Computer games and learning

We come to praise video games not to shoot ‘em up! The Observer (10th January 2010)

Most guides to child development would counsel against encouraging kids to imagine themselves as mass killers, playing out repetitive fantasies of butchery to the exclusion of social activity.
So it is perhaps peculiar that society is generally tolerant of video games that achieve just that.
But not all games, or even a majority, fit that description. And, of course, they are not just played by children. Many require complex problem-solving techniques and place the user in wholly peaceful scenarios where they must exercise moral, diplomatic and commercial judgment.
As the writer Tom Chatfield argues in today's Observer, the sophistication of modern gaming has not had due recognition as a transformative cultural phenomenon.
Games have been well remarked upon as an emerging force in business, rivalling cinema in the entertainment industry and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the technology sector.
The cultural backlash has also been well aired. An opinion poll last week highlighted fears that excessive gaming saps children's speech development. Too much screen time has also been associated with obesity and has fed into wider cultural laments that children don't get out enough.
It is worth remembering in this context that novels were once presumed to corrupt the morals of young ladies and that Elvis Presley's hips were deemed obscene. Civilisation generally survives innovation in entertainment.
The under-recognised aspect of gaming is in the conceptual changes it introduces to the way we get aesthetic thrills. Gamers are the subjects of the action, not passive observers. They also often interact with other players. Within some of the vast online gaming environments, players rehearse different strategies for consensus-building, regulation of competition and restorative justice. At the very least, this gives social scientists mountains of data to play with.
In the past, revolutions in leisure, driven by new technology, have catalysed equivalent upheaval in society. The novel, made possible by mass printing, allowed people to retreat into an interior world of the imagination. That fed the subjective individualism of Enlightenment philosophy. Without rock'n'roll on the radio there would have been no 1960s counterculture.
The virtual gaming experience of today will surely breed some development with similarly powerful consequences. Too many people are having too much fun doing something that their great-grandparents could never begin to comprehend. That, human history teaches, is a recipe for social change on a revolutionary scale.
** See www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/10/video-games-technology to follow comments