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Education Entertainment Games

Father and Son Learn From Games 40

Posted by Zonk from the making-jack-thompson-angry dept.
Via GamePolitics, a Washington Post article that for once paints gaming as an activity that can bring people together. Apparently you can even learn thing from games. From the article: "I'm sure that not all games are good for you, just as not all movies or newspaper articles improve your intellect or morals. Williams, the professor at the University of Illinois, has studied the impact of computer games on social patterns, and he finds results both good and troubling. But games that teach 11-year-olds about inflation or history can't be all evil, and they may be an improvement on Clue or Monopoly for all I know. Besides, kids clearly enjoy them. That surely ought to count for something."
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Father and Son Learn From Games More

Father and Son Learn From Games

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  • My magic sky deity says video games are bad, so this article is obviously wrong.

  • My Son and I, Game to Learn.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chaffar ( 670874 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @05:46PM (#14354185)
    DAMN IT BOY, how many times did I tell you NOT to shoot the zombies with the rifle? Use the g*damn pistol for medium range, and the shotgun for close range, you need every bit of ammo you can save...For chrissakes, AIM FOR THE F*CKING HEAD!!... EQUIP THE ROCKET LAUNCHER NOW, HE'S FROZEN!...GIVE ME THAT CONTROLLER, go play with your sister or something. God you suck d*ck, boy...

  • Of course (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NateE ( 247273 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @05:55PM (#14354228)
    Playing video games is interactive and multiplayer makes it even more fun. TV is passive.

    It should be obvious which is more beneficial.

    • Re:Of course (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Golias ( 176380 )
      Why does everything an 11-year old kid does have to contribute to making him/her a better person?

      When I was 11, my coalition force of Empire and Rebel Alliance action figure units would mount a joint assult on the mighty Green Army Man Lego Fortress for hours on end. Assults became more one-sided after "The Empire Strikes Back" was released, as I was suddenly able to employ tough-looking Snowtroopers, along with three different Han Solos, but then the Green Army Men added some Yellow Japanese Soldiers, who
      • More or less the same here. I also found a large magnifying glass that helped put "blaster" wounds in various stormtroopers. I think at one point the Starship Enterprise joined the fray along with the Falcon. There may have been a Cylon fighter involved as well.
      • For me it was GI Joes v. Transformers, but then I Was about five years too early to really remember those early Star Wars movies [I have a very vague recollection of being absolutely terrified of that big nasty thing in "Return of the Jedi" and yes I realized my geek badge should be revoked because I can't think of the damn things name...in fact I think it got revoked a few weeks back when I referred to the voice over on Civ IV as some dude and not Mr. Spock].
      • indeed. Surviving puperty with all arms and legs as well as eyes, without having to pay child support *already*, with no STDs and not more than one harmfull addiction and maybe even with a degree of somekind should please any parent. Seriously.
        • Of course, such pleasure would surely be mitigated by one's offspring being 20 years old and unable to spell "puberty."

          I keed, I keed.
          • yes, it's really troublesome if the 24 year old makes a typo in a post on a website that's not even in his first language. Let me ask you this: can you participate in discussions in german, with or without typos?

      • Why does everything an 11-year old kid does have to contribute to making him/her a better person?

        Why shouldn't everything anyone ever does contribute to making them a better person? The real problem comes in trying to decide what qualifies, esp. since it's different from person to person.

  • Hah. There are some funny posts already. But really, I play games with my family. My wife games, and my two kids game, who are both below 7 years old. We have a great time gaming together. Mario Party seems to be the all-time favorite, but just today we were doing Project Gotham Racing against each other. It was great!

    I didn't intend to stroke Nintendo with this post, but, frankly, make games that involve multiple people and multiple people will play. The Big N has a lot of those that we fool around with:

  • Fond Memories (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rmjohnso ( 891555 )
    Some of my fondest memories of growing up were playing video games with my dad on our Commodore 64. I remember one game, Falcon Patrol [gb64.com], where you fly a blue Harrier and shoot down red enemy jets (probably Soviets). I could always fly and shoot the bad guys, but I never could land the plane. I would always wait until I was almost out of fuel and ammo and then try to quickly hand the joystick off to my dad for him to land it for me.

    Another game he and I used to play was Threshold [mobygames.com], and he actually got so go
  • "Apparently you can even learn thing from games." Thing? Singular? I think I've learned more than..five things from games! That must make me a terrorist or a communist, I sure hope Junior doesn't do too much learning from that those electronic toys!

  • . . .support for the view that deflation can occur in virtual economies.

    There is absolutely nothing virtual about online economies. Neither is there anything virtual about the social relationships that take place online. Perhaps, by the abusive current definition of the term, we can refer virtual violence or virtual worlds, but the economies and relationships, the social aspects of these games, are decidedly *not* virtual. They are merely mediated over TCP/IP. Is your phone-call to your moms virtual
    • well it isn't if it's good old analog technology all along. But those bits and bytes, I tell ya. Them newfangled computers ain't do no good.
    • also: you might want to keep such comments to yourself. We don't want the world to know that much of the money in the "real" "world" is in the same way virtual as the EVEs, now would we?

      Come to think of it, are pork futures really more real than the rendering of a space station? ;)

    • In some sense they're not "virtual" in that there are definite forces that act upon them, and people can have a real influence on them.

      But in another sense, they are virtual, in that they're artificially created, because the digital nature in which they exist pretty much precludes any true scarcity, which is a real foundation of all the economies the world has seen so far. I guess you can make the argument that this is just a new type of economy, and it'd be an interesting experiment, but that's not what an

      • Very astute.

        I am thinking of economy in its most general sense, a system of differential value. Your last remark is most salient. Looking closely, you will find systems and policies enforcing artificial scarcity throughout the ostensibly free western economies. The diamond market is an outstanding example, but a defacto monopoly is not required to introduce these distortions.

  • Not just computer games... (Score:4, Informative)

    by BigZaphod ( 12942 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @06:54PM (#14354521) Homepage
    There's thousands of board games out there that most people (at least in the US) have never heard of that are far and beyond the standard Monopoly knockoffs. I recommend Settlers of Catan [wikipedia.org] and Carcassonne [wikipedia.org] as good entry points into this world, but there's many to choose from and a large, helpful community to interact with [boardgamegeek.com].
    • Couldn't agree with you more.

      It really irritates me when people tell me they think board games are boring, when all they mean is that they've only ever played monopoly/clue(do)/game of life etc and that they found those boring.
    • ... It's at least fifteen years old, and it was a huge hit in Europe, IIRC. Of course, it started as a niche game for many of us roleplaying geeks, but... Seriously, this game isn't known by each and every geek, er, slashdotter in here?

      Shame on you! (not the parent, he actually has good taste in gaming)
      • All the RPG geeks I know of knew nothing about euro-style board games until I brought Settlers around. The rest of my computer geek friends had no idea, either. And certainly the rest of my non-gamer/non-geek family didn't even know there were other games except for the ones on the shelves at Wal-mart. It really is a sad state of affairs... The only reason I even know about these games myself is my accidental discovery of the board game geeks site online one day...
    • Two more well worth playing: Illuminati! (original edition, although INWO is great too) and Nuclear War, although the latter is a little morbid for kiddies...

  • Funny, this has been Nintendo's exact angle with their TV ads for quite some time now in Japan. There are very, very few "just game" Nintendo ads which focus entirely on game footage. The vast majority of Nintendo's ads now focus on the PEOPLE playing the games.

    Promoting Socialization A large number of Nintendo's ads show people playing together. One ad of memorable note (although I can't remember which game for the life of me) showed a grandfather and grandson being brought together by gaming. Even t

    • Aha, found the "adult educational" game in question: "Motto Nou o Kitaeru, Otona no DS Training".

      Official website: http://touch-ds.jp/mfs/mottotraining/index.html [touch-ds.jp]

      The site includes the Nanako Matsushima commercial which is currently on air in Japan. There are also a number of web-only segments, featuring average people in their mid-50s trying the game for the first time, which show the exact type of questions and drills in the game.

      With Japan's aging society and low birth rate, aiming games at older

      • Did you know that brain training was this year's HUGEST seller on the DS? It was priced pretty low, but it moved a ton of consoles as well. The saddest thing is that Nintendo, despite such a success, will take another five years before they think to themselves "hmm, wonder if the occidentals will like this?", just before they answer themselves "naaaaah."

  • Confirmed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Thursday December 29, 2005 @10:34AM (#14357910) Homepage Journal
    Games - like all other social activities - can do a lot of good things for people. Now I don't talk about single-player doom, just like solitaire isn't so much use. But online games? Check.

    Two data points:
    One, a recent study on MMORPGs (sorry, lost the link) revealed that quite a lot of couples play together. I do that myself and it helps keeping a long-distance relationship happy.

    Two, I run an online game myself (see .sig) - and among the praise I got was a father who played the game together with his children whom he didn't see for years after the divorce and the part plays a good part in helping them bond together again.

    Multiplayer games are social activities and should be seen in that light, with all the good and bad that brings.
    • I couldn't agree with you more. I play Counter Strike Source ALOT, and finally forced my girlfriend to play it. Big mistake, i know, but now we play together all the time. So much so, I got her a different computer to play on. Not only that, but I got my little brother and dad to play from their home, so now we all get some game time together on a server. Good times, good times.

  • My personal experiences (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PIPBoy3000 ( 619296 ) on Thursday December 29, 2005 @11:31AM (#14358180)
    My seven year-old son and I play a fair amount of computer games together. It started with adventure games, that "gateway drug" to the hard stuff like Counterstrike. Some games he can do on his own, like Fable and virtually any FPS (he started on Jedi Outcast, as I recall). Some games spark lots of chatting outside of gaming, such as Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault and discussions of the era and our family history (my step-mother is Japanese-American and was born in the Nevada internment camps). We played Civ 4 and talk about technology and such.

    Gaming in general has led to some funny moments as well. He and his young cousin were pretending to shoot other cars from the back seat, wildly making machine gun noises and pointing in all directions. "No, Sam!" I told him harshly. "Use short, controlled bursts!" He smiled and complied with my suggestions.
    • Thats great you play games with your son. I find the Civ series very interesting, you can learn alot about history by simply playing the game (as i'm sure you know). I also like Alpha Centauri, which instead of covering mainly past technologies it reaches out to some possible future technologies. I think they're very well thought out and also fairly balanced.

      Computer games do make for good ice breakers too (keep in mind, guys, this is not true for women). I love talking about computer games with friends,

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