Feature
State of play
by Matt Nippert
Are video games really so addictive that they are turning kids, especially boys, into brain-dead bores by playing with their minds – or do they, as researchers suggest, have a positive effect?
It’s already the iconic image of the 21st century, a twisted take on Rodin’s Thinker: an adolescent boy or nerdish young man hunched over a computer for hours, cocooned in an electronic glow. He’s playing video games as if life depended on it, immersed in a realm of make-believe, sitting in a seat long-moulded to a body deprived of physical exercise.
It’s not doing drugs or mugging old ladies, but concerns are increasingly being expressed about the effect of intensive game-playing on boys’ social and mental development. The US is buzzing with articles like Harper’s Magazine’s “Grand Theft Education”, about how video games are affecting literacy. What might have once been regarded as a hobby is beginning to look like an unhealthy obsession to many parents.
Take Lena Bonamis. An Auckland mother of two teenage sons, she says that video games keep kids engrossed in frivolous activities and soak up valuable time when they should be enriching their minds. And Jenny Forsyth, with a young son, is noticing worrying signs. “I can see already – he’s four – that it can be incredibly addictive.”
Other parents of teenage sons feel that electronic play is crowding out schoolwork – it’s almost impossible to monitor whether teenagers are doing homework on the computer or just playing games – and physical exercise. School leaders are aware of the trend, too. Noticeably fewer boys have been taking part in sports over the past decade, says Peter Fava, principal of St Bernard’s College in Lower Hutt.
“Games, iPod and Xbox, they may be playing with those – and in some instances it has affected their homework – but it probably has affected their participation in sports more.”
Nelson College headmaster Gary O’Shea, although not wholly dismissive of the value of computer games, says, “We played cowboys and Indians down in the woods when I was at school, but that was a social activity. That’s the concern: game-playing is an isolated activity, even online.”
A direct causal connection between excessive computer gaming and poorer educational achievement is yet to be established, but there are grounds for real concern. A Massey University conference on boys’ education earlier this year heard that, out of 296 externally assessed NCEA standards, girls outperformed boys in 258. And in tertiary education, research by Victoria University’s Institute of Policy Studies shows that women outnumber men by 40% at postgraduate level.
Computer gaming also carries physical risks. A 28-year-old South Korean man died last year, apparently from exhaustion, after playing online games for more than 50 hours; and two years ago 14-year-old British boy Stefan Pakeerah was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by a 17-year-old friend obsessed by the game Manhunt. (This game was deemed objectionable by New Zealand censors in 2003 and banned.)
Are addictive video games turning boys into brain-dead couch potatoes who are losing the ability to distinguish between virtual and real?
The most authoritative academic on the effects of video games on UK children is Professor Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University. In fact, he says, he’s probably one of only about 10 people in the world who have seriously studied the phenomenon. His finding: “I have to say, in the 20 years I’ve been in this field, I’ve seen no good evidence that moderate playing of video games has any negative, detrimental effects on children.”
Note the word “moderate”. A father of three, Griffiths says that all his children play “fun and exciting and educational” video games chosen by him, “but I wouldn’t necessarily let them play the same game for six or seven hours a day. I’m not trying to demonise games, but I’m trying to put it into a healthy context.”
In his research, however, separating healthy enthusiasm from harmful addiction has proved rather difficult. “My bottom line is that healthy enthusiasms add to life and addictions take away from it.”
Even authorities in New Zealand schools can see the positive. Simon Leese, headmaster at Christ’s College, Christchurch, says that good computer games compare favourably with TV.
Boys with an unhealthy addiction to computer games would probably have found similarly antisocial outlets in another generation, he says. “Many of us had stamp collections, but a few were never happy unless reordering their commemoratives for hours on end.”
Leese says that mum and dad shouldn’t throw up their hands when faced with game consoles and controllers. “How many parents consider sitting down with their sons and playing alongside them? Would it be so much different from a game of chess on the coffee table?”
Alexander Donohue, an uncommonly articulate 17-year-old at Auckland’s Howick College, goes further than Leese’s comparison with chess: he is a believer in games as a new art form. He spends, he says, at least an hour a day playing video games, “but if I have a really good game, I can do a stretch up to seven hours”.
Is his mother, Vicky Donohue, concerned? “Not in the slightest. He’s a happy, articulate, well-balanced child.” She encouraged his electronic habit by buying an Apple IIe when Alexander was “about two. He wasn’t typing letters – he didn’t know the alphabet – but he used to bang the keys. We’ve always had a computer, and I’ve always let him play it.”
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