Do computer games really harm children?

By Margaret.

Do computer games really harm children

At the age of 7, Ben Machell was given a computer and started gaming. At 32, he’s still at it. Sometimes for four hours a day

I was seven years old when I started playing computer games, often spending hours on games like Pokemon – Leaf Green Version – V1.1 and some other favourite games of mine from different periods. I’m 32 now and, over the intervening 25 years, I’ve never really stopped. I have dedicated more of my life to sitting in front of a screen and dispatching my enemies, carving out empires, embarking on quests and blowing stuff up than I’ve spent watching television, going to the cinema, doing exercise or, if I’m being totally honest, reading books.

Playing on a computer is my idea of a good time, and it has been ever since my mum bought a second-hand BBC Micro that came with a shoebox full of big black floppy disks, each containing dozens of weird games that flickered and bleeped and that I immediately loved.

One thing led to another, and now here I am, taking a quick break from a huge three-dimensional ancient battle I’ve been overseeing on my laptop and trying to resist the temptation of playing football on my phone.

And it’s not as though I’m some obsessive, self-identifying “gamer” who will queue up outside a shop the night before a new Call of Dutyis released. I have a life and a job and a girlfriend and all that kind of stuff. It’s just that I was part of the first generation of people to have really grown up gaming, and I suppose it’s only natural that it will have had some kind of effect on me. Of course, so many people also feel this way about gaming, but there can be health risks for people who game as often as I do. I’ve heard that some people can actually be exposed to blue light when they spend all day focusing on their monitor. Blue light can cause various eye problems, so it’s important that gamers take precautions, such as wearing blue light blocking glasses from Felix Gray. Those glasses should protect our eyes whilst we play video games.

The question is: what kind of effect exactly? For as long as I can remember, the societal consensus regarding computer games has been pretty straightforward: they’re bad for you. Or at least if not outright “bad”, then certainly not “good”; tolerable at best, but a tightrope walk of risk for whoever is playing, especially if they are young, especially if they are left to their own devices.

Psychologists have spent years researching the negative impact of gaming, with aggressive behaviour, addiction and social isolation all cited as potential pitfalls. Sometimes, even darker effects are ascribed.

If someone goes on a killing spree and is later discovered to have enjoyed playing violent video games in which you run around shooting people, then news reports will invariably alight on this. Anders Breivik, we learned after his 2011 massacre in Norway, played such games. So did the Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza.

The spectre of an emotionally inert teenage boy plugged permanently into a games console continues to haunt parents around the world.

Last year, the government published a report, How Healthy Behaviour Supports Children’s Wellbeing, that will have done nothing to ease such fears. “Children who spend more time on computers, watching TV and playing video games tend to experience higher levels of emotional distress, anxiety and depression,” it stated. “Time spent playing computer games was significantly and negatively associated with young people’s wellbeing.”

It seemed only to reaffirm what to many was already gut instinct: children’s lives would be better if computer games had never been invented. And to follow the implication through, if I am today a happy, well-adjusted, fully functioning human being, then this is very much in spite of my childhood playing on the computer, not because of it.

But what if the reverse were actually true? What if there were a growing belief among researchers, scholars and psychologists that playing computer games wasn’t necessarily harmful and could, in fact, be a good thing for children, with the potential to enhance mental health, boost sociability and encourage things like creativity, empathy and cognitive function?

This is a genuine school of thought that has emerged over the past few years, and yet it will strike many readers as almost laughably counter-intuitive – like claiming that a diet of cannabis and continental lager can help boost GCSE results, or that prolonged exposure to hardcore porn nurtures a healthy attitude towards sex. But it is nevertheless an attractive proposition – at least, it is to me.

I would, after all, prefer to believe that the countless hours I spent getting York City into the Champions League in Football Manager or making my car do really cool flips in Grand Theft Auto may somehow have been more than just an emotionally stunting waste of time.

So, what’s so great about computer games? I speak to Isabela Granic, professor at the Behavioural Science Institute at the prestigious Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Granic’s job involves trying to develop interventions that can help children struggling with anxiety and depression, and she believes that computer games have the potential to help in these areas.

It is, she admits, a view that not everyone finds easy to accept. “There is still a stigma attached to gaming,” she says. “And certainly when I start talking about the idea of using computer games for improving the mental health of kids, a lot of people are absolutely shocked. They will not even consider it.”

Earlier this year Granic co-authored a paper called The Benefits of Playing Video Games. Here, she proposes that computer games basically serve as training grounds that can help children develop useful skills and positive mindsets.

So one of the first things she highlights is that, if you grow up gaming, you’re going to be used to failing a lot. I can vouch for this. If computer games weren’t challenging, people wouldn’t enjoy playing them so much. But this means there will often be points when you are left stuck, thwarted and frustrated. And Granic says these are all healthy things to experience.

“I think one of the most important things games have taught people is the ability to persevere in the face of failure. Of thinking of ‘failure’ really as ‘information’,” she says. “I’ve seen it personally with my own children. When they would first fail in games, they would get frustrated and throw the controller on the floor. But as they kept playing, they realised, ‘I just have to try harder; I have to try different things.’ They were basically being trained up to have grit.”

Granic says she has spoken to young gamers who, when faced with real-life challenges, consciously apply the same approach. “They literally think of themselves as a character in one of their games and go, ‘Well, OK, I’m just going to get back up and do this again’.”

Another thing she says some games can do is help to “train up empathy”. Games in which you guide a character through a story and make decisions about what they say and do force you to see things from another perspective. You are required to follow plot lines, understand motivations and live with the consequences of your actions.

Thanks to such games I’ve played more parts than a jobbing West End actor, from a cowardly pirate in The Secret of Monkey Island to a suburban housewife in The Sims. “When you’re changing from role to role in drastically different ways, when you have to imagine yourself to be someone entirely different, you get this empathic jolt,” says Granic.

Plus, she continues, it’s not even a bad thing if you make the characters you’re playing do, y’know … bad things. This is actually a relief. Over the course of my gaming career, I have committed countless unspeakable acts. Murder. Torture. Genocide.

As an 11-year-old I was stabbing dogs to death in Wolfenstein 3D (to be fair, they were chasing me, plus they were Nazi dogs), and last night I unleashed nuclear weapons against Mahatma Gandhi in the strategy game Civilization IV.

I spent hours of my teenage life in the guise of a psychotic female elf I’d created in the classic Dungeons & Dragons computer gameBaldur’s Gate. I’d shoot arrows at innocent children and basically double-cross everyone I could. Looking back, all this strikes me as a little incongruous given that in real life I was (and remain) painfully strait-laced. I am not a violent person. But then according to psychologists, this could be precisely the point.

“Play exists as a place for people to experiment with different identities,” says Dr Andrew Przybylski, who works at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. “The question is, what role do video games have in that?

“Maybe being the villain or being a total jerk isn’t who you really want to be, but a game gives you a safe place to try on those roles and see how they fit. It doesn’t mean that if you play Grand Theft Auto you are going to become a car-jacking sociopath.”

Much of Przybylski’s work involves observing how children play computer games and what motivates them to do so. In August, he published research showing that 10 to 15-year-olds who played up to an hour of video games every day were more satisfied with their lives and showed higher levels of positive social interactions and fewer emotional issues than children who did not play games at all.

In other words, kids who are banned from gaming by their parents are less happy and less sociable than those who are allowed to play within reason. And to understand why this may be, he says, we have to understand the extent to which games now serve almost as a lingua franca for young people.

So whether it’s collaborating with hundreds of other kids inMinecraft to construct vast three-dimensional cityscapes, or playingFIFA 15 against someone on the other side of the world, to be a gamer is to be automatically plugged in to a huge community. “Having gaming as part of your life means you are part of the conversation,” says Przybylski. “For children today, gaming is not some subculture. It is the culture.”

So while I still might feel a social pressure to lie to my colleagues about how I spent my weekend – officially I was at the Tate Modern, when in reality I was playing FIFA till my arse was numb – there are people in their tweens, teens and twenties today who will have no such hang-ups about broadcasting their love of gaming to future employers.

Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that some jobseekers are now including experience of the game World of Warcraft on their CVs. The logic is that the hugely popular fantasy role-playing game requires players to work in unison, to arrange themselves into groups and guilds to complete quests and meet goals, and that to do this successfully, you need to be able to communicate, delegate and organise.

And the occasions I’ve played World of Warcraft have felt a little bit like a team-building exercise, only with axes and swords and spells and a load of teenage kids from the American Midwest pretending to be muscle-bound dwarves. But they were polite, encouraging and enthusiastic, conversing crisply and efficiently with one another in order to kill monsters and get treasure and have fun. I’d give them jobs if it were up to me.

Although, actually, maybe I am getting a little ahead of myself. Despite a growth in the number of academics willing to credit games with all these various benefits, there are those who remain circumspect.

I speak to the neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield, who believes that rapidly developing technologies – including computer games – could be changing the way our brains function, and not always for the better. She sets out her views and concerns in a new book, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving their Mark on Our Brains.

“I’d like to be on record as admitting there are some very positive things about gaming,” she tells me. “Some can enhance sensory-motor co-ordination, and they’ve shown that there tends to be a correlation between people who play video games and who become laparoscopic surgeons, for example.

“Basically, you have to accept the premise that the brain is good at what it rehearses and not good at what it doesn’t. So you ask, what are you rehearsing when you play video games? And it follows that the brain will be good at those things. So, for example, people have said the same mental agility that’s required in video games is also good for working memory or for IQ tests,” she says.

“Unsurprisingly, you may see an increase in IQ. But it does beg the question, ‘How important is that in the whole toolkit of mental abilities?’ It doesn’t necessarily mean you understand things. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have insight or imagination.”

She worries, particularly, that gaming could dull the imaginative instinct in children, and compares the open-ended possibilities of playing make-believe with friends with the narrower, more prescribed world of video-game play. “It’s someone else’s imagination you’re playing with, someone else’s images, and you are just much more passive. I know you can decide who to decapitate and so on, but that special inner world is removed.”

But perhaps more than anything, the issue with computer games is that, in Greenfield’s view, they are fundamentally meaningless.

“For every hour you’re playing a game, that’s an hour you’re not doing something else,” she says. “If you’re doing something that doesn’t have any consequences in the real world for long periods of time – which, incidentally, is why I don’t like playing poker or bridge – and is not a means to an end but rather an end in itself, then it is meaningless. And that’s fine; we can all do meaningless things. But if you do it a lot, how are you going to see yourself as a person?”

I tell Greenfield that, respectfully, I’m not sure all computer games are as meaningless as she thinks. I mean, when it comes to it, so many of the games I’ve played over the years have just made me feel really, really happy. Not necessarily because they are just some sugar rush of fun, but because they have often made me feel genuinely contented and fulfilled.

I’m aware that sounds dweebily earnest – again, I honestly do have other interests – it’s just that it’s a very easy point to overlook if you’ve not actually played many games yourself. In fact, one of the key things it helps to understand when looking at why people get so much out of games is that they offer players regular feelings of achievement and advancement. They can make you feel good about yourself.

Professor Jamie Madigan writes extensively about the psychology of computer games, and he describes this dynamic as the “self-determination theory”.

“It’s about a sense of progression: ‘I did something, something happened as a result, and now I’m better off than I was before’,” he says. “That is one of the fundamental reasons why we play games and why they are designed the way they are today. It scratches that itch of needing to know that you are having an effect, that you are being competent, and that it is measurable and observable.”

All Madigan is saying, really, is that there is something to be said about any activity that makes the person doing it feel in control and aware that they are doing it well. It’s the same reason many of us were happy to ride our bikes in aimless circles as kids, or play for hours with a yo-yo.

Only now extend that gratifying feeling of mastery to a scenario where you have worked out how to fly a fighter jet, build an entire city, cast a fireball spell or pretty much anything that you can do within a game. It can make you feel great. Especially casting fireballs.

“My ten-year-old daughter is absolutely crazy about Minecraft,” says Madigan. “And she will sit down for hours if we let her and build incredibly elaborate things – castles, villages, amusement parks. I said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Daddy’s putting his psychology hat on! And she said, ‘It’s just nice to do something, to be able to control it, and when I’m done with it, be able to show it off to people’,” he says. “Games give us that sort of feedback when the world doesn’t always. Which is a reason a lot of us like them.”

It’s not hard, then, to appreciate how games can sometimes even be a form of comfort to players. And there have been plenty of occasions when I have fallen back on the familiar sounds, actions and emotions of a favourite game during times of adolescent crisis and anxiety.

A brutal teenage break-up was once anaesthetised by hours ofSensible Soccer; miserable days at school didn’t seem quite so bad after getting home and progressing in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis; even today, the soothing, reassuring repetition of playingTetris on a packed Tube train is more effective than any meditation or mindfulness routine you can think of. At least, it is for me.

Only, comfort and reassurance can sometimes tip over into something more like dependence. Recently, it occurred to me (ie, it was pointed out to me by my girlfriend) that I had been playing games a lot more than I should. I’d get home from work, collapse on to the settee and open my computer.

Four hours later, I would still be there, my laptop burning hot against my groin and the evening gone. Some weeks I’d top 25 hours’ game time, which is bad when you have a job, and even worse when you’re in the office but can’t stop thinking about how to conquer the Persian empire in Total War: Rome II.

Taking a step back, it was pretty obvious I was relying on playing games just to blot out some of the day-to-day realities of adult life. Around this time, my girlfriend and I managed to get a mortgage, which had been a stressful and expensive process.

Then we started planning a wedding, which is also stressful and expensive. Then it turned out we were going to have a baby, which was great, but also, y’know … And while I wouldn’t say I was exactly addicted, I probably also wasn’t that far off.

So I called Peter Smith, development director at Broadway Lodge, a charity that offers support in dealing with all kinds of addictions, including computer games. I expected him to be fairly hard line about gaming but, actually, he was surprisingly relaxed about everything. For a start, he points out that a lot of the people who are most anxious about the effects of gaming are those with the least first-hand experience of it.

“I think that once you get to people in their forties and upwards, they’ve not really been brought up with the technology,” he says. “They don’t understand it and they can be quite fearful. All they can see are the negative aspects, and fears are raised.”

To illustrate his point, he compares gaming to drinking. “A lot of people get a lot of pleasure from drinking alcohol and don’t get into difficulties, and I think the same is true of gaming,” he tells me. “Millions of people play games and get a lot of pleasure out of it.

“But there is a relatively small percentage who struggle. It would be easy to come from the place, ‘Oh, it’s causing all these problems.’ I have two children, a son and a daughter. The son is now 24 and went through a phase where he was playing quite a lot of games and it used to frustrate me as a parent at times.”

But, he continues, the fact is that his son had also been on the margins of his peer group at the time and had felt a bit lost and excluded. “What the gaming gave him was something where he could be acknowledged, because he became quite good at it and played in the European gaming league. It performed a function for him at the time. Now, he has a girlfriend and a job and he lives in London and he’s doing very well. He still plays games, but it’s just not as central to his life as it used to be.”

I tell him that, to be honest, I’m never going to be good enough to play in any European gaming leagues, but that I was a bit concerned that I’d been using gaming to block out stress. And while he concedes that this can be a problem with games, it can also be a problem with loads of stuff.

“Older people, people in their thirties, forties and upwards, may have other ways of escaping from their difficulties. It could be alcohol, drugs, exercise,” he says. “It could even be work.”

That makes me feel a bit better. I guess there are worse things I could be doing to combat stress than trying to conquer Persia or win the World Cup with Jamaica. Anyway, it’s not as if I’ve really got the time to play on my computer much right now. As I write, I’ve got an eight-day-old son to master, so I’ve saved all my games and I’ll probably load them up again once he’s left home, in 20 years or so.

Or maybe we can play some of them together. After all, I think that, on balance, computer games have seen me right. They’ve engaged me, educated me, made me think deeply and laugh hysterically, and time and again they’ve just made me feel really, really happy.

Why would I deny my own son all that? Actually, thinking about it, I’ve decided. He’s getting a PlayStation. I’ll just keep it warm for a bit.

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Topic
Computers
Published
Nov 30, 2015