Game Boy Effective Kid Tranq

yali writes "A new study shows that Game Boys are better than tranquilizers for calming children before surgery. Kids allowed to bring Game Boys into the OR showed no change in anxiety (compared to a small increase with tranquilizers, and a big increase in a control condition.) Kind of puts a different spin on analogies between games and drugs."

Comments

Will it work on road trips too?

[cdoty]

And to think, we're buying them for our kids this Christmas to be an effective tranquilizer on road trips.

It works for adults too!!

[FriedTurkey]

As a frequent traveler, I still get a little scared during really rough flights. I whip out the gameboy and I don't really pay attention to what is going on anymore. Fear is all mental. The more you let your mind think, the more you are scared. Gameboys divert all thinking to trying to defeat the other army in Advance Wars.

Child's Play

[Schezar]

Considering the ramifications of this article, I urge any of you with spare cash/games to check out Child's Play. It's a huge charity that collects video games and systems for children in hospitals, run by the folks at Penny Arcade

I normally don't plug things, but this is too relevant to the article to ignore, and it can help out a lot of kids.

Not so much with adults

[Mostly Monkey]

I brought my DS with me before getting surgery last Tuesday for a pilonidal cyst and honestly it didn't do anything to calm my nerves. Even while playing I couldn't get the painful future recovery out of my mind. In my case I could look more into the future then kids despite distractions.

Re:Bad thing

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Let's see what these kids are like as adults.

We won't have to wait very long. We ARE those kids remember. Majority of slashdotters are 15~30 years old I should think(Aplogies in advance to the legions of outrages 0-14 and 31-127 age groupers). Most of us grew up on gameboy, SNES, Genesis and Playstation. And guess what! Society isn't falling apart after all.

Or is it? Video games, TV, porn, drugs, education, emancapation, the vote, tolerence, cars, secularism and the internet have all failed, despite all doomsday predictions to the contrary, to tear the fabric of society apart. However I personally fell that our new found 14 hour day work ethic could have a fair stab at bringing about an Escape From New York or Mad Max type senario. The reason people are turning to Gameboys and Riddlin as babysitters is because they're exhausted after slogging for corperate masters all day so they don't lose their job to offshoring.

Naturally of course free market economics will eventually solve this problem. So goes the prevailing theory anyway. It's more likely however that kids and teenagers will just have to make to with Super Mario and Gordon Freeman as role models while their parents spend most of their free time sleeping or driving.
But hey! We beat the commies right!? ...Right?