A host of new studies suggest that video games build rather than diminish cognitive skills. Even a relatively simple tiling puzzle like Tetris has been shown to boost brainpower. Moreover, learning expert James Gee’s research reveals that typical teenage gamers are anything but addlebrained. “We had a hard time finding kids who were bad at school but good at games,” Gee says. |
Gee had so much fun playing Pajama Sam that he subsequently decided to try his hand at an adult video game he picked at random off a store shelf—an H. G. Wells–inspired sci-fi quest called The New Adventures of the Time Machine. “I was just blown away when I brought it home at how hard it was,” he says. “I thought, ‘You can’t tell me that people go to the store and pay fifty dollars and buy this!’ Then I found out that there are billions spent each year on these games.”
Gee’s scholarly interest was also piqued. He sensed instantly that something interesting was happening in his mind as he struggled to complete the puzzles of The Time Machine. “I hadn’t done that kind of new learning since graduate school. You know, as you get older, you kind of rest on your laurels: You learn certain patterns, you know your field, and you get a lot of experience. But this requires you to think in a new way. I saw that the excitement of this is the challenge and the difficulty and the new learning. That’s what makes it fun!”
Gee’s epiphany led him to the forefront of a wave of research into how video games affect cognition. Bolstered by the results of recent laboratory experiments, Gee and other researchers have dared to suggest that gaming might be mentally enriching. These scholars are the first to admit that games can be addictive, and indeed part of their research explores how games connect to the reward circuits of the human brain. But they are now beginning to recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging.
All of this, of course, flies in the face of the classic stereotype of gamers as attention deficit–crazed stimulus junkies, easily distracted by flashy graphics and on-screen carnage. Instead, successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think.
One of the most popular video games ever created is called Tetris. It involves falling tile-like tetrominoes that a player must quickly maneuver so they fit into space at the bottom of the screen. In the early 1990s, Richard Haier, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine, tracked cerebral glucose metabolic rates in the brains of Tetris players using PET scanners. The glucose rates show how much energy the brain is consuming, and thus serve as a rough estimate of how much work the brain is doing. Haier determined the glucose levels of novice Tetris players as their brains labored to usher the falling blocks into correct locations. Then he took levels again after a month of regular play. Even though the test subjects had improved their game performance by a factor of seven, Haier found that their glucose levels had decreased. It appeared that the escalating difficulty of the game trained the test subjects to mentally manipulate the Tetris blocks with such skill that they barely broke a cognitive sweat completing levels that would have utterly confounded them a month earlier.
Nearly a decade after Haier’s study, Gee hit upon an explanation. He found that even escapist fantasy games are embedded with one of the core principles of learning—students prosper when the subject matter challenges them right at the edge of their abilities. Make the lessons too difficult and the students get frustrated. Make them too easy and they get bored. Cognitive psychologists call this the “regime of competence” principle. Gee’s insight was to recognize that the principle is central to video games: As players progress, puzzles become more complex, enemies swifter and more numerous, underlying patterns more subtle. Most games don’t allow progress until you’ve reached a certain level of expertise.
This is exactly the model of how Tetris works: When you first launch the game, the blocks fall at a leisurely pace, giving you plenty of time to rearrange them as they descend so they’ll fit the spaces where they fall and gradually build up a wall that fills the screen. As you get better at manipulating the blocks, the game starts dropping them at increasing speeds.
To understand why games might be good for the mind, begin by shedding the cliché that they are about improving hand-eye coordination and firing virtual weapons. The majority of video games on the best-seller list contain no more bloodshed than a game of Risk. The most popular games are not simply difficult in the sense of challenging manual dexterity; they challenge mental dexterity as well. The best-selling game of all time, The Sims, involves almost no hand-eye coordination or quick reflexes. One manages a household of characters, each endowed with distinct drives and personality traits, each cycling through an endless series of short-term needs (companionship, say, or food), each enmeshed in a network of relationships with other characters. Playing the game is a nonstop balancing act: sending one character off to work, cleaning the kitchen with another, searching through the classifieds for work with another. Even a violent game like Grand Theft Auto involves networks of characters that the player must navigate and master, picking up clues and detecting patterns. The text walk-through for Grand Theft Auto III—a document that describes all the variables involved in playing the game through to the finish—is 53,000 words long, the length of a short novel. But despite the complexity of these environments, most gamers eschew reading manuals or walk-throughs altogether, preferring to feel their way through the game space.
Gee contends that the way gamers explore virtual worlds mirrors the way the brain processes multiple, but interconnected, streams of information in the real world. “Basically, how we think is through running perceptual simulations in our heads that prepare us for the actions we’re going to take,” he says. “By modeling those simulations, video games externalize how the mind works.”
Among all popular media today, video games are unique in their reliance on the regime of competence principle. Movies or television shows don’t start out with simple dialogue or narrative structures and steadily build in complexity depending on the aptitude of individual viewers. Books don’t pause midchapter to confirm that their readers’ vocabularies have progressed enough to move on to more complicated words. By contrast, the training structure of video games dates back to the very origins of the medium; even Pong got more challenging as a player’s skills improved. Moreover, only a fraction of today’s games involve explicit violence, and sexual content is a rarity. But the regime of competence is everywhere.
Even if Gee is right and games are learning machines, one question remains: Do the skills learned in the virtual world translate into the real one?
INSIDE THE MIND OF A GAMER
Complex video games require far more than simple hand-eye coordination. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the latest installment in a popular Tom Clancy–inspired series, taxes stealth and navigational skills as the player explores huge virtual environments in the guise of an undercover federal agent. To complete the game, you need to think simultaneously on four distinct levels.
Illustration by Bryan Christie/Video stills courtesy of Ubisoft
1. MANUAL INTERFACE
To control the movements and actions of your on-screen character, you must memorize several dozen distinct button combinations on a video console handset or a PC keyboard (far left). That’s a far cry from the simple jump-or-shoot interfaces of primitive arcade-style games.
2. CHARACTER VIEW
As the game progresses, you take in a shifting landscape of information about the virtual world, such as the sudden appearance of enemies, visual cues that suggest the existence of a puzzle to be solved, and overlaid interface elements that track your character’s health.
3. INTERNALIZED MAP
Most games involve exploring vast worlds as you struggle to learn the rules. You must remember all the twists and turns you’ve made, or you’ll get hopelessly lost. Lose your bearings on this giant ship in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and your character may end up dead.
4. BALANCING ACT
Playing complex games involves juggling multiple objectives, choosing what to prioritize and what to defer. The goals affect decision making on other conceptual levels: which buttons to press, how you interact with other characters, and which areas you choose to explore.
