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Video Gamers From the '90s Have Turned Out Mostly OK (arstechnica.com)
A study reported on by Ars Technica indicates that video games, much ballyhooed (alleged) source of mental, physical and psycho-social ills for the kids who spent a lot of time playing them, don't seem to have had quite as big a negative effect on those kids as the moral panic of the past few decades would have you believe. Instead, There didn't seem to be an association between the number of games the children reported owning and an increase in risk for conduct disorder. When examining depression among shoot-em-up players, there was evidence for increased risk before the researchers controlled for all the confounding factors, but not afterwards. Of course, there's a lot of data to go around in the several studies referred to here, and the upshot seems to both less exciting and less simple than "Video games are good, not bad!"
Full study here.
Pretty tame conclusions, but I'm glad they're still doing research into this. I'm actually really curious to see what kind of psychological effects show up (or don't) as graphics technology gets ever closer to perfect fidelity. Not in the moral panic or "we must legislate this" sense, but just to understand whether and how a technology is capable of damaging us. VR is right around the corner, and game developers are focusing constantly on immersion -- this makes me wonder whether a sufficiently advanced game could cause PTSD, or a similar condition. I suspect not now, and not soon, but it'll probably be an issue some day.
I have read about people neglecting their kids to play farmville, I have even done a few nasty binges where I would swear to "stop by midnight" only to look outside and see that it was dawn.
The big kerfuffle in the 90's wasn't that games were addictive, it was that they were violent and that we were going to turn into desensitized savages who want to dismember people. Basically this article is about kids that grew up on Mortal Kombat.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
or you could play the masterpiece, Portal 2. And actually get smarter while you play. So says Stanford et al. http://www.fastcompany.com/303...
They're using their grammar skills there.