Heidi,

There are lots of computer games and video games going on, pretty much all the time, at Fairhaven. Movies happen every now and then, as well.

The only real constraints on these, as with any activity, are related to the availability of resources like the particular computer or television, and whether the room is reserved for something else.

If a parent has a "hot-button" with regard to an agenda for their children in our school, this is usually it. I find it unfortunate.

I personally think that video games are very good for children, and I have never understood why so many parents think that playing video games doesn't offer the same or more challenge and mental stimulation that playing chess or reading books does.

I think perhaps it is because 1) children like them so much that it appears to adults that it must be addictive and therefore bad for them, and 2) because most adults are unfamiliar with them.

On one hand, the fact that children like them so much is because they offer such a variety of mental challenge and stimulation you simply don't see in any other activity, with very little risk. In the physical world, in order to encounter the variety and level of challenge found in many video games, you have to subject yourself to enormous personal risk and danger.

On the challenges and rewards of gaming, I quote an interview of Dr. David Deutsch by Sarah Fitz-Claridge:

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Let's compare video games with other great educational things in the world. Books and television have great complexity and diversity - they give you access to almost every aspect of human culture and knowledge - but they are not interactive. On the other hand, something like playing the piano is also complex, and interactive, but it requires an enormous initial investment (months or years of practice or training) with the associated huge risk of misplacing that investment. One cannot make many such investments in one's life. I should say, of course, that the most educational thing in the world is conversation. That does have the property that it is complex, interactive, and ought to have a low cost, although often between children and adults it has a high cost and high risk for the children, but it should not and need not.

Apart from conversation, all the complex interactive things require a huge initial investment, except video games, and I think video games are a breakthrough in human culture for that reason. They are not some transient, fringe aspect of culture; they are destined to be an important means of human learning for the rest of history, because of this interactive element. Why is being interactive so important? Because interacting with a complex entity is what life and thinking and creativity and art and science are all about.

In The Face magazine (December 1992, page 46), Dr Margaret Shotton, author of Computer Addiction?, is quoted as saying, "Apart from increasing your manual dexterity and hand to eye coordination, video games speed up your neural pathways." This, the writer says, allows knowledge to travel around quicker, thus speeding up judgments and decisions, possibly leading to a higher IQ. Margaret Shotton, like David Deutsch, believes that parents who disapprove of their children playing computer games are mistaken, but David Deutsch is skeptical about the neural pathways theory. Perhaps surprisingly, he doubts that computer games improve hand-eye coordination.

David Deutsch: Life improves one's hand-eye coordination. One spends one's whole life picking things up and doing fine finger movements, which one does in video games as well, but video games, if they are well designed, tend to use skills which people already have. If they go too far beyond what people already have, they tend to be less attractive as video games. They are then more like playing the piano, which requires a new kind of physical skill. Video games do not really impart a new kind of physical skill; what they impart is the fundamental mental skill, of understanding a complex and autonomous world.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge : Many parents would agree that conversation is very valuable, and it is because their children spend so many hours playing computer games instead of conversing, that they worry.

D: I do not accept that children play video games instead of conversation. They love both, and there is plenty of time in a day for many hours of video games and many hours of conversation - especially since, in my experience, it is perfectly possible to play video games and talk at the same time. Most parents do not talk enough to their children. If they want to talk to their children, let them do so. If the conversation is interesting enough, the children will talk. They will either talk during the video game or, if it is very interesting, they may postpone the video game. Forcing them to give up the video game in order to talk will make the resulting conversation worthless.

S: Could the number of hours children spend playing computer games be harmful?

D: Let me answer that question in two ways. First, how do you know what the appropriate number of hours is? Nobody can know that. If your children were playing chess for several hours a day, you would boast about what geniuses they are. There is no intrinsic difference between chess and a video game, or indeed, even between things like playing the piano and playing video games, except that playing the piano has this enormous initial cost. They are similar kinds of activity. One of them is culturally sanctioned and the other is still culturally stigmatised, but for no good reason. I spent a lot of time playing with Lego when I was a child. For some reason, it never occurred to my parents that because I spent hours and hours with Lego, this was bad for me. If it had occurred to them, they could have done a lot of harm. I know now, for myself, that the thing which makes me play video games today is identical to the thing which made me play with Lego then - which is, by the way, the very same thing that makes me do science - that is, the impulse to understand things.

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(Joe Jackson Continues...)

Additionally, our observation at Fairhaven (which is echoed at almost all other Sudbury schools) is that video game playing is an intensely social activity in which medium and large groups of children (usually boys 6-14 years old) noisily play with much constant comment.

And finally, researchers have been trying to establish links with gaming and aggression, most notably recently, for years. Having played them extensively, I am certain that such a short-term link exists, that when you play a violent game you feel a localized heightened aggression. Just as I do after seeing a movie like Raging Bull, reading a book like Sea Wolf, watching a stage production of Romeo and Juliet.

For centuries we humans have realized that a fantasy world that includes pretend violence and role-playing is a healthy release of our instinctive aggression. For the life of me, I don't understand why the human race would suddenly start listening to a bunch of 21-year-old students at the University of Iowa doing research on the internet and saying that the link exists but inexplicably concluding that IT TURNS PEOPLE INTO STONE COLD KILLERS.

While I believe the localized effect is there, the attempt to longitudinally prove that video games create violent people is such BAD science in terms of attaching their prejudices to a set of numbers, well, OK, I'm done. It's Saturday. Relax, Joe.

Sorry to rant on, but this is an issue very near and dear to my heart.

-Joe