Video Games & College Education

With the exception of the breakout hit Oregon Trail franchise, video games are an art form developed primarily as forms of entertainment, much as novels, movies, and radio programs are.  But today I was challenged with the statement "video games are a crippling educational problem for college students."

Well, I work with college students, and I play video games.  But before I went on a rant that this statement couldn't possibly be true, I decided that I would actually research the topic.  Do video games represent a barrier for student academic success?

(Disclaimer: to be certain, compulsive video game behaviors do represent very serious barriers to academic and professional development in the same ways that compulsive internet use, gambling, or drug and alcohol addiction would.  I hope to address more habitual and casual forms of play in this analysis.)

My initial findings were not particularly endearing to my original thesis.  In A Study of Time Management, published in 2007 in CyberPsychology & Behavior, researcher Vivek Anand found an inverse trend in grade point averages with higher daily video game usage. 

Graph!

Anand did note that with the study group, SAT scores were highest among those students who played for approximately 4.5 hours, however "the p value for the correlation between a person's SAT score and video game usage was 0.618, which shows that they are most likely unrelated and thus have no correlation" (Anand, 555).

(In case you haven't been to a stats class forever, but are still reading this, here's what p means.)

However, I have some criticism to Anand's findings (which is easy, since I write a blog, and he is - you know - actually doing research).  The data presented does not indicate what types of video games are being played.  Due to the Skinner box mechanics of online gaming (and the online social environments therein), online games would represent a far different issue with GPA than offline gaming.

Also, results were not delineated by gender.  I, for one, would have liked to have seen whether or not the GPA correlation in gameplay was accurate for both genders, since Anand himself admits to having a higher percentage of male respondents.

If I had hoped a 2010 article in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence titled More Than Just a Game: Video Game and Internet Use During Emerging Adulthood by Laura Padilla-Walker, Larry Nelson, Jason Carroll, and Alexander Jensen would encourage me to think that gaming wasn't a huge concern to college students, I was wrong.  "Specifically, regardless of gender, video game use was linked to greater drug use, drinking behaviors, and lower relationship quality with friends and parents" (Padilla-Walker, et. al., 109).

Furthermore, "research suggests that time spent playing video games may also inhibit identity exploration," a complete antithesis to the notion that games can help facilitate identify exploration (Padilla-Walker, et. al. 110).

In fact, the entire article by Padilla-Walker and her team suggests that video games are bad news, not just for academic performance, but for the development of an older adolescent into adulthood!  Crud.


This article does not please me.

 Again - video games are not specifically delimited in this study, although there is a comparison between "violent" video games and non-violent games.  And, a nod to the research team, because unlike the Anand study, Padilla-Walker does an excellent job in exploring the differences between men and women.  The team went even farther to point out "another limitation [to the study] was the use of single items to assess video game and violent video game use ... future research should examine video game use in more detail by assessing specific games played, as well as other contextual factors" (Padilla-Walker, et. al., 112).

Luckily, I did find an article from CyberPsychology & Behavior by Marko Skoric, Linda Lay Ching Teo, and Rachel Lijie Neo that found a strong causal link between the amount of time playing video game on weekdays and English scores, supporting the notion that Intensive English Language Institute (IELI) students may benefit from playing games in English.  So, I am not left wholly disheartened - only mostly.

The findings from the Anand and Padilla-Walker studies are both pretty directional into my understanding of one very important thing: we've got a long way to go in understanding how video games impact academic performance.  While neither study had great things to say, they were also both quick to establish that they are trailblazers in this area of research, and that without more studies, there could be no conclusions drawn.

If video games are a significant impediment to academic success (research seems to be leaning this way), it would behoove those of us who are assigned the task of removing barriers success to know a little more about them, and a little more on how we can employ harm reduction techniques to make education a priority, and gaming a recreational activity.

But until more research can be done, I guess we'll just wait.

Online Social Environments (Beyond the MMO)

Usually, when I blog, it's to talk about how awesome (or slightly less so) games are; but sometimes, I like to go a little off the deep end and apply my knowledge about social constructs to the design and play of video games.  Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about online social environments and how they influence, impact, and have changed the way we game.

Gaming in social environments is not a new concept by a long shot.  Only recently did the scope of social environments involved in gaming expand exponentially.  An online social environment is a community (best defined by Pillari & Newsome as "[a social system] by the personal or affective ties among their members ... people with a common identity and bond").  This community's common identity is the game play.  And whereas many communities form in geographical locations, the space in which this community meets is virtual: the online social environment.

Before I lose you, here's a graphic representation of community (as we traditionally have understood it) and how an online social environment might be perceived.

Traditionally, communities are formed of cohesive groups of individuals - the community representing the focus of support for the individuals creating the group.  However, with online social environments, we are looking more at structures created (sometimes manufactured, sometimes grown organically) between individuals linked together through network connectivity (also known as the interwebz).

Okay, so what?  Well, the creation (especially the manufactured creation) of online social environments remains a major issue in online social gaming.  Everything from Facebook games to World of Warcraft create and utilize online social environments.  These are the foundations for which the game is designed, developed, and eventually, driven.  Where the theories of community development come into play are in considering how the environment and the individual interact.

There are two concepts of environment when considering systems theory.  I know I'm on the cusp of losing you again, so here's another drawing:

So, a symmetric environment (also sometimes called a symbiotic environment) influences the individual and the individual influences it.  Theoretical democracy is a symmetric environment.  An unbalanced, or directive environment is one which shapes the individual.  Online social environments can be applied to either category.  Consider a server community on Minecraft, for example.  This is a very symmetric environment - users create based on the materials available; the environment is shaped by users and provides the materials for construction (and also, Creepers). 



That'sss an awfully nice ssssocial environement you have there.
It'd be a ssssshame is ssssomething happened to it...

But not all games with online social environments work so nicely.  Let's take my arch-nemesis Farmville for a ride: users have little-to-no interactive ability with the environment, save for cosmetic changes.  There is little environment to speak of, because Farmville holds all the cards.  And rightfully so!  Relying on microtransactions would become difficult if you enabled community members to openly interact (especially on an economic basis). 

I don't want to go crazy into economics, but there is a huge problem between manufactured online social environments and profit motivation theory.  The notion to create a symmetric environment may be at diametric odds with the notion of creating a revenue generating environment.  So, in a capitalist based society, profit may beat out community development.

Because of this (I promise, the econ is almost done) profit problem, organically created online social environments tend to thrive more, because they are naturally uninhibited by those constraints that would generally plague a manufactured environment.

Of course, that sounds delicious to an investor.  Like wanting to capitalize on viral marketing, there is no magic bullet to ride the coattails of Web 2.0 to instant profit.  The motivation differences create a series of problems, lead to social entropy, and the decay (and eventual death) of the online social environment.

If you are an avid gamer, developer, or investor, I strongly recommend that you continue your investigation into online social environments - how we impact them, and them us.  Better understanding our mechanical interactive world can help make it better, not just for us, but for everyone else we share the community with; which, really, is what community is all about.