Slashdot Mirror
Video Games Can Make Us More Creative
FiReaNGeL commends to us a study by Penn State researchers looking at the effect of video game play on creativity. "[Subjects] were asked to play a popular video game, Dance Dance Revolution, at various levels of complexity. The students took a standard creativity test after playing. The researchers also took readings of the players' skin conductance and asked players if they were feeling either positive or negative after the game ... [T]he study appears to indicate that after playing the game, happy or sad people are most creative, while angry or relaxed people are not. The findings suggest that either high or low arousal is key to creativity. In other words, medium amounts of arousal are not conducive to creativity."
I keep telling my parents that video games make me smarter, but they never believe me.
Boycott shampoo! Demand the REAL poo!
I think everyone who plays video games knows this already...
Scorta futuere amo!
Of course I haven't RTFA, but I wonder if the test is measuring what the title of the article says it is measuring. Are the results due to playing the video game, or could they be from the physical exercise involved in DDR (considerable). There is probably room for a number of different control groups.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
I guess it is a good thing I got back into my hour-a-day of playing DDR then.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
and then you pwn him/her
Any one who has studied arousal levels and their relationship to performance would have been able to tell them that relationship to creativity. In fact, anyone who has a reasonable knowledge of sports would tell you the same. Think about the occasions when the best performances tend to be seen (not "are seen", for you nit-pickers out there, but "tend") and it would be in the occasions when the athlete was highly motivated. Also, the times when you utterly destroyed your previous scores in (your favourite game here) you would have been at your creative best. No new news here, Move on.
For every present, there is a past
When I think of video games, I don't think of DDR. DDR is a plot to get nerds to work out by making them think they're scoring points instead of burning calories.
How about doing a study about how creative people are after going to the gym? It gets the blood flowing, oxygen circulating -- no wonder they think better.
Likewise, happy and sad emotions making people more creative than neutral or angry? Duh. Anger makes me want to break things -- or play DOOM. Frankly, DOOM doesn't make me solve problems better afterwards.
I always think better after having worked out, or done something outside. Just an observation.
Skin conductance? "Feeling positive or negative"? Dance Dance Revolution? Not to mention how they measure creativity...it's basically a self assessment.
There are so many problems...skin conductance is a meaningless measurement. All we know is that is changes...we don't know why with any reliability. The rest is Freudian/behaviorist psychology bullshit. It's not pseudo-science...it's worse...it's a fraud. These experiments do not come close to proving any sort of hypothesis.
I can say from personal experience that *some* video games substantially increase my brain activity, but having some sort of statistical proof is a long way off. We simply do not understand the human brain and creativity enough to draw these kind of conclusions from this shitty data.
I'm not anti-video game by any means, I'm anti-behaviorist psychological bullshit peddlers who do this work and call it "science".
Thank you Dave Raggett
it seems everyone who posted so far kind of missed the point... the findings show that you have to either be up or down to be creative, which i've noticed and have to deal with every day as a composer. feeling so so is not the time to work on music. i make my best stuff out of a surge of happiness or the bottom of depression.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't, "standard creativity" quite a little bit oxymoronic?
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
"Creativity test?" What is it, a blank page?
Couldn't the "heightened creativity levels" have something to do with the fact that Dance Dance Revolution requires physical activity? I feel like coming to the conclusion that "video games make us more creative" is a bit presumptuous. If they used a game like WOW maybe...
Also, I couldn't find exactly how they measured creativity. How DO you measure something like that with a pre-made test?
Things that interest us cause us to learn or create, thats amazing. Its almost like why production line workers dont win phds or dont come up with the theory of relativity! Its almost the opposite to what school does, maybe its time to rethink learning, learning should be about finding our passions, not learning 10 topics we couldnt give two shits about
I actually play, to a certain extent, for the exercise. Not for creativity or anything.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
so porn stars must all be picassos and mozarts
huh, the mysteries of the lessons of science
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Standard creativity test? Hum... ok....
Send your spendthrift head of state this
So manic depressives must be veerryyy creative.
Video games, they claim, spark "positive social traits, such as creativity."
How would this compare to dancing with another person?
For socially adept, happy, creative people, dance with another human, not a video game. Like these people here, here, here, and here.
Yes, it would mean you'd have to stop playing with your Wii ... for at least a little while.
By RTA or even just reading the quote alone it's obvious that there should be a "or not" at the end of the title. The creativity effect only happens when the game brings certain people to certain ranges of the two variables they measured. It isn't some universal magic result that occurs just by playing the game. PM
Introducing... clichefit!
Duude, don't discount WoW so fast. With how much my dwarf runs around hills and valleys and thickets, he's probably uber-creative. He's probably composing the next great symphony when I'm not around. Having herbalism as one of the jobs probably also helps, if you know what I mean.
;)
Also, I remember trying one of the (back then) new MS Sidewinder force-feedback joysticks in some Star Wars game, waay back. It was like arm-wrestling an epileptic grizzly bear while he's having a seizure. The damn thing would shake, pull in random directions, and generally act like it had a will of its own. Or like it was possessed by the angry spirit of a spastic monkey who died of a drug overdose.
You want to accelerate? Have some random joystick shake. One of your team mates got too close to you? Let's shake, rattle and roll, baby. You passed by another ship? Arm wrestle this, nerd-boy. Laser fire narrowly missed you? Shake baby, shake. You're trying to carefully aim at a 2 pixel shield generator? Let's have some shaking that you'll be glad if you can keep it on your screen, much less in the crosshair. Etc.
'Cause you know, it's only _realistic_ to simulate turbulence. In space. In a vacuum. Caused by a laser beam. Ookaayy.
If that wasn't a bigger workout than waving your wiimote around, I don't know what is. More depressing too, and, hey, these guys say that being sad is good for your creativity
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"We looked at two emotional variables: arousal and valence," said Hutton. "Arousal is the degree of physical excitation -- as measured through skin conductance -- and valence, which is the range of positive or negative feeling."
So this means race car drivers are much more creative than say... artists.
Now you're thinking with portals!
First post = troll. Cleverly worded post designed to enrage others = flamebait.
Video Games Can Make Us More Aggressive
There, fixed it for you.
"The findings suggest that either high or low arousal is key to creativity." No shit? When I am highly aroused I get very creative; I tend to vividly fantasize about some hot guy (or several) and me ;P
-Nita
The site appears to be slashdotted at the moment, here's a google cache link: http://tinyurl.com/6rsjmz
Now, what happened after regular "dancing"? Even hop scotch.
I would expect similar results.
I KNEW chronic masturbation and Photoshop went well together! Thanks /.
Video games linked to lousy statistical methodologies.
When questioned about sketchy practices, senior researchers at Penn State replied, "Wtf noob get your own research grant lol"
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
This was the wrong game to use to try and prove a point about the effect of video games. I play DDR fairly often, and it's not really a video game so much as a physical workout. Working out is good for you on several levels. You get your circulation going, your metabolism picks up, you get endorphins making you happy, and you come out of it feeling like you did something good for yourself. Creativity is enhanced when your sense of well-being is enhanced. The video game aspect of it is, to me, pretty meaningless. They should have compared the effects of DDR with the effects of people doing aerobics to a workout video. I'll bet they would have found the same results.
That said, video games can make you more creative, but this was the wrong way to measure it.
What are all the games that they tested? if they only tested DDR you might as well just start telling people to go outside, exercise and have fun since the way that this looks it is more or less the result of endorphins being released in our bodies.
Damn.. had I known that i could get published this way, I woulda kept accurate data back then!
Back when DDR first appeared stateside (We had a DDR 3rd mix - Korean at the local arcade) - we used to play it vigorously until more locals/kids figured out that it was entertaining to play as well, and lines started to build.
To give ourselves breathers/kill time waiting - we would go over to the touch screen machine and play some form of the Merit Megatouch machines, and specifically play Wordster or Word Dojo to see how good our brains were in our exhausted physical states after say, 10 straight games of DDR...
Conclusions: Due to the lower amount of oxygen going to our brains (relatively speaking), as more of it was going to the muscles to assist in recovery - our scores on average sucked by at least 10% while being tired. However, even though our scores were worse, we did come up with some of the most esoteric words that we would never use in daily speech while totally tired, that we would never pull out while playing fresh.
It's not the point that was missed -- it's that it isn't clear they actually measured creativity or 'anything' -- the testing methodology was flawed, like "skin conductance -- that increases with sweating -- wouldn't exercise increase sweating?" Several things measured don't add up to the conclusions drawn -- which is very often true with 'scientific studies', but appears even more so in this 'study'. Whatever.
After hours of doing boring and repetitive tasks, the brain is hungry for doing something new---something creative. Sounds plausible to me.
The study really had nothing to do with video games at all. It used DDR to get people to exercise to a point of pysiological arousal to see how it, in correlation with emotional state, would affect various aspects of cognition. The abstract can be found here.