Video Games

• “And what about preparing for the real world? In the real world—unless you’re a fighter pilot or a Marine sniper—being able to push a button 0.02 seconds faster than the other guy isn’t such a valuable skill. Preparing teenagers for the demands of real-life requires skills quite different from the cognitive and vasomotor skills required to master video games. Imagine a young father, in his twenties let’s say, trying to comfort his crying baby daughter. There are no buttons to push, no photon torpedoes to fire. The right thing to do may be simply to rock the baby and hum a lullaby. The chief virtue required may not be lightning virtuosity with a game controller, but merely—patience. If you need to get along with a belligerent coworker, the chief virtue you need may not be lightning speed. In most video games, the best way to deal with difficult people is to vaporize them with photon torpedoes. In the real world, what you need is not high-tech virtual weaponry, but patience.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 66
• “The stereotypical pastimes of boys and men in previous generations were pretty good at teaching skills like patience. Thirty years ago, and even more so fifty years ago, it was more common for boys and men to go hunting and fishing together. Boys who go fishing with an experienced fisherman soon learn that a good fisherman has to be able to wait patiently. That sort of patience might serve a young father well. But video games do not teach that kind of patience.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 67
• “Researchers at Yale University recently reported that playing violent video games such as Doom clearly and unambiguously causes young men to have a more violent self-image and to behave more violently” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 67
• “A comprehensive review of the research on video games recently demonstrated that playing violent video games leads directly “too aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, and cardiovascular arousal, and to decreases in helping behavior.” The linkage between the violent game and the boy’s antisocial behavior is unequivocally cause-and-effect, these researchers found; the end result is that boys who play these games are more likely to engage in “serious, real-world types of aggression.” The more carefully researchers control for all the variables, the larger the effect size, suggesting that previous studies “underestimate the true magnitude of observed deleterious effects on behavior, cognition, and affect.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 67
• “Moreover, researchers have found that playing violent video games has a substantially more toxic effect than watching equally violent television programs, probably because when a boy is watching a violent TV program he’s watching someone else commit the violent act, but when he’s playing Doom or Grand Theft Auto or Halo, he’s inflicting the death and destruction himself.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 67
• “These games are gratifying to boys, this study found, not only because the boys have the satisfaction of being the tough guy, but also because they are in charge of the game itself: they can turn it off any time they want to and move on to another game in another universe.26 In real life, you can’t just walk away from the havoc you create. In the world of video games, you can.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 68
• “In my judgment, though, the research clearly indicates that boys who spend many hours each week playing violent video games are at greatly increased risk of disengaging from the real world.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 68
• “Professor Anderson also notes that the controversy now surrounding video games is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding cigarette smoking in the 1960s or lead poisoning in the 1970s. After all, most people who are exposed to cigarette smoke will never get lung cancer. And some people who get lung cancer are not smokers and have never been exposed to cigarette smoke. Likewise (Professor Anderson would argue) not all boys who play video games twenty hours a week will disengage from real life, and not all boys who disengage from real life are video game players.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 68
• “So what rules should you lay down for your son? Professor Anderson has provided some practical guidelines based on the published research.28 He recommends first of all that you either play the game yourself or watch it being played. Then ask yourself these questions: • Does the game involve some characters trying to harm others? • Does this happen frequently, more than once, or twice in thirty minutes? • Is the harm rewarded in any way? • Is the harm portrayed as humorous? • Are nonviolent solutions absent or less “fun” than the violent ones? • Are realistic consequences of violence absent from the game?   If you answer yes to two or more of these questions, then Professor Anderson suggests that you reconsider whether your son should be allowed to play the game.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 69
• “Another consideration is what activities are displaced by playing video games. If your son is neglecting his friendships with non-gamer friends to spend more time playing video games, then he’s spending too much time playing video games. If he refuses to sit down to dinner with the family because he’s in the middle of a video game, then he needs some help from you getting his priorities straight.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 69
• “And what about teenage boys having relationships with girls? Surprisingly, especially to those of us over thirty, many boys today seem to prefer playing video games to being with girls.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 70
• “Boys prefer video games over girls? In the summer and fall of 2006, the New York Times published a series of front-page articles entitled “The New Gender Divide.” One of these described how many young men seem more interested in playing their video games than in being with their girlfriends. The reporter interviewed one young woman at college who had broken off her relationship with a young man, “in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day. ‘He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to fifteen hours a week,’ she said. ‘I said, “Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month. That’s my litmus test now: I won’t date anyone who plays video games. It means they’re choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them.’” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 70
• “Time: No more than forty minutes a day on school days, one hour a day on other days—and that’s only after homework and household chores have been completed.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 72
• “Video games teach these boys that if you manipulate things a certain way, you will get an easy win.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 75
• “In the real world, things are not so easy to control. They can’t rule with a joystick. In the real world, they have to talk to people. They have to work.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 76
• “Laziness. A guy addicted to video games can waste hour after hour after hour without doing anything productive. Playing games is easy. Studying is hard. Taking care of daily chores is hard. Working on a real job is hard.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 76
• “We parents are to blame for some of this because it started out as a way to entertain our kids. We justified it by saying they were developing their hand/eye coordination. They were home, we knew what they were doing, they were out of our hair and not causing trouble. Now they are in their twenties and we are scratching our heads wondering, “What’s their problem?” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 76′
• “Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting,” Louv reminds us.34 The end result of childhood with more time spent in front of computer screens than outdoors is what Louv calls “cultural autism. The symptoms? Tunneled senses, and feelings of isolation and containment . . . [and] a wired, know-it-all state of mind. That which cannot be Googled does not count.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 30
• “Boys who have been deprived of time outdoors, interacting with the real world rather than with computers, sometimes have trouble grasping concepts that seem simple to us. Louv quotes Frank Wilson, professor of neurology at Stanford, who says that parents have been deceived about the value of computer-based experience for their children. Dr. Wilson says that medical school instructors are having more difficulty teaching medical students how the heart works as a pump because these students have so little real-world experience. They’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through [computers]. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior—but now we know that something’s missing.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 30
• “Boys who play lots of video games are no less likely to read for fun than boys who don’t play lots of video games.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 38
• “Video games have displaced a major activity in the lives of teenage boys, but that activity isn’t reading; it’s playing outdoors. In 1980, many boys spent lots of time playing outdoors. Today, those boys are more likely to spend that time indoors with the GameCube or the PlayStation, or the Xbox. That may be one reason why boys today are four times more likely to be obese compared with boys a generation ago.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 38
• “Remember that the average teenage boy today spends more than thirteen hours a week playing video games, compared with five hours per week for the average teenage girl.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 58
• “If time spent on video games is crowding out time spent with friends or time spent on homework, then clearly too much time is being spent on video games.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 58
• “I suspect that a boy born today with the DNA of General Patton or Howard Hughes would more likely become a video game addict. He might have a job, but there’s a real risk that his drive and his energy would be directed into the video games rather than into his career.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 59
• “The virtual world is fast-moving, interactive, collaborative, and fun. The real world of homework and textbooks can’t compete—not, at least, for the boy who is motivated by the will to power.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 60
• “The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation also has announced that it is spending fifty million dollars to support “the emerging field of digital media and learning,”9 specifically with regard to the potential of using video games in the classroom.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 61
• “In 2008, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her intention to help create an action-packed video game to teach civics to middle school students. She explained that her grandchildren have taught her that technology is the best way to inspire children to learn. With all due respect to Justice O’Connor, for whom I have great admiration, I don’t agree that technology is “the best way to inspire kids to learn.”10 I believe that kids are more effectively motivated by interacting with the real world, or by team competition, or by some of the other approaches we discussed” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 61
• “Then Shaffer makes a subtle shift. Most of us don’t live on rural farms anymore, he observes. So what would education “based on life itself . . . look like in our high-tech, digital world?” His answer is that video games can serve the same function for twenty-first-century kids that working on a farm would have done in previous generations.14 Video games are, he asserts, the best training to make kids smarter and better prepared for the challenges they will face in the twenty-first century.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 62
•  “A series of studies over the past seven years has demonstrated clearly and unambiguously that the more time your child spends playing video games, the less likely he is to do well in school—whether he is in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 63
• “Football coach Greg Sullivan, Mr. Welsh’s colleague, says that he sees fewer and fewer boys playing outside when he drives around northern Virginia. “They are inside playing video games,” he says. “More kids are finding real sports too demanding.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 64
• “I’ve talked with other football coaches who describe, with amazement, teenage boys who think that because they can win at Madden NFL, they, therefore, know something about playing the real-life game of football. “These guys are five-minute wonders,” one coach told me. “They get out on the field, run around for a few minutes, and then they’re done. They have no endurance. They’re in pathetic shape. And they don’t want to do the work that they would have to do, to train the way they would have to train, to get in shape.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 64