Would you assume the same thing about playing a musical instrument or playing a sport? What is playing video games except practicing cognitive performance? It works spatial reasoning, logic, dexterity, problem solving, reactions, etc.

Yes, but for different reasons. Playing an instrument or sport means you're more likely to have a non-poor family with parents who have time to spend with you.

I think having parents who can help you develop a growth mindset is awesome and something generally reserved for upper/middle class parents. The part where your mind grows comes from practicing. So practicing video games is the same as practicing sports or instruments, the games encourage you to keep pushing yourself in the same way that a coach or teacher would.

That sounds like wishful thinking in a Dunning Kruger kind of way by somebody who never played physical sports on a competitive level.

Video games are a non-social controlled environment with obvious and predictable goals, similar to gambling. Gambling encourages a person to keep pushing themselves for a positive outcome but that alone does indicate any form of personal advancement.

Sports and music require development of skills, often with coaching by a human, and requiring long periods of independent practice without any kind of immediate feedback. In sports it takes years of investment to get good (less than excellent). If a given video game took years of investment to complete the current level almost nobody would play that game.

The goals are pretty obvious in many sports. Heard of goal posts before?

An athlete doesn’t go from couch potato to immediately scoring touchdowns just after a few attempts at trial and error. You can do that in video games because everything is synthetic and linear.

In the real world you actually have to overcome real pain (both mental and physical) to achieve success. Video games are incapable of teaching that on absolutely any level.

You should sign up for a fighting game tournament some time and see how far a few attempts gets you

> If a given video game took years of investment to complete the current level almost nobody would play that game.

How do you explain League of Legends or even E-sports in general? Games are as competitive as they are endeavors of creativity.

The same way I would explain drugs and gambling. Gambling can be very competitive. That appeals to somebody and glamorizing it can generate a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean it’s beneficial in absolutely any way.

Unless you're thinking of gacha games, I don't see the similarity. In general, video games have defined victory conditions and rewards. Gambling, outside of certain card games, doesn't.

> Video games are a non-social controlled environment

Lots of video games are social. Some are not. The amount the environment is controlled can also varry.

> Gambling encourages a person to keep pushing themselves for a positive outcome but that alone does indicate any form of personal advancement.

So like literally everything. Seriously, can you name an external stimuli that this doesn't fit? Is work gambling? School? Yoga class?

> In sports it takes years of investment to get good (less than excellent). If a given video game took years of investment to complete the current level almost nobody would play that game.

I can be shit at soccer, and still have fun with friends. I can be shit at video games and still have fun. I can spend years practising and still be nowhere close to olympic level. Similarly, i can spend years on video games and be nowhere near the top of competitive e-sports.

What's the difference exactly?

> What's the difference exactly?

The difference is third party contribution. If you are playing games purely for personal enjoyment that’s great. If you consider it a sport you are probably someone else’s product with little or nothing but lost time to show for it. This has long since been explained in Nicomachean Ethics and Utilitarianism. What matters is not the carrot someone can dangle in your face but your ability to tell the difference.

Do you think high level (real) sports are different? That NHL players do it purely for the love of the game, with no corporate interests meddling?

Like i said, what is the difference?

could be kids who have access to a console and have several hours a day free might be in a different socioeconomic environment?

but with cheap phone games, maybe not. hmmm...

I’m inclined to disagree based on antithetical first hand experiences. In fact the only console we ever had growing up, my father smashed in front of us after a year because all he gave a shit about was our grades, and a few classes started slipping so he blamed the box.

Also, “associated” is different from “causality”, right?

I had a similar upbringing. Video games and TV were blamed for bringing down our grades, and were extremely restricted. We never had a console. Dad would come home and put his hand on the TV to see if it was warm, and ground us if it was. I was allowed to spend time on the computer if I was writing BASIC or playing something "educational" (like Carmen SanDiego, or Oregon Trail). The occasional Sierra game slipped in. The first real game machine I was allowed was a Game Boy, when I was 12.

For better or worse, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have become a coder if I'd had access to lots of games in elementary school.

It's funny how different circumstances shape people so differently. I had access to a lot of video games and I decided I wanted to make them as a kid and that started my programming experience around 11-12.

If I didn't have video games I probably wouldn't have become a programmer!

Same for me and most of my high school friends. We were all dorks that loved video games and most of us ended up going into technical jobs largely because of video games.

Interesting, isn't it? When I was around 10 I had after school access to a lab full of Mac Classics, which had The Manhole installed, and it was about that age that my two best friends and I started working on our first "games" in HyperCard and screensavers in Perl. They were also both banned from having consoles at home, which was a reason we became friends... other kids would go home but we wanted to stay at school late because it was where we had access to Macs. All three of us ended up adjacent to the game industry at one point or another. I remember going to other kids' houses and being blown away by (and terrible at) NES games. Something like Mario 2 seemed impossible to imagine programming for me at the time. Something like The Manhole, though, or even "Glider" could reveal its hypertalk mechanics. So maybe that had more to do with where I went than trying to do text adventures in BASIC on an IBM PC at home.

> Would you assume the same thing about playing a musical instrument or playing a sport?

Yes, of course. Musical ability is well known to be closely associated with mathematical ability. Musical achievement is not known to be closely associated with mathematical achievement; people tend to do one or the other.

But this already tells us that playing an instrument will predict better cognitive performance for reasons unrelated to the work you do to learn the instrument.

I would not assume that playing a sport predicted better cognitive performance, but I obviously would assume that playing a sport intensively predicts better athleticism -- independent of the effect of practicing sports -- than avoiding sports does.

How is the alternative not?

Anything with a screen has to be treated as having an asterisk *.

Absolutely. Saw a study a few years ago that finds that school music program participation is significantly correlated with parental wealth, which raises all kinds of confounding factors depending on what's actually being measured (e.g. Was the kid 10ms slower because they didn't get a good breakfast? Or mom got home late from her 2nd job and interrupted her family's sleep?)

I dont understand what you're getting at. What are the "reasons to think" that the populations are not equivalent? The study controlled for parental income, sex, age, BMI, IQ.

I doubt those controls are sufficient, individual-level IQ measures are very variant and likely incomplete, so there still could easily be pre-existing differences the controls can't sort out

I'm not seeing your point. Are you saying it is not valid because you doubt if such a study could show anything, or are you saying that you would design the study differently?

The study is what it is, I'm not saying anything about its validity, we were talking about possible interpretations of it.

The point is that we need to be careful not to take this data as implying that games cause better performance, only that it's correlated with it; guelo pointed out the study does control for BMI/IQ/etc, but I think that this is still insufficient to claim any kind of causation there*. We know nothing at all of the counterfactual world where those same kids didn't play games.

* Even if IQ tests were a message from the heavens saying THESE KIDS WERE DESTINED FOR THE EXACT SAME LEVEL OF COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE AT BIRTH we would still know nothing about causality, because there may have been something else in their lives that caused both the game-playing and the better performance.

Studies also show that taking university level maths in preschool is associated with better cognitive performance!

It’s true that correlation isn’t causation but I think, in moderation, games do improve cognitive skills. If it becomes something the kid does all the time, then I think the lack of balance does more harm than good. Moderation is all things.

One thing I remember from childhood is playing console games at houses of friends who owned consoles. They would be masters of the game and I would pick up a controller and from lack of experience feel completely lost and useless at the game and lose interest quickly. There's seems like there would be a self selection where those who can fall into the learned behavior of the game/reward cycle (console or phone easy access) can get lost in it for quite a time barring supervision. The study itself also mentions confounding things like higher percentage of gamers in study being male (so maybe gender plays a larger role than chance), weird memory effects like the video gamers being better for a short time at start of testing but falling off rapidly versus non gamers being able to continue at a higher level. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

There are enough signals in this paper to warrant caution, although the paper has a careful title, as well as abstract. I congratulate authors with that, but it hasn't stopped this crowd from overinterpreting the results.

First, they don't measure general "cognitive performance," they measure something very specific, this one: https://www.cambridgecognition.com/cantab/cognitive-tests/me.... That task is very close to video gaming. I know of another study that shows that FPS gamers have a somewhat better peripheral vision. It makes sense that playing games improves reaction time and control on some tasks.

Second, the difference between gamers and non-gamers on this task is very small: 299ms vs 307ms. That's really far below any interesting effect. Effects in fMRI are not interesting: it is unknown what a larger signal in a certain area means. You cannot draw conclusions from it.

Third, the statistical logic is the classic NHST with all its problems. They even commit the error of drawing conclusions from lack of significance.

Fourth, they don't give specifics, but potential confounds were modelled with some linear modelling. It's highly unlikely that the effects of those external factors are linear, and there aren't many of them. There are however some really large difference between the groups (parental income, sex, and watching video/streaming).

Concluding, there's no reason to suppose the effect must be attributed to video gaming, and certainly not that it is positive for general cognitive performance.