The Cognitive Value of Videogames
- Playing is widespread in the animal kingdom
- Games, whether played in a courtyard or in the house, are a form of education.
- Card games and board games teach strategy, social skills, even math, i.e. interaction and algorithms
- Playing games is practice for higher-order cognitive tasks
- Watching television and films is not as educational. If the program/film is intellectual, it might provide some other form of education (of the literary/historical kind) but not the same skills that one acquires through games.
- Watching is passive (it dumbs you down), playing a game is active (it refines your intelligence).
- In this sense, videogames might be the ideal mix of passive and active: partly related to playing card/board games and partly related to watching shows/films.
- Or it could be the opposite, that the videogame player acquires insufficient amounts of both skills
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