The new disadvantaged: white male students

[JewelSong]

Very untrue. Most games are a series of problems that you are asked to solve. They give you tools, they give you an obstacle, then ask you "Hey, solve this one!". It really is a bunch of problem-solving skills put to the test in a bazillion different ways.

Yes, I think some video games can be very engaging and great puzzles and fun to play and a fun way to spend some free time. Some of the graphics and situations are very creative and realistic. And maybe they help in certain problem-solving skills. Maybe.

I do not think they improve anyone's educational or academic skills - or help a student to read, write, reason and think better.

When you have high school students who cannot read a paragraph and draw conclusions from what they have read, or who cannot put a coherent sentence together or who state (proudly) "I haven't read a novel in 4 years!" I think that there is a huge problem. And I think if they are playing video games instead of learning to read and write and reason, and we allow them to think that somehow they are getting some kind of education from these games, we are doing them a grave disservice.

I am not talking about just a few students, either. I am talking about a large percentage of high school students. The writing skills of the students in high school and college (and beyond) is appalling. I have received job applications from college graduates with so many errors in the cover letter that I have chucked it without even looking at the resume.

I do not believe video games are inherently "evil" or anything of sort. But I think trying to present them as some kind of alternative educational experience is simply wrong. They are leisure time activities.

[sauronsfinger]

There has to come a point when the question is posed "to what end is all this?" It is a given fact that we all only are given 24 hours in a day. How we use that day is vital in determining what our life is like and what our future may be like.

If a person, especially a younger person in their formative educational years, spends vast periods of almost every day in front of a video game screen playing games which - for the most part - do nothing to teach them any real educational or life skills, then they are robbing themselves of other worthwhile activities.

Perhaps there is a segment of the population who can indeed do this and still excel in their studies. But there is also a significant population who are not doing what they need for their education and instead of playing mindless games, could well benefit from more contstructive uses of their limited time.

Next Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday and I will most likely attend a party or two. Almost as sure as the sunrise, a few people will come up to me and say "so you are the guy who I see running every day". And during the conversation about my 30 years of running, they will feel a bit of guilt and say something like "I wish I had time to do that". I usually respond with.. "I know what you mean. The only reason I can do it is that my day has 26 hours in it unlike yours." That usually ends that conversation.

Everything in life has consequences. Wasting valuable parts of your day, especially when your future may well hinge upon how you spend it, has consequences both for you and for society of which you are a member.

[yovargas]

And maybe they help in certain problem-solving skills. Maybe.

Many of the most popular/acclaimed games are nothing but problem-solving (particularly PC games). I don't think there's any maybe about it.

I think that there is a huge problem. And I think if they are playing video games instead of learning to read and write and reason

Why does it have to be either/or?

But I think trying to present them as some kind of alternative educational experience is simply wrong.

I don't think I've ever heard anybody say it was.

[JewelSong]

I think if they are playing video games instead of learning to read and write and reason

Why does it have to be either/or?

See SF's post above. Because there are only so many hours in a day, basically.

[yovargas]

I think the video game topic should be split into its own thread.

[truehobbit]

Doing anything 8 hours a day is gonna be bad for you eventually,

Like working in your job, you mean?

Very untrue. Most games are a series of problems that you are asked to solve. They give you tools, they give you an obstacle, then ask you "Hey, solve this one!". It really is a bunch of problem-solving skills put to the test in a bazillion different ways.

I'm sorry, but I disagree. True, I don't play games (other than FreeCell or Bounce Out and things like that ) - but from the short attempts I made at playing other kinds and from what I hear, I think that what problem-solving there is lies in figuring out the way of thinking of the game-programmer. You can never succeed with finding your own way of solving the problem - you have to find the solution intended by the game-author. IMO this increases the potential for danger of these games. How do you know beforehand whether the ideas of problem-solving the programmer of a certain game aren't morally reprehensible? What if the player "learns" that the way to solve this or that problem is something that would be unthinkable in civilised society?

I'm hoping this is just a particularly awful example of someone's idea of "problem-solving", but I'd fear not, I rather think it's probably typical for the way the minds of game-authors work - a review of the Narnia game, as quoted by T_A on TORC:

...[E]ach character has special moves and abilities that are required to overcome certain obstacles. Peter is the strongest of the bunch, so you can use him for fighting off enemies or breaking through barriers. Susan is your ranged attacker, and she can throw snowballs and tennis balls, as well as use a bow and arrow. Edmund is a decent melee fighter, but he's also light and athletic enough that he can climb trees or posts and walk on delicate surfaces like thin ice or weakened floorboards. Lucy is small, so she can crawl through small passages to reach areas that the other children can't. Lucy can also charm animals and use them to attack, and she can use a first-aid skill to heal all the children.

...

There are also tandem abilities that require two of the children to team up. When you move close to a character you can press a button to initiate a cooperative attack. You can team up with Susan and Lucy to slide Lucy through breakable barriers or to fire a volley of flaming arrows into the air. Also, Peter can grab Edmund and swing him around to inflict radial damage or to break down tough barriers. There are multiple different cooperative attacks for each combination of characters, although most of the challenges don't require you to use cooperative attacks at all.

...

[JewelSong]

Ye gads, TH, that sounds like an awful game! I don't remember Peter swinging Edmund around in the book at all!

And, yov, I don't think this should be split off at all. The topic is why boys are doing more poorly in school. One of the reasons postulated here (and being discussed) is the prevelance of video games. I would bet that a very high percentage of people who play such games on a regular basis and for long periods of time are adolescent males. Time that perhaps should be spent doing other, more productive things.

[Jude]

I agree with yov, the video game subject would make a worthwhile thread in its own right.

Here's my stand: a moderate use of good, quality games can be beneficial. Some games are just trash - but so are some books! And even some music! As in everything, you need to exercise some judgement.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

My initial inclination was to agree with Yov and Jude that the video game posts should be split off. But I think Jewel makes a good point about how the video game discussion relates to the original subject, so I am going to hold off, at least for now, and defer to the decision of the next Shirriff that comes around.

[vison]

Video games are much more popular with boys than girls. There are game developers going grey trying to create games that will hook girls the way the present games hook boys.

yovargas, even when my family got TV we weren't allowed to sit around for hours and hours every day watching it. And when I was a parent of young kids, my kids weren't either. My grandsons are not allowed to play video games during the school week and they have pretty strict limits on their TV time. I make them read at least a half hour a day and they both read far over their grade level.

For many families now, TV is a babysitter and a crap one at that. Mum and Dad vegging out in front of "their" TV and the kids off in another room watching "theirs" or glued to their Gameboy or computer games. They aren't playing complicated logic games, they're playing Grand Theft Auto and dreck like that. I'm not talking about 18 year old geeks, I'm talking about 11 and 12 year olds!

No useful skills are learned, you are expected to find the programmer's preferred solution, that's all, as someone pointed out above.

If every adolescent boy in North America had his TV, his video game systems and his music players taken away and he "had" to live as his grandpa did, what would happen? Think about it! How many generations of boys who never had all this electronic stimulation! Oh, god, the suffering!

For the luvva pete.

These things are little more than soft drugs/time wasters. Mind numbing "entertainment" loaded with street-thug values and anti-social attitudes: TV, music, and video games.

The results are pretty obvious.

[truehobbit]

I agree with Jewel that this shouldn't be split, because it's too closely tied to the discussion at hand.

(Edited to add: LOL, I had to laugh out loud when I read that game review for the first time. It's just so absurd! )

The possible dangers (or not) of video games is however a fascinating subject in itself, which I think is what Jude was saying, so if you want to go on discussing that, I think you should start a new thread on it!

[Alatar]

Ye gads, TH, that sounds like an awful game! I don't remember Peter swinging Edmund around in the book at all!

Actually, the Narnia game is excellent and promotes co-operation rather than competitiveness. Books and Games, like Movies and Books are different media. Where would be the fun in playing a game where all you could do was what was in the book? What would be the point? It seems to me that there is an inherent snobbery that books are sacrosanct and that all else is dross that should be avoided like the plague. Books, Movies and Games are all valuable and worthwhile in their own way. None should supplant the other. To talk Tolkien for a moment, I have read the books, watched the movies, played the computer games, played the RPGs, played the interactive Novels and I will continue to do so until people stop making them. Some were rubbish, some were excellent. How many people would argue the educational value of reading the "Lays of Beleriand"? It's not history. The language is archaic and in some cases now grammatically incorrect. What about "The Da Vinci Code"? Is that educational? It pretends to be a scholarly work wrapped in a thriller, but it's pulp fiction at its best. Is "The Da Vinci code" more eductional than "Age of Empires"? Certainly not.

Would you rather your child read the Marquis De Sade or played GTA?

[Jnyusa]

Re a split:

I'm inclined to agree that the video game topic as discussed here is relevant to the topic of education, and I'm afraid it will hurt the coherence of the thread if we split the thread. But if Yov and Jude want to explore the virtues of video games in a separate thread they are welcome to do so and perhaps this thread will then veer back toward some other arm or leg of this issue.

Jn

[Impenitent]

...

[sauronsfinger]

Would you rather your child read the Marquis De Sade or played GTA?

Do I get any other choices while we are at this?

How about...
- would you rather have your child get swept away in a flood or caught in a fire?
- woud you rather have your child come down with a serious heart condition or contract cancer?
- would you rather have your child get hit by a car or fall out a fifth story window?

Seriously, I would have that a parent is not exercising the choice between polluting a child with the writings of De Sade or polluting them with GTA.

[Alatar]

That wasn't the question SF.

The point is that not all books are good, and not all games are bad. Discretion is required in all things, and to point at GTA and say "Look games are bad" is no different to pointing at Marquis De Sade and saying "Look, books are bad". It's a ridiculously simplistic attitude and farcical in the extreme.

That doesn't stop people from incessantly doing just that with regard to video games.

[JewelSong]

I don't think "all video games are bad." And I am sure that there are some with redeeming qualities and maybe some that even teach you something. (Remember "Oregon Trail" and "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" Taught geography and history, as I recall. And there was "The Playroom" for younger children with different rooms you could enter that had different tasks in them and taught spelling, music, colors and the like. It was fun.)

But the video games most popular now have to do mostly with fighting. Pitting one thing against another and coming out on top. The Narnia game description tells me that the game is basically a battle. (And I was being facetious about Peter not swinging Edmund around in the book - of course the game is different than the book.) I looked into several of the LOTR games and was dissappointed, because they were ALL basically battles and strategies about how to kill your enemy.

The only games I have seen that I felt the least bit connected to (and played, with varying degrees of success) were the "Myst" series - Myst and Riven and the rest. And I enjoyed the challenges and the puzzles (and the gorgeous artwork and soundtrack) But I do not think of them as anything but a fun time-filler. And I do think that if I played them all the time, to the exclusion of other pursuits, that I would be doing myself a disservice.

And, regarding books vs video games. I think reading a book - any book - is of more educational benefit than playing a video game - any video game. Even a "bad" book and even a "good" video game.

[Alatar]

I could go on at length about the myriad games that do not involve "trying to kill someone" but I feel it would be pointless. Your mind is made up on this. Many games are indeed battle based. The Lord of the Rings console games are "Hack and Slash" action games. They don't pretend to be anything else. Jackie Collins doesn't pretend to be anything else than pointless romantic drivel with some sex thrown in. Thats fine by me. But I don't hear you say that because Jackie Collins is more "popular" than James Joyce, all books should be banned.

I refuse to believe that any intelligent person can say that reading, for example, Jilly Coopers "Riders" is more educational than playing through the campaign maps of "Rome: Total War". I just won't believe it.

To me the LoTR Console games are like the movies. A fun ride and a hook into LotR. If you have no interest in playing them, fine, but they are no more or less worthy of attention than any of the pulp paperbacks that adorn the shelves of any newsagent.

If you are truly interested in playing a LotR game that exercises your brain instead of your thumbs, let me know and I'll point you in the right direction.

[Ethel]

I don't think anyone is saying video games are bad per se (except maybe SF .) I think the point that vison and Jewel are making - and it's one I agree with - is that video games involve a very different type of cognitive activity from reading and other academic pursuits. People who read well - quickly and with good comprehension - nearly always do well in school. They also tend to write well, spell correctly, and have good vocabularies. The very act of reading enhances all of those abilities, and this is true even of "bad" books. Playing a video game doesn't.

I don't have anything against video games. I bought boatloads of them for my son when he was young, and even played some of them myself. Some of them were really fun. Some of them presented complex logistical problems. (My son once managed to evolve a race of sentient birds in Sim Earth - that was amusing.) But like most boys, his favorite games involved fighting.

I don't think playing the games did him any harm. But I also don't think they did him any good academically. I also read to him every single day until he was 12 or so, and encouraged him to read on his own in addition to that. That did have academic benefits for him. By the time he was 12 we were routinely sharing and recommending books to each other and often discussing them at length. We still do this on IM! We recently had a long conversation about The Merchant of Venice on IM in fact.

He watched plenty of TV too; probably more than was really good for him. But I also made it a point for us to watch a couple of classic movies every week, and he came to really love them. It tickled me no end when he'd bring a friend home and make them watch something like The Seven Samurai. (One side benefit of video games I will acknowledge - through some of the Japanese games he was drawn to anime and mangas, and through them developed a passionate interest in Japanese culture in general.)

As for why boys in general are struggling in school more than they used to... I doubt it's the nature of pedagogy. I don't think that has changed all that much over the years. Over the centuries, even. It has always involved a lot of sitting at desks, listening and doing various sorts of exercises - worksheets and so forth. Demographic changes are probably a factor: absent fathers and working mothers. The very high amount of time boys spend watching television and playing video games is almost certainly a factor. But... I raised a son alone (from the time he was 9), and I always had to work, and he watched a lot of TV and played a lot of video games. Yet he did very well in school, and is now in his third year of college and getting better grades than he ever did in high school. So you can't convince me that any one of those things is deterministic in and of itself.

I think balance and moderation are key. Playing video games won't hurt you if you also spend time reading and playing outdoors.

[yovargas]

I started a video game thread. Though it's sorta on topic here, I think there are more relevant things to discuss in this thread. I was hoping for some commentary on what I posted earlier:

More on topic [a Newsweek article on exactly this topic]:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/

One of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school rests on a single question: does he have a man in his life to look up to? Too often, the answer is no. High rates of divorce and single motherhood have created a generation of fatherless boys. In every kind of neighborhood, rich or poor, an increasing number of boys—now a startling 40 percent—are being raised without their biological dads.

40%!!!

That sounds like the best theory to explain this problem.