Antisocial, violent and under-developed brains. The latest attack on videogames.
New Japanese report on the effects of gaming. Shock factor or genuine concern?
A study into the effects of videogames on players has come up with some startling conclusions.
In what has to be seen as one of the most concerted attacks on gaming in the industry’s history, a study carried out in Japan has claimed that videogames actively cause violent behaviour, antisocial tendencies and under-developed brains.
Carried out by Professor Ryuta Kawashima of the Tohoku University, the study compared two groups of teenagers. One group played an un-named Nintendo game while the other group did simple arithmetic.
Professor Kawashima and his team measured the brainwaves of the subjects and came up with some staggering results.
He claims that videogames do not stimulate the frontal lobe of the brain, the section charged with repressing antisocial behaviour, violent and aggressive impulses and aiding memory, learning and balancing emotion.
"The importance of this discovery cannot be underestimated," declared Kawashima at a conference on learning, held in Britain over the weekend. "There is a problem we will have with a new generation of children who play computer games that we have never seen before. The implications are very serious for an increasingly violent society and those students will be doing more and more bad things and not other things like reading aloud or learning arithmetic.
Of all the many absurd and saddening attacks on electronic gaming we have read in our time, this is one of the most misguided and uninformed ever released.
We are happy to accept that playing some games may not stimulate the same parts of the brain as mathematical tasks. But by the same token, some games blatantly do. Tetris is a classic example of this, along with the legions of other puzzle games and games with puzzle elements. To pit a single, un-named Nintendo game against arithmetic is a fools' test. We would argue, in our comparative ignorance in the field of neurology, that there are certain games that would demand far more of the frontal lobe than the solving of simple mathematical problems.
The issue is how long children are allowed to play games that are not healthy for the brain. As with most things they love, kids will spend as much time as possible indulging in playing games. It is surely up to the parents to decide whether or not their own children are playing too much.
There have been many studies that contradict the findings of this report and state that playing games is mentally beneficial to gamers, promoting concentration, lateral thinking and heightened co-ordination.
In what has to be seen as one of the most concerted attacks on gaming in the industry’s history, a study carried out in Japan has claimed that videogames actively cause violent behaviour, antisocial tendencies and under-developed brains.
Carried out by Professor Ryuta Kawashima of the Tohoku University, the study compared two groups of teenagers. One group played an un-named Nintendo game while the other group did simple arithmetic.
Professor Kawashima and his team measured the brainwaves of the subjects and came up with some staggering results.
He claims that videogames do not stimulate the frontal lobe of the brain, the section charged with repressing antisocial behaviour, violent and aggressive impulses and aiding memory, learning and balancing emotion.
"The importance of this discovery cannot be underestimated," declared Kawashima at a conference on learning, held in Britain over the weekend. "There is a problem we will have with a new generation of children who play computer games that we have never seen before. The implications are very serious for an increasingly violent society and those students will be doing more and more bad things and not other things like reading aloud or learning arithmetic.
Of all the many absurd and saddening attacks on electronic gaming we have read in our time, this is one of the most misguided and uninformed ever released.
We are happy to accept that playing some games may not stimulate the same parts of the brain as mathematical tasks. But by the same token, some games blatantly do. Tetris is a classic example of this, along with the legions of other puzzle games and games with puzzle elements. To pit a single, un-named Nintendo game against arithmetic is a fools' test. We would argue, in our comparative ignorance in the field of neurology, that there are certain games that would demand far more of the frontal lobe than the solving of simple mathematical problems.
The issue is how long children are allowed to play games that are not healthy for the brain. As with most things they love, kids will spend as much time as possible indulging in playing games. It is surely up to the parents to decide whether or not their own children are playing too much.
There have been many studies that contradict the findings of this report and state that playing games is mentally beneficial to gamers, promoting concentration, lateral thinking and heightened co-ordination.
Companies:
Nintendo
Read More Like This