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.

Bastion Coming to PC!

I'm more excited than I can speak to, because Bastion is coming to the PC via Steam!

Bastion is an action-RPG that I've been excited about since reading about it on GayGamer.net September last year.  Then, I was somewhat sad, because it was Xbox only, and now I'm happy again!

In-Game Economics 101

EDIT: Oh sure, Washington Post, put up your article at the exact same time I post this, referencing very similar things...  You're on my list, buddy.

Disclaimer!  Some of this discussion comes from the presentation "Understanding Virtual Worlds" that Michelle Kandalaft (a Ph.D. Psychology student and awesome gamer-gal) and I put together at the University of Texas at Arlington.  I am not an expert in Economics, though my mother drew a Supply-Demand graph on a napkin at Denny's when I asked why things cost money at the age of 4.  So, credit where credit is due to Dr. Kandalaft and my mother.

Also, the Amazon.com ad for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers [7th Edition] was purposeful.  If you haven't read it, you really ought to.

With Blizzard's announcement that Diablo 3 will feature a system for users to sell in-game items for real-world currency, gaming blogs and twitters have erupted with interest over the decision.  While to many this seems a formalizing of a long-standing system (gold-farming), the nature of in-game trade for real-life currency is not unheard of in Virtual Worlds.

TL;DR (because really, this is TL):  Economics is complicated.

More (and, lamentably, graphs) after the jump...

Violence In Video Games

The California Supreme Court ruled today that prohibiting the sale of "violent" video games was unconstitutional, something much aga on the gaming twitterverse. 

Personally, I'm okay with making suggestions and educating the consumer population about the content of video games.  Parents who are averse to exposing their children to violent video games (like violent films, or books, I suppose) should be able to know the basic premise and level of violence the game contains.  Thank god for sites like GamerDad's - which specifically take a no-nonsense, honest and fair approach to gaming with children.  The above site does it in a way easy for parents to understand.  For example, when describing the "Kid Factor" of Super Mario Galaxy, GamerDad writes: "you stomp fictional creatures called Goombas, who vanish in a puff of smoke, revealing a coin."

However, not all games are of the puff of smoke, reveal a coin variety.  Games like Call of Duty present real and substantially violent situations, appropriate for mature gamers, but possibly not age-appropriate for developing children.

My background on this issue blends from both my youth as a gamer and my education in childhood development.  Simply put, while I agree with the ruling, there are some fantasy situations (whether by video game, film, or novel) that developing minds will have trouble differentiating from reality.  Considering the medium of delivery, parents should (as best available) be responsible to observe and curtail any influence that could be detrimental to their children's healthy development.

However, with some parents barely even to meet their children's basic needs, perhaps there is a place for government intervention of the sale and furnishing of all media based on developmental level.  Of course, the issue becomes much, much more subjective, and I can't count on the guy in GameStop as being able to assess a child's readiness to look down the scope of sniper rifle and disassociate that with real-life scenarios.

Fantasy play is important to childhood development, and children can benefit greatly from the introduction of age-appropriate gaming, but just like you wouldn't expect a child to appropriately play Canasta, or Texas Hold 'Em, we also shouldn't be forcing games (through advertisement, primarily) to children who won't be able to enjoy or understand the medium.

Fallout: New Vegas News - Summer DLC Packs

In addition to Dead Money (which I still haven't gotten a spin at) - three new DLC packs are coming out for Fallout: New Vegas which add new environments and expand upon story elements left unfinished.  In true Bethesda style, the level cap will increase and there are new perks, new trophies, and new weapons to bring a more diverse experience to the Mojave Wasteland.

• Honest Hearts - Releases in May 2011 - DLC that gives you more background on the Burned Man, Ceaser's right-hand man who was believed dead.
• Old World Blues - Releases in June 2011 - after the Courier is captured and exposed to laboratory testing, you learn more about how some of the monstrous denizens of the Mojave came to be.
• The Lonesome Road - Releases in July 2011 - finally!  We get to learn more about the courier who turned down the Platinum Chip job and caused the entirety of the events in Fallout: New Vegas.

Each pack rounds up to a $10 price tag, making a $50 gift card to the Playstation Store an obvious choice for my birthday (July 8).

PSN Returns

The Playstation Network (PSN) is back online with (very nearly) full functionality.  In related news, if you are friends of mine on Facebook, I inadvertently spammed your newsfeed with a bunch of trophy notification.  I've been busy, alright?

In due time, I will finally play Portal 2 co-op so that I can actually review the whole game proper, complete with spoilers.  In the meantime, the spoiler-free review is here.

Playstation Network (Still) Down

Hopefully you don't rely on this blog for updates on what's going on in the world of the video games, but in case you do (hi Mom!) - you should probably know that the Playstation Network has been down for about a week now.  This means that no online features are available, or online play (like, co-op in Portal 2, for example), can't access the PSStore (to spend money I don't have).  And there may have been some accidental leaking of personal data, like where I live and stuff - but nothing that wasn't already leaked by the Texas Comptroller's office.  Sony assures me that credit card numbers were encrypted, but I dare the hackers to try to use that card to buy anything more than a hot dog.

So today, Playstation released some presses (it was actually yesterday, but I was asleep) - saying that as sort of a "sorry" that users would be getting a month free of the Playstation Plus, and some mystery content (or maybe a choice between several types, as is rumored by the internet).  This is kind of exciting, because despite my rant about Playstation Plus, I actually kind of love free stuff - especially getting a trial at something.  This might be the sort of thing I angle to get for my birthday.

In the meanwhile, I've been trying my hand at Dragon Age II, and borrowing it is not going to work out - I'm going to have to own this eventually, because I already know I want to play it AGAIN, and I'm barely a couple hours in.

Did you want to buy me something?  That's so sweet.  You can check out my Amazon wishlist here: http://amzn.com/w/1HLFDVW8GNHV2.