A couple of times each year, some no-name “study” comes along heralding video games as a trojan horse for brain development.
Some of the more common headlines: Video games increase hand-eye coordination, video games give you ninja fast reflexes, and most recently, video games augment decision making.
They’re all lies, of course.
Like other forms of entertainment’including movies, music, and TV’video games are really good at distracting humans for extended periods of time. That’s all.
Want to enhance brain development? Read a book. They’ll fuel anger, provoke self-analysis, teach language, and inspire ideas better than any other medium.
Wanna build hand-eye coordination? Play sports, Operation, or try to catch flies with chop sticks.
Want to augment decision making (whatever that means)? Get a job, study economics, launch a business, or start a family, I suppose.
Now if you want to escape into a hands-on world of audio-visual awesomeness, play a video game. They’re awesome at that. Some of them are even super creative and artistic to boot. Or super competitive. Or super social’all awesome side effects of gaming.
But please don’t tell me I’ll be smarter for playing them. I won’t be. Anything suggesting otherwise smacks of insecurity.