The Psychology of Video Games: It's a Spatial Thing

It's also a Sex Thing

Cognitive development of spatial skills is not restricted to children according to researchers at the University of Toronto, who discovered that "differences between men and women on some tasks that require spatial skills are largely eliminated after both groups play a video game for only a few hours."(5)

Improving spatial skills in adults can be accomplished through playing video games -- and the direct benefits from what might be viewed as therapeutic and educational gaming improve every day useful skills covering everything from diving a car and reading a map, to assembling the furniture you bought from Ikea and even learning advanced math.

While the primary path towards this discovery related to the gender differences in cognitive and spatial skills (we touched upon above) the result of experiments using video games revealed some surprising results, including the fact that an orderly approach to the use of video games for improving spatial skills has a permanent effect upon the individual if a specific approach is taken.

The best results were obtained when the subjects chose games that they enjoyed playing, and that were action-oriented and used the visual POV of the third-person interface, which makes sense considering that gamers find immersion in games that they enjoy to be faster and more complete, and the third-person POV is more spatially relevant.

Game play should be consistent -- play sessions of up to several hours at a sitting should be broken up by regular breaks of at least 15-minutes every hour -- but long play sessions are not necessary to obtain benefits of play providing that the gamer plays each game for a cumulative total of ten or more hours over the course of their play, which has been found to obtain the maximum benefit in spatial improvement. Including several different titles in the play rotation, and playing the games over time is also beneficial, with a play routine of several hours once or twice a week over the course of two to three months being notably effective.

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Other studies indicate that in addition to improving spatial skills, playing third-person action-adventure video games improves a subjects attention to detail and the speed by which they process data from what they see and events that occur around them (6), and that video game play among children significantly shortens the learning process and improves development of skills in computer literacy.

In the end it seems that video games are not the harmful habit that mothers have long believed them to be provided that, like any other activity, they are used responsibly and overindulgence is avoided. With the average male child spending 30 minutes a day playing video games, and with the benefits of this so clearly understood, the real challenge for parents appears to be finding ways to encourage their daughters to play video games daily.

Parents who are concerned with all of the bad elements that are associated with video games would do well to carefully read the article Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked , which was written by Dr. Henry Jenkins, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities.

"A large gap exists between the public's perception of video games and what the research actually shows. The following is an attempt to separate fact from fiction," the article begins, and then it answers the eight major myths about video games and their play. This is a must-read for any parent who is concerned about the effects that games and gaming might have on their child, and nicely wraps up this column!

Questions? Concerns? Observations? That is what the comment function is for below -- so please feel invited to leave a comment if you have one, ask a question, or share your own opinion on the topic for this month's column. We will be glad that you did!

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(1) http://queenofspainblog.com/2010/04/27/the-..

(2) Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps -- And What We Can Do About It, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009, ISBN-10: 0618393110

(3) The original quote that this is bastardized from is by author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons) which was originally stated as "Figures don't lie, but liars figure" but was later changed to the more popular quote.

(4) Study of Spatial and Geometric Thinking, Case, Stephenson, Bleilker and Okamoto (1990-1996)

(5) Playing Video Games Reduces Sex Differences In Spatial Skills, ScienceDaily 26 October 2007 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/1..

(6) Dye, M.W.G., Green, C.S. & Bavelier, D. (2009), Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 321-326.

(7) Subrahmanyam, Kraut, Greenfield, and Gross, "The Impact of Home

Computer Use on Children's Activities and Development," Children and Computer Technology, The Future of Children Journal Volume 10 Number 2 Fall/Winter 2000: 123-144.