Reference List

May 10, 2015May 12, 2015 / portgas20 / Leave a comment

References:

1. Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature. Psychological Science, 12 (5), 8.

2. Bavalier, D. (2014). The Positive and Negative Effects of Video Games. Retrieved from Raise Smart Kid: http://www.raisesmartkid.com/3-to-6-years-old/4-articles/34-the-good-and-bad-effects-of-video-games

3. BBC News. (2014, December 4). ‘Sexually Violent’ GTA 5 banned from Australian stores. Retrieved from BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30328314

4. Daly, J. (2013, February 14). What Can Urban Planners Learn from SimCity? Retrieved from State Tech Magazine: http://www.statetechmagazine.com/article/2013/02/what-can-urban-planners-learn-simcity

5. Franceschini, S., Gori, S., Ruffino, M., Viola, S., Molteni, M., & Facoetti, A. (2013). Action Video Games Make Dyslexic Children Read Better. Current Biology, 23 (6), 5.

6. Fujisawa, K. K., Kitsukake, N., & Hasegawa, T. (2008). Reciprocity of prosocial behavior in Japanese preschool children. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 9.

7. Gallagher, P. S., & Prestwich, S. (2014). Videogame Design for Cognitive Enhancement through Micro-Puzzle Cognitive Profiling. Retrieved from Advanced Distributed Learning: http://www.adlnet.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/14039-1.pdf

8. Gentile, D. A., Anderson, C. A., Yukawa, S., Ihori, N., Saleem, M., Shibuya, A., et al. (2009, March 29). The Effects of Prosocial Video Games on Prosocial Behaviors: International Evidence From Correlational, Longitudinal, and Experimental Studies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, p. 12.

9. Giannotti, D., Gregorio, P., Di Rocco, G., Vestri, A. R., Semproni, C. P., Pontone, S., et al. (2013, Febraury 27). Play to Become a Surgeon: Impact of Nintendo WII Training on Laparoscopic Skills. PLoS ONE.

10. Granic, I., Lobel, A., & Engels, R. C. (2014). The Benefits of Playing Video Games. American Psychological Association, 69, 13.

11. Hoffman, H. G. (2004, August). Virtual-Reality Therapy. Retrieved from Scientific American, Inc.: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrpain/index_files/SCIAMFin.pdf

12. Kato, P. M., Cole, S. W., Bradlyn, A. S., & Pollock, B. H. (2008). Re-Mission™ Outcomes Study. Pediatrics, 22 (2), 15.

13. Portal 2. (2015). Portal 2. Retrieved from Portal 2: http://www.thinkwithportals.com/about.php

14. Re-Mission. (2015). Re-Mission: Six games to fight cancer. Retrieved from Re-Mission: http://www.re-mission2.org/games/

15. Rock Star Games. (2015, April). Grand Theft Auto Info. Retrieved from Rock Star Games: http://www.rockstargames.com/V/info

16. Shute, V. J., Ventura, M., & Ke, F. (2014, August 23). The power of play: The effects of Portal 2 and Lumosity on cognitive and noncognitive skills. Computers & Education, 10.

17. Sokol, Z. (2013, March 1). The Gamification of Medicine: How Video Games Are Sharpening Surgical Skills. Retrieved from Motherboard: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-video-games-are-sharpening-surgical-skills

18. Touch Surgery. (2015). Touch Surgery. Retrieved from Touch Surgery: http://www.touchsurgery.com/

Comments

May 10, 2015May 10, 2015 / portgas20 / Leave a comment

Comments:

The Negative Effects of Using Mobile Phones

MAY 10, 2015 AT 10:18 AM

Hi, Nistha!

I really enjoyed reading your topic, and some of the links were very useful and interesting as well. I agree with you, especially with your statement about people being distracted from the conversation with a partner. My friend always chatting by her phone, writes to somebody or checks emails and messages. And when I’m telling her something, she is like “What did you said?”, because she just doesn’t pay any attention to what I’m saying. That’s pretty said that mobile phones and other gadgets make people less communicative, be “out of reality” as well as caused driver distraction and lead to road accidents. Thank you for discussion!

Smoking Cigarettes should be made illegal in New Zealand

MAY 10, 2015 AT 10:39 AM

Hello.
This is a very interesting topic for me as I totally agree with the statement that smoking must be prohibited. It very negatively influences human’s health and I am not jealous to those who inhale second-hand cigarette smoke. For example, if somebody smokes in the street and other man, or even child, will have problems with lungs or immune system and will pass through this smoking man? It can lead to very serious disease including lung cancer. As for me, I do not care if somebody is smoking (that more their problem that he/she damages own health condition), but I have really bad lungs and if I inhale the smoke, then I will feel really sick, suffocate and have breathe’s problems. Moreover, I have absolutely the same opinion about parents’ influence on children. That is not too rare thing that “monkey see, monkey do”, which means if parents, one or both of them, are smoking, that’s quite possible to child “to copy them” and start doing the same thing. Prohibit, prohibit, prohibit!
Thanks for the discussion.

Public transport should be free for tertiary students

May 10, 2015 at 10:58 am

Hello, Sam!
I agree with the claim that public transport for tertiary students must be free. I live not too far from the city, but still spend more than $120 per week, which still not as much as many other students spend. And what about exam period? Or when you have plans on weekends? Then you spend much more amount just to go to the city area. That’s really too much for the transport aside from rent and other expenses. Currently, even Red Link having only city route become 50C with AT Hop Card. You provided very good and useful references and understandable numbers. Thank you.

Same-sex marriage should be legal in all Western societies

MAY 10, 2015 AT 11:22 AM

Hello, Savannah!
As the student from the country, where same-sex marriage is still prohibited, I am quite concerned and interested in your topic. As for me, I think that everyone in our world has his own right to love and be married to the person he wants, no matter what gender this person is. This is totally normal to same-sex couples to raise a child in a family, as they sometimes can do this better than heterosexual couples. They will teach a child from the small age that there is nothing wrong with families, which have two mothers or two farther. Moreover, I think same-sex couples can understand each other better, which lead to small divorce numbers. I believe that soon every country will have the law with permission to same-sex marriage and child adoption.
Thank for your topic, that was interesting!

Euthanasia for terminally ill patients should be made legal

May 10, 2015 at 11:48 am

Hello!
I find this topic quite interesting, even if I’m not really keen on such sort of things. I considered your claims for euthanasia very supportive, especially because of given evidence, that was very pleasant to read about Informed Consent Law and ‘Hippocratic Oath’. I’m still not sure on what side I am, but mostly on “for” side. That’s pretty bad and desperate to ask for the euthanasia because your family and close people will be upset, especially if this is chosen by young patient, for example, by a child 7-10 years old with cancer. However, I consider euthanasia as a right choice and not the worst way to end the life if you are in a terribly bad health condition. Anyway, euthanasia should be legal as averyone has his own right to choose what is better for him.
Thank you for your discussion.

Answer to Hayley:

MAY 10, 2015 AT 1:22 PM

Thank you, Hayley!
My brother (16 years) and I really like to play Portal 1&2 together. Actually, after my brother started to play Portal, his college marks improved, even a bit. And yeah, my brother plays Minecraft as well, so I can understand you. 😉
It was taken lot of time to find examples.
Thanks for reading 🙂

Conclusion

May 10, 2015 / portgas20 / Leave a comment

In my blog, I provided some discussion with an appropriate evidence and examples in order to prove that video games do not have only negative impacts, but positive benefits for children as well. Specially designed games are able to improve children’s cognitive abilities, such as critical thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, strategy, creativity, planning, memory, and concentration. Besides, many video games can help children to improve social skills, for example, be more cooperative, develop teamwork and leadership skills, and teach real-world skills. One more important factor for gaming is that video games or simulators can help young future surgeons to develop their surgical skills, for instance, eye-hand coordination, movement precision and enhanced visual attention, which will help them with further studies. In addition, gaming can “treat”. Patients can get off their phobias or PTSD, stress, video games help children with cancer with their treatment and dyslexia kids to improve their reading skills. From my point of view, video games have more positive benefits than negative, especially when parents control the amount of time children spend video gaming. Moreover, I was excited to find so much useful and interesting information, especially about surgeon’s training.

“How violent are you?”

May 10, 2015May 10, 2015 / portgas20 / Leave a comment

Many people believe that video games have negative impacts on children’s mind and behavior more than positive. Evidently, there have been many suggestions that violent games encourage violence and aggressive behavior. A number of people believe that children who play violent video games are more likely to have increased aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and decreased prosocial helping. In many games, for example, series of Grand Theft Auto, players are rewarded for being violent by killing, shooting, stabbing, kicking or making robbery acts. The act of violence is done repeatedly by active participation, repetition and rewarding, which leads to aggressive children’s behavior.

Iowa State University conducted the study across 33 independent tests of the relation between violence in video games and aggression, involving 3,033 participants. The results were positive and significant, showing that violent games can increase aggression in the short-term by increasing aggressive thoughts of players. Another 20 independent tests between violent games and aggressive cognition, with involved 1,495 people, stated that effect again was positive. Violent games increased negative thoughts in males and females, children and adults, demonstrating the link between exposure of violence in games and aggression.

In 2005, the American Psychological Association made a resolution about the reduction of violence in video games oriented to youth because of links between video games and aggression towards women. In 2014, two Australian retail chains removed Grand Theft Auto V from its stores, exactly because the depiction of violence towards women. Their petition stated that this game encourages players to commit sexual violence for entertainment and then murder women to proceed money. Moreover, GTA V allows players to kill, hurt and shoot anyone not just females. Currently, the game carries an 18 rating in the UK and an equivalent R18+ rating in Australia in order to be sold only to adults and do not harm children’s mental health and social behavior.

“To treat or not to treat?”

May 10, 2015May 14, 2015 / portgas20 / Leave a comment

Many people believe that video games do not have any positive impact on health, not only children’s health. Evidently, a number of video games make children being game-addictive, deteriorate eyesight if a child spends too much time playing, lead to obesity and many other.

There are large numbers of video games, which improve hand-eye coordination, help with cancer treatment, help diseased children to read better, reduce stress and help to go through phobias and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and develop surgical skills. The medical field has become increasingly interested in putting video games as medical interventions. Different researchers around the world already begun to study the power of video games as the tool of improving health outcomes.

As discussed above, a number of video games can help with the child cancer treatment. The most successful of the game, which had a significant impact on health-related behaviors, is the game called Re-Mission. This game was specially designed for cancer patients. It allows players to control a nanobot who shoots cancer cells, overcomes bacterial infections and manages common barriers to cancer treatment adherence. There was the randomized research in order to test the effect of this game on adolescents and young adults with cancer. There were 375 teens and young adults with cancer at 34 medical centers in the US, Canada, and Australia, who were involved in three months period of treatment. The participants were assigned to play for at least 1 hour per week during the testing period. Key outcomes included adherence to prescribed chemotherapy and antibiotic medications and cancer knowledge. The results of this study were published in the journal – American Academy of Pediatrics and showed that participants maintained high levels of chemo in the blood, took their prescribed medicine more consistently, acquired cancer-related knowledge and showed fast increase in self-efficacy.

Going further, there was a study conducted by the University of Padua, in which was investigated the evidence that playing action-oriented video games can increase the reading comprehension skills of children with dyslexia. In the experiment, children aged from 7 to 13 were separated into two groups: the first group played nine 80-minute session of the action video game Rayman Raving Rabbids, and the second group played a placid game. After sessions, participants were tested on reading skills. As a result, those who played Rabbids were able to read faster and more accurately after playing and did better on tests measuring attention span. Moreover, the study also found that the children played action video for 12 hours had a larger improvement in reading skills than they would have from an amount of reading during a year. Action games sharpen visual attention and taught children to extract useful information from the environment – these two skills are crucial for reading.

Going further, what about teaching impact? Department of Surgical Sciences “Sapienza” – the University of Rome in Italy – performed the approved study and investigated the influence Nintendo® Wii™ training on laparoscopic skills (a procedure in which a thin tube with a camera is inserted into the abdomen to see organs on a screen) by analyzing performance with the validated simulator (Lap Mentor™, Simbionix™). The department performed randomized study by testing 42 postgraduate students from General, Vascular and Endoscopic Surgery. The participants were separated into 2 distinct groups with 21 people in each group, then were tested on a laparoscopic simulator. Before and after this study all members completed the appropriate tests. As a result, after playing the simulator, students showed improved skills needed for laparoscopic surgery, such as eye-hand coordination, movement precision and enhanced visual attention. This means that video game skills can correlate with laparoscopic surgical skills. Training programs that include video games may be more useful and practical teaching tool in order to help training surgeons.

Another example of video game helping surgeons to learn is the app Touch Surgery, which represents accurate and valuable surgical content and helps improve surgeons’ decision-making and technical skills. Moreover, this game was suggested to patients in order to familiarize them with whatever procedures or surgeries they’re about to go through.

Besides, many video games are created with the purpose to help to reduce stress and get over different phobias and PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder). It can be possible to use virtual-reality therapy to help patients to get relief from pain, overcome their phobias and recover from traumatic syndromes by immersing themselves in computer-generated worlds. For example, the team of Jaume I University in Spain showed that exposure therapy (the virtual-reality treatment involves introducing the phobic person to the feared object or situation a little at a time) is very effective for reducing phobias, for instance, arachnophobia – the fear of spiders. In the subsequent controlled study of 23 patients with arachnophobia, 83% of them reported a significant decrease in their fear of spiders along with decreased obsessive-compulsive behavior. One of the succeeded participants – Miss Muffet – was able to hold a live tarantula for several minutes after the treatment with little anxiety.

“To be a Social Butterfly?”

May 9, 2015 / portgas20 / Leave a comment

Aside from developing cognitive skills, video games can improve social skills as well. There are many games promoting violence, but there is still a bunch of prosocial games, which teach children real-world skills, interactivity, improve cooperation, teamwork and leadership abilities. Many children prefer to play games with a friend, either cooperatively or competitively as a number of games offer different cooperative and multiplayer modes, for example, World of Warcraft has millions of regular players who play online with each other. In such modes, players from around the world are fostered to work together to solve problems or complete tasks, to make decisions about whom to trust, whom to reject, and to be an effective leader of the group in order to defeat enemies or complete a dungeon. As discussed above, the game Portal 2 has the cooperative campaign as well, in which children have to work together in order to complete a test chamber, after which they can go to another chamber.

There are number of studies which prove the fact that many video games have a positive impact through developing social skills. Let’s look through the particular examples.

To begin with there was the study conducted by Iowa State University in 2012 in order to find whether prosocial games could promote helpful behavior in children. They surveyed 727 secondary school children with different ethnicities (Chinese, Indian, Malay and others) in Singapore. All participants listed their three favorite games whether it was prosocial game or violent, the number of hours they spent playing games per week and how often they help other players and hurt or kill others in the game. As a result, participants who played prosocial games, for example, Chibi Robo – an adventure video game, were positively related to prosocial behaviors and traits.

Another study was conducted by the University of Tokyo and investigated the reciprocity of social behavior among 3- and 4-year-old Japanese children during the free-play time. There were two separate samples, in which video game habits and prosocial behaviors were assessed twice with 3-4 months gap between the two assessments. Results indicated that playing socially-orientated games affects children’s social cognition as it changes their attitudes positively than playing violent games. Moreover, the researchers found that participants, who played prosocial games, for example, Lemmings, were more likely to help with solving different problems or to cooperate with other players.

Furthermore, many video games teach children real-world skills. For instance, the game Black Gold involves experiences of strategizing and marketing. There a number of simulation games, which offer real-life scenarios, such as Capitalism, which requires players to fight competition by managing resources effectively, and saving the business from bankruptcy.

“How strong is your brain?”

May 6, 2015May 7, 2015 / portgas20 / 4 Comments

Currently, many parents expect their children to be smart and to devote as much time as possible to improve their knowledge. A number of adults are not expecting kids to spend their leisure time playing video games. However, parents should understand that video games have positive benefits as well as negative. To begin with, let’s consider how video games help children to develop their cognitive abilities.

Video games differ from the other media (books, TV, movies) as they are interactive, they are designed for players to actively participate in the story and change its pace through their actions. Many video games stimulate the brain and develop a wide range of cognitive skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving and logic, decision-making, planning, multitasking, strategic skills, memory, concentration, creativity, and others.

For instance, by playing very popular Angry Birds or Cut the Rope, children train their brain to find creative solutions to different tasks and puzzles. As an example of improving planning skills, Jimmy Daly said that SimCity – the game with building the own city – teaches how to manage limited resources, to find the best way to use them, and to expect unexpected situations. Besides, first-person shooters enable the player to fairly and effectively judge what kind of information they will need further and concentrate on the game environment.

Nowadays there are a lot of popular video games, so let’s look through the well-known Portal 2. This is the first-person perspective puzzle video game developed by Valve Corporation. The game has advantages as the tool for developing different cognitive skills. For example, researchers of Florida State University has conducted a small study by testing 77 undergraduates, who were assigned to play Portal 2 or the popular brain training game – Luminosity – for 8 hours. Before and after gameplay, all participants completed a set of online tests related to problem-solving, spatial skills and persistence. The study results indicated that video game Portal 2 is better at developing cognitive skills than the ‘training tool’ Luminosity.

Portal 2 provides a unique gameplay environment that enhances critical thinking and cognitive flexibility by requiring players to creatively apply given tools to accomplish the level, take particular actions and proper planning. Children have to search problem-solving strategies in order to complete the challenging puzzles.

Moreover, Portal 2 has a unique 3D environment that requires players to navigate through problems, which leads to improving spatial cognition and attention to details. Since this game offers active gameplay environment and involves many challenges that typically require players to continue despite failure and frustration, there is a potential improvement of persistence, speed, and working memory. Furthermore, during the gameplay, Portal players completed more levels and spent less time to complete them than Luminosity’s. Finally, participants, who played Portal 2, improved all three aspects of spatial skill: figural, vista, and environmental while Lumosity players only improved the first two skills.

Introduction

April 30, 2015May 14, 2015 / portgas20 / Leave a comment

Nowadays video games are often considered as a negative activity, especially by parents as they are aware that games teach children to be violent. Many people are playing video games every day, no matter if that’s a child, a student or even an adult, who wants to relax after the hard-working day. In this blog, I will discuss how video games enhance children’s development through its positive benefits such as cognitive impact, help in a social development and the assistance in health and education. As a negative impact, I will consider the violence in video games.