Games As A Multitasking Aid?

Thanks to the MIT Technology Review for their article discussing the value of videogames in teaching multitasking skills. The opening paragraph posits: "Playing computer games doesn't shorten kids' attention spans - it helps them to manage competing demands in the new era of 'continuous partial attention.'", and goes on to suggest that "...much as earlier civilizations used play to sharpen their hunting skills, we use computer games to exercise and enhance our information processing capabilities", although the article's author, Dr.Henry Jenkins, warns that these new skills "...should not come at the expense of older forms of literacy."

Comments

depends

[Tirel]

.. which games you are playing. Sure, quake might be good for reflexes, but you don't exactly learn anything else. Baldur's gate 2 has great learning potential, especially if you play a solo mage. Simulations are great for teaching physics, etc.. I think most can be learnt from RPGs where you have enough freedom for bad choices to reflect in the game, fallout 2 was excellent in this.

But think about it for a second? What about other software? If a windows user installs unix, doesn't he (eventually) learn a shitload of beneficial things? Things not only intellectually stimulating, but also great if you're looking for a job, and it's fun too. My opinion is that for instance, learning linux (or any unix really) has more good effects than playing games, combined with todays internet information services (bookwarez;), who needs school?

Re:depends

[Magic Thread]

If a windows user installs unix, doesn't he (eventually) learn a shitload of beneficial things?

Sure, but is installing Unix as much fun? Remember, these are kids we're talking about here.

Re:depends

[GiMP]

I think the point is that games like Quake teach you skills that are often learnt by hunters. These skills are that of remembering paths, solving puzzles, etc. I would not be surprised if playing Quake strenthened one's ability to learn and perform such tasks like programming or learning linux/unix.

Note that my references to Quake are in respect to the one, original Quake.. the versions 2 and 3 of Quake are wholy diffenent animals.

Re:depends

[zatz]

Once you get the mechanics of combat down, and learn the maps, Quake is mostly about anticipating what your opponent will do. As is almost any adversarial multiplayer game, really. Most of the important decisions in a Quake 1v1 are made when you can't see your opponent.

I don't think playing Quake did anything positive for my programming skills, although all the time spent writing mods and admin tools may have :)

Re:depends

[PainKilleR-CE]

Of course, especially if you get out of 1v1, you also add in the need to track multiple targets, on-screen and off, through visual and audible cues. You could also add prioritization, through the trade-offs of various weapons as well as the trade-offs of going for various weapons (anyone that played enough Quake DM knows that the rocket launcher on one particular level was excessively easy to camp, but the rewards for cleaning up that room were high in terms of # of frags, too).

"exercise and enhance our information processing"

[Andy Smith]

we use computer games to exercise and enhance our information processing capabilities

No we don't. We use them for fun. Any enhancement of our "information processing" is an accidental bonus. There may be rare cases when specially written/selected games are used by carers to help people who are suffering from physical or mental problems. But games are never designed, marketed or purchased on the strength of how they might enhance our information processing.

Video Games made me smart!

[The_Listener_1985]

I love how video game skills can be applied to real life. Thanks to video games, when the enemy of the moment's invasion comes, I can multitask my ammunition, objectives and keep my health points in check while everyone else is left in a confused huddle at a save point.

Re:"exercise and enhance our information processin

[vaporakula]

You have a point in that it is never a deliberate thing (buying a game to "enhance our information processing"), but a lot of the "fun" you are talking about is about pushing our brains: where to best fit this L-block, learning the pattern of the spikes shooting out of the ground, how to stop the enemy from repairing their tank.

Its all about Situational Awareness, a concept the military has known about for a long, long time. Good games (the fun ones) are all about situational awareness: knowing the environment, the actions of other characters, the potential for your own character or moves. The more you know about what is happening in the game world around you, the better a player you can be. To improve in the games, we improve our situational awareness (information processing capabilities) within that game.

I wonder if there were any activities 100 years ago that demanded anything like the continuous attention to several different things at the same time as a modern RTS game (production status, resource gathering, unit health, enemy status, all in different places)? I'm sure there was, I just can't think of a decent example... either way, it is a good way to show how games are training people to do lots of very different tasks at the same time.

Multitasking Games

[applefan]

I don't know about this idea, but all I know is that UT2K3 helps me in between studying.

Well...

[bl4nk]

I don't know about this article, but I wouldn't have failed history if I hadn't been playing Battlefield: 1942 and Desert Combat while I should have been working on my research paper. Multitask my ass. If only I could use my keyboard/mouse while browsing an encyclopedia for sources and pondering my thesis statement. Now that's multitasking that's useful.

Re:"exercise and enhance our information processin

[gl4ss]

exactly, i'd mod you up if i ran into you on the metamodthingie..

in this context 'fun'==intresting, be it books, movies, pcgames.. if you don't care at all what happens in the book you will just drop reading it given the chance (if you don't, you obviously do care). many players drop most of the games halfway their supposed gaming life(whatever that may be) because the game fails to intrest them enough(it's only fun for a short while).

part(heck, all) of nethacks long lasting appeal must be this 'getting inside' of the game. if you watch somebody play nethack for 15 minutes you don't want to see the whole game again, but when you play it for hour, or two, or five, you get into it and start noticing there is more than just ascii characters on the screen.

and yeah.. there is a real life equivalent for rts, it's called socialising... never seen it though ;)

Windows Gaming and the dreaded pop-up

[realdpk]

Definitely. Windows programmers like to *enforce* multitasking by way of focus. So you can be in 1st place in a race, doing really well after trying 5 or 10 times (Midnight Club II, heh, just happened to me), and then all of a sudden the whole thing goes away to pop up an IM window.

Why do Windows folk put up with this?

Appropriately timed article it seems ;)

Re:Windows Gaming and the dreaded pop-up

[PainKilleR-CE]

and then all of a sudden the whole thing goes away to pop up an IM window.

Why do Windows folk put up with this?

We don't, because we do one of two things:
-Shut off IM when playing games
-Set the IM not to popup the damned message windows

Most IM systems have other ways to notify you of an incoming message than to just put it in your face, such as changing the icon in the notification/status area, or playing a sound (I shut off all sounds in IM clients, though). Games are notoriously bad at handling multitasking except in very simple or turn-based windowed games, so gamers don't usually deal with the bs that a lot of windows applications like to pull on you (and this isn't a Windows-user thing, either, because it's just as easy to program a *nix app to do the same types of things, and many of them do).

Re:Windows Gaming and the dreaded pop-up

[realdpk]

Eh, it's not just IM clients. It's every single Windows program out there, apparently. They all want your attention, and damned whatever you're doing.

I've seen it happen with UNIX-based apps, but it's incredibly rare.

Abstraction

[quinkin]

The largest hurdle I find in teaching computer skills or even awareness in the general community is the conceptual abstraction required to use a computer, even in a very minimal sense.

Once learnt though, I feel it definitely expands the problem solving approaches available in a persons repertoire.

Q.

Re:Abstraction

[PainKilleR-CE]

I'd just like to add that playing Quake (and Half-life as well), eventually led to an increase in my accuracy both with the mouse and the keyboard, not only in hitting targets (regardless of whether it's Quake, the desktop, or any other GUI-based application), but also in typing in general, especially once I moved towards TF/TFC (which requires a slightly larger set of keys to use efficiently, and a much larger set of keys if you can't handle scripting very well).

When my dad sets up a new computer for someone that's never really owned a computer or spent much time on one, the first thing he does is set them down with Solitaire to learn how to use the mouse. I'd say that once they get to this point Quake could be an addition to improve simultaneous mouse/keyboard use as well as typing skills (believe me, once you start using the WASD setup for direction controls, that home row thing makes a lot more sense and you have a much greater ability to hit at least half the keys on the keyboard with good accuracy).

Re:"exercise and enhance our information processin

[zatz]

Never seen a game marketed as "educational"?

Female Gamers and Multitasking

[quinkin]

I agree with this article in general, but it is not only the management of the mutiple information streams that is learnt, but also management the of stress induced by this information "overload".

All of us have had the experience where we felt we should have been able to complete some task/race/frag/whatever but became "flustered" and hence failed to respond appropriately within the time constraints.

I had previously considered this exact subject as a contributing factor in the different percentages of game type usage between males and females. In particular with regards to the physiological differences in brain morphology between the sexes.

Women have a measurably larger corpus callosum and anterior commisure - both resposible for interconnecting hemispheres of the brain - and this has long been assumed to be the cause of the equally measurable advantage that women have over men in (non-spatial) multi-tasking.

I assume this would have an effect on exactly what, on average, representatives from each sex would find challenging or tedious in the contect of gaming.

I have wondered how much research the game production studios have put into these concepts. The game market is maturing very rapidly, and any companies that can effectively leverage this previously largely untapped audience will have a huge advantage over their competitors...

I would love to hear any feedback from women /. readers, especially any games that you really like/dislike.
(And before the "there are no women on /." posts start, my wife reads it so STFU).

Q.

Multitasking vs. getting stuff done

[Fastball]

There's multitasking, and then there is getting stuff done. Sometimes I wonder if all the game playing I've done (I'm thirty) has whittled down my patience and persistence to follow through on some things. Like work. But then, I'd rather have one large project of my own, than a bunch of smaller ones from other people.

heh heh

[drinkypoo]

Playing computer games doesn't shorten kids' attention spans - it helps them to manage competing demands in the new era of 'continuous partial attention.'

What shortens kids' attention spans is tearing them away from the video game every 30 minutes to help you hook up/set the clock on your VCR, do the dishes, fold the laundry, or other such tasks which are more fun to simply ignore.