By Marc Prensky © 2004 Marc Prensky

“The three words that best describe me are ‘athletic,’ ‘smart,’ and ‘GameBoy-addicted.’” – A 10 year old

A great many parents are concerned that electronic games their kids play are teaching kids “negative” messages such as aggression, violence, and isolation from real people. I want to illustrate here how computer and video game playing, can have positive effects on kids. This includes even “addictive” game playing associated with many of these games. The learning from these games is well worth effort kids put in playing them, and kids typically sense this at some level, which is one reason they fight so hard for their games.

One key lesson many of their games is teaching them is value of people working together and helping each other. To illustrate how this occurs, I will use one particular game, Toontown, as an example.

Toontown (www.toontown.com) is Walt Disney Company’s entry into Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) category. For non-initiated, that means a computer game that supports thousands of players online simultaneously, all of whom can see and interact with each other. A key feature of these worlds is that they are “persistent,” meaning that worlds continue to exist and change whether or not you are there, just any other place in real world.

[Note: There are two types of multiplayer online games, both of which have their advantages. One type, “multiplayer” game, lets you interact with a limited group of people, such as those on your team or squad, in a game world that typically exists for only time you are playing. The game America’s Army is a good example of this. The second type, “massively multiplayer” game, lets you interact with everyone you meet in ongoing world. Massively multiplayer games like EverQuest, Asheron’s Call, and Dark Age of Camelot have captured time and imaginations of hundreds of thousands of US teenage and older players. The Korean massively multiplayer game Lineage has over 4 million registered users, often with up to half a million players on-line at once. The players typically meet in relatively thinly-populated areas of very large and often interconnected virtual worlds, so even with these huge numbers, it is not like pushing your way through Times Square on New Year’s Eve.]

Toontown is first massively multiplayer game designed specifically designed for younger kids (pre-teens, I think, though they don’t specifically say.) In addition, many older kids and even adults enjoy playing it. In game you create, name and dress a character, and then you take it out to play in virtual world. Your character is representation (“avatar”) of you playing in world – it is “you” that other players know.

Although if you wanted to you could spend your entire time in Toontown merely running around virtual world, “object” of game is to defeat “Cogs,” members of evil gang that wants to take over town. The Cogs to fight come in many varieties and strengths. To defeat a Cog you employ “gags”– such as squirt bottles or pies in face – that you purchase with jelly bean currency that you earn in a number of ways.

In your early days in Toontown, when you have earned relatively few gags, you typically run around alone, deciding when to confront a low-level Cog you pass in street. (You do this by running into it.) You and Cog then square off and do battle, taking turns throwing gags at each other. If you defeat Cog, he explodes and you are rewarded with points towards additional gags. If Cog defeats you, you “die,” which means you lose all your gags (although, importantly, you do not lose “experience” you attained – i.e. types and levels of gags you are allowed to purchase and use.)

There are a lot of other twists, but that’s essentially game: Earn and buy gags, use them to fight Cogs.

by Marc Prensky (c) 2004 Marc prensky

Research published by University of Rochester neuroscientists C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier has grabbed national attention for suggesting that playing “action” video and computer games has positive effects – enhancing student’s visual selective attention. But that finding is just one small part of a more important message that all parents and educators need to hear: video games are not enemy, but best opportunity we have to engage our kids in real learning.

Any observer knows that attitude of today’s children to video and computer games is very opposite of attitude that most of them have toward school. The amount of time they spend playing computer and video games – estimated at 10,000 hours by time they are twenty-one, often in multi-hour bursts – belies “short attention span” criticism of educators. And while years ago group attracted to video and computer games was almost entirely adolescent boys, it is now increasingly girls and all children of all ages and social groups. One would be hard-pressed today to find a kid in America who doesn’t play computer or video games of one sort or another.

The evidence is quickly mounting that our “Digital Native” children’s brains are changing to accommodate these new technologies with which they spend so much time. Not only are they better at spreading their attention over a wide range of events, as Green and Bavelier report, but they are better at parallel processing, taking in information more quickly (at “twitchspeed”), understanding multimedia, and collaborating over networks.

What attracts and “glues” kids to today’s video and computer games is neither violence, or even surface subject matter, but rather learning games provide. Kids, like and all humans, love to learn when it isn’t forced on them. Modern computer and video games provide learning opportunities every second, or fraction thereof.

On surface, kids learn to do things – to fly airplanes, to drive fast cars, to be theme park operators, war fighters, civilization builders and veterinarians. But on deeper levels they learn infinitely more: to take in information from many sources and make decisions quickly; to deduce a game’s rules from playing rather than by being told; to create strategies for overcoming obstacles; to understand complex systems through experimentation. And, increasingly, they learn to collaborate with others. Many adults are not aware that games have long ago passed out of single-player isolation shell imposed by lack of networking, and have gone back to being social medium they have always been – on a worldwide scale. Massively Multiplayer games such as EverQuest now have hundreds of thousands of people playing simultaneously, collaborating nightly in clans and guilds.