Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto available on the NHS.

This would be the final proof that electronic gaming is not a passing fad but a mode of entertainment firmly established, for better or for worse, at the heart of our culture.

Eventually, parents may begin to smile when they hear plinks and plonks coming from their children's bedrooms while their sons and daughters exercise their thumb muscles on joypads.

Just as the internet is now much more than a pornographer's electronic filing system and video shops are no longer dominated by gratuitous slaughterfests, it is reasonable to expect computer entertainment to become more moderate in its presentations as it glides into the mainstream.

Already, the most popular games on record are The Sims series, which simulates families coping with everyday life.

And parents worried their children will use Dr Bavelier's as justification for not doing homework need not despair.

The findings simply show that people who play first-person perspective games are significantly better at being able to count the numbers of objects which flash in front of their eyes.

While this is a useful skill for pilots and people working in airport screening, it does nothing to help improve reading, writing, mathematics or IQ scores.

The ancient adage seems not to have changed: If you want to be smart, work hard.

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