Sunday, November 27, 2005 10:29 PM CST
The goods on games:
EIU prof: Video games aren’t all bad for kids, depending on selection, supervision by parents
By NATHANIEL WEST, Staff Writer
CHARLESTON -- A lot of people hate Barney. Really, really hate Barney.
However, Mikki Meadow’s disdain isn’t so much for the purple dinosaur himself, nor for the flock of we-learned-to-act-from-William-Shatner children who pal around with Barney on TV.
Rather, the Eastern Illinois University parenting professor reserves her venom for children’s video/computer games like those featuring the teaching tyrannosaur.
“I don’t know that (educational) video games are that helpful,” said Meadows, assistant chair of EIU’s School of Family and Consumer Science. “I don’t know that Barney will teach them their ABCs. I’d rather they play.”
That’s why she tells students in her parenting classes about the virtues of many traditional video games. Specifically, Meadows believes a lot of these games teach kids to think at a higher level than so-called educational programs, while also facilitating the social interaction vital to a child’s development.
“I’m actually very anti-educational software,” she said. “I don’t think it’s very beneficial for kids.”
Yet her somewhat unorthodox perspective on children and video games includes a big caveat. She firmly holds that games with violence and adult content are not appropriate for some ages, and parents need to keep tabs on the activities of their little gamers.
“We need to know what they’re doing, what they’re playing,” she said.
But neither does she share the opinion of some parenting experts who believe any game without a direct focus on a classroom subject is worthless at best, harmful at worst.
“The kids are going to play video games -- if not at your house, then at a neighbor’s,” Meadows said. “We know they are going to play them, so let’s get them the good quality ones.”
That quality may be determined often if parents imagine a game’s virtual challenges translated into reality. Meadows asks which is better: a child learning his colors for an hour by himself, or a child setting up and moving around a world of plastic people.
And she applies what she teaches in her own home, to her teenage sons Lee, 13, and Alex, 15, and to her husband, Brian.
The Meadows family owns four personal computers (which are clustered together in an easily supervised area), as well as a host of different game consoles dating as far back as the original Nintendo.
On the newer consoles such as the Microsoft Xbox, games like the Halo series are popular in their home.
But Meadows is quick to note that Halo and Halo 2 both carry ratings of “M” for gamers 18 and older. The reason her sons are allowed to play these games, she said, touches on many aspects of her teaching.
For one, the human bloodshed is only moderate, and not caused by the players, who are responsible only for blasting aliens.
According to Meadows, it does make a difference whether the chunks of destroyed beings were once people or monsters. Because she and her husband are aware of the type of carnage in the Halo games, they can make that discernment, she noted.
Secondly, Halo and Halo 2 ask gamers to exercise parts of their brain which manage complicated tasks such as map reading, problem solving, combat strategy, following the scientific method, etc. Hands down, this beats educational games that require only rote memorization, according to Meadows.
“You’re either memorizing your colors, or you’re strategizing (about) what will happen next,” she said. “That’s a higher level of thinking.”
Not that rote memorization is ignored in normal video games. Meadows said she is amazed by her sons’ abilities to recall the detailed steps in completing a mission or objective.
(She adds with dismay, “But they can’t remember to take out the trash.”)
From a psychological standpoint, she said games like Halo can boost young people’s self-esteem as they rise to the challenge when confronted with difficult situations.
“People get nervous about kids and guns and that kind of thing,” said Meadows. “But children (need to) set up games with an enemy that can be conquered. It’s very developmental.
“It gives them a feeling of self-confidence, of control, which children don’t often have -- an idea that they can make things better, they can overcome something that’s frightening to them.”
And the Halo games are rarely played in solitude. The Meadows boys go to Halo parties, where they form teams and play en masse.
This social aspect is perhaps the most important positive trait of video games, Meadows suggested. Her sons also enjoy playing games on their PCs over the Internet with their friends. Meanwhile, their father is likewise an avid gamer and often joins them behind a console.
According to Meadows, research shows increasingly how important playing and social interaction is for children. “And there are a lot worse things they could be doing,” she added.
The Halo games are, however, an exception to Meadows’ usual advice on shying away from “first person shooter” games, which tend to be the most violent and sexually explicit.
In general, she advocates role-playing games, commonly known as RPGs, which seem to dwell more on strategy and solving puzzles and less on blood and guts.
That being said, Meadows acknowledges that some RPGs -- even those rated “T” for teen -- can expose younger players to inappropriate bloodshed, language and sexual scenarios. That’s one of the many reasons she encourages parental involvement with video games.
“We have the responsibility to find out what they’re doing,” she said.
Contact Nathaniel West at nwest@jg-tc.co or 238-6860.
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Stephen wrote on Jul 17, 2006 8:22 AM: