A study published in Nature received a lot of coverage this week after scientists found that there was no discernable benefit from playing brain-training games. The Times' headline, 'Brain training games are not worth the money', echoed a New Scientist article which said 'Brain-training software may be a waste of time'.Adrian Owen of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK carried out the study, the largest-ever investigation into brain-training software. 11,430 adults recruited via the BBC TV programme Bang Goes the Theory agreed to do mental workouts for ten minutes a day, three times a week for six weeks. They were randomly assigned to three groups, two of which involved playing computer games designed to train various mental skills, and the other in which people carried out web-browsing tasks.
Study participants did get better at the assigned tasks after practising them, Dr Owen agreed. But, he told The Times, 'the scientific evidence that these games work is really rather lacking'. The experiment didn't find evidence that brain-training games led to cognitive gains that were any greater than the general web-browsing activity.
It's obviously not news that we get better at tasks involving matching, memorising and calculating if we practise them. But the big question is how much of what we might learn can be generalised to other situations. If computer games offer potential cognitive benefits, are any of those skills transferable to 'real life', or are they restricted to helping you do better the next time you play the same level of the same game?
Dr Owen didn't see any evidence of this skills transfer in his study. But there is evidence that it happens in some situations. In researching the chapter of my book Can computer games change the way you think? I interviewed Lata Aiman, a psychologist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. She told me 'I think gamers do gain cognitive skills that make them more successful in real life tasks, based on my research so far'. Her evidence was from tests she had carried out on non-expert game-players, using the action adventure game Banjo Kazooie. Those who played for six hours were able to perform a complex multi-tasking test better than those who had played for only one hour. She saw the same gain for six-hour gamers when she tested their reaction times.
Experiments at the University of Rochester, New York, also found improved multi-tasking skills among people who played the action game Medal of Honour. On the other hand, Daphne Bavelier and Shawn Green found the single-task game Tetris conferred no such benefits to people's abilities to juggle multiple activities.
Other research has found skills apparently gained or sharpened by game-play. Children who regularly played computer games were better at mentally rotating 3-D objects at the ages of 10, 12 and 15 according to a 1987 study. People who played The Empire Strikes Back, a game involving manouevring through tight spaces, were better at mental paper-folding tasks, a 1994 study found.
But there may not be enough evidence yet to draw conclusions about what kind of games are effective in enhancing skills. You'd expect a game similar to a real-life task would be the most effective - and yet one famous study sponsored by NASA in 1992 found that a basic line-drawn game outclassed a sophisticated flight simulator in tests to improve pilots' performance.
Also ripe for further exploration is the question of whether carrying out targeted exercises really increases skills in those particular areas. Can you 'spot exercise' your reasoning, memory, planning or visuospatial abilities? The Nature study indicates the answer is no: people played a memory game in which they had to find a match for a briefly overturned card - but then showed no skill gains in a similar test that used stars concealed in boxes. Even Nintendo's best-selling Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training series makes no claims for specific cognitive gains. 'It is like a workout for the brain,' said a spokesman,'and the challenges in the game can help stimulate the player's brain.'
The tasks involved in the Nature study, and in most brain-training software from Dr Kawashima to products like MindFit, endorsed by neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, are currently pretty basic. Perhaps they are just too simple to have any impact on real-life situations - like becoming incredibly skilled at recognising letters of the alphabet, without ever learning to read whole words.
The games that have seen the most reported cognitive benefits tend to be those which - even if they are not graphically realistic - involve a greater challenge than just matching a card or doing a sum. Although we might not yet know exactly what skills we're gaining, or how, it might be better to sit down to a fun session of Banjo Kazooie than to steel yourself for a daily dose of brain training.
Word Challenge is both as simple and as devious as Scrabble. You have to find words of 3 or more letters from a mix
ed-up 6-letter word. When you solve the full anagram it unlocks a bonus round and then throws the next 6-letter word your way... and all against a timer relentlessly counting down from 2 minutes. Words longer than 3 letters score you a few extra seconds. It sounds straightforward enough, but some of those 6-letter words are unexpected things like nonces. Yes. Also, I definitely haven't worked out whether I get more benefit from solving the main anagram more quickly, or from coming up with more shorter words before going for the bonus. Last week while both my children were off school with flu, I tried to keep the seven-year-old's brain from turning into Pom-Bear-fuelled mush by sitting on the sofa with him to play a few rounds of Word Challenge (that was my excuse, anyway). He really did amazingly well, shouting out words for me to type in, and solving some of the long anagrams while I was still shuffling the letters around with the space bar. He and his sister found it most amusing each time the game finished to see whether we had been rated 'playground bully', 'rock star', 'drill sergeant' or (and we're going up the scale now, I should clarify) 'celebrity chef'. Teacher was our highest rating, and one I have failed to surpass since.
I wonder what kind of brain is naturally disposed to word puzzles like this? Do you get better at them by playing more? Have I really reached the top of my game, or do I need to play smarter by working out better strategies? Is my competitive nature enough to keep me playing even if I repeatedly fail to achieve a higher rating? Am I already seeing the inevitable decline of my faculties so that I will descend through chef and rock star, back to 'hermit' or 'newborn baby'?
All I know is, some seven-year-olds can be surprisingly good at anagrams. My powers, on the other hand, aren't what I think they should be. And obviously they must now be training teachers to 'read' systems like this so as to maximise the return on their effort in the classroom. I expect it makes sense when Ofsted comes around.
Spirograph… toy of my youth. Or in fact, of my youths – I rediscovered my original spirograph recently and gave it to Jonathan (6) and Natalie (4) to play with. It reminded me that you need a surprising level of dexterity to get good results – one slip and the whole pattern’s ruined. Pattern-making has been a big part of one of my current projects: developing content ideas for a new science centre. I worked with the wonderful Casson Mann, museum innovators of the highest order responsible for the Churchill Museum, the Energy gallery and In Future at the Science Museum and the British Galleries at the V&A.
In my research I had been exploring patterns in nature, and how so much of science is the outworking of simple ideas or rules, repeated or tinkered with over many generations, and came across an online spirograph you can play with.
Although slightly mathsy in its realization – and written in Spanish – the application seemed to indicate I should fiddle with the points A, B and C, then click on a few colours. I knew enough to recognize ‘pintar’ – draw, ‘borrar’ – rub out, and I soon had a pattern appearing on the page – a pretty example of how a simple rule, regularly repeated, quickly spits out a complex mesh of lines.
More fiddling revealed that you can change the parameters while the pattern is drawing; change the thickness of the line; have the trace appear as dots, connected dots or as a smooth line, and so on. I felt a slight sense of triumph at getting the thing to work properly. No sudden computer crashes, Java problems or inexplicable slow-downs beset my efforts. But I also felt as though I had worked the thing out for myself through exploration, as many gamers do when tackling a new title.
But is this a game? You can interact with it playfully, certainly, and there is a sense of completion when your line returns to its starting point. Winning doesn’t really seem relevant, because everyone’s efforts would produce some kind of valid result.
If my experience is typical, the game is figuring out how to get the program to work in the first place: it teaches you something about how to learn. Some of these ideas are examined in my book chapter Can Computer Games Change the Way you Learn? A game is based around a set of rules, decided on by the game designer. The player’s role is to discover the rules and see the pattern.
Strangely enough, the idea of underlying rules chimes absolutely with the proposal we are developing for the science centre project. Science seems so hard sometimes – we’re trying to show the visitors that tricky phenomena are often caused by the predictable behaviour of systems. If you know the rule (‘light travels in straight lines’, or ‘hot air takes up more space than cold’) you can see why something happens.
Researcher Constance Steinkuehler has seen evidence that gamers use scientific methods to unpick the rules underlying the games they play – building mental models and testing them in an effort to understand the system. Her work on World of Warcraft showed that 86% of players' conversations weren’t chat or banter – they were about problem-solving in the game.
Without being too dramatic about it, the Spirograph experience was at the edge of my capability – not perhaps in an absolute sense, but certainly in terms of the amount of effort I was prepared to invest in getting it to work. The idea that good games operate at the edge of your level of competence is a notion that was first advanced by James Gee, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Wisconsin, and is developed by Steven Johnson in his book Everything Bad is Good for You.
Physically using a pen to draw a patterns using a ‘real’ spirograph has its charms – or I wouldn’t have been delighted to see my red plastic gadget again after twenty-mumble years. But I have to say the electronic spirograph is superior to its physical counterpart in some key ways. It lets you experiment and learn interactively, changing parameters as you go along. You work out rules about the mathematics of what’s going on as you play, because you’re fiddling with the centres of rotation, not just selecting a nice shape to draw around. Plus, of course, you’ll never accidentally bodge it and ruin your design.
So how can this potential be harnessed – and what contributions can industry, research, practice and policy make to the development of games for learning? I recently addressed these issues in an article for Vision, the magazine of Futurelab, the innovative education and technology charity.
Powerful examples of games being used creatively for learning are becoming ever-more abundant. While writing my book, I interviewed Tim Rylands about his work on boosting children’s literacy using the game Myst. It’s a personal favourite, because of the hours I spent playing the game as a student (I didn’t know at the time that it was enhancing my sesquipedalian predelictions).
Caroline Pelletier is also enthusiastic about the possibilities games offer for learning. At the London Knowledge Lab she's developed MissionMaker, a tool to allow young people to make their own impressive 3D games. She feels it’s crucial to make games in order to develop media literacy: ‘It gives children the resources and skills to enable them to become sophisticated participants in digital culture, as well as consuming it,’ she told me.
Di Levine, Head of Educational Research and Analysis at Becta, the Government's technology agency for schools can see the potential in games. ‘There is certainly a growing body of evidence that some characteristics of games have a role in learning settings,’ she told me. ‘But sometimes elements of a game are more useful than a game as a whole, and some learners' needs are better met than others.’
MIT’s Education Arcade initiative, along with projects such as Newtoon and Savannah by Futurelab, are striving to uncover how learners learn from games and exactly what kinds of things can effectively be taught. While there are already some conclusions, there’s still a long way to go in harnessing games to their full potential.
But the sheer numbers of children using games in everyday life means that educators surely can’t ignore them as a tool. Classroom computer use is ready to go beyond the mere acquisition of skills and start working seriously with the idea that games really can teach.
Newcastle and Glasgow Universities. During the newly-published study, children wore accelerometers to measure every time they got puffed out. Researchers compared these figures with the answers the kids' parents had given to the official questionnaire used to gauge the nation's fitness. Et voila! The numbers didn't match at all. While parents claimed the kids did around 2.5 hours of activity a day, in reality their offspring didn't even average 30 minutes.This has interesting implications for the ongoing debate about whether television and computer games are implicated in rising obesity levels in the last twenty years. The link between obesity and a sedentary lifestyle is so often repeated by diet and health experts that it's hard to imagine it could be challenged. Yet, if the government's understanding of our current exercise levels is based on such dodgy self-reported data, how can we be sure that any of their advice actually adds up?
It's currently decreed that children should do an hour's exercise a day to keep flab at bay. If most kids are currently doing half that, shouldn't many more than one in four of them be overweight by now? Are we measuring it all wrongly? Or is there another explanation? One clue may be in the amount of supposedly insignificant 'light exercise' children do while playing - something to which the scientists involved in the accelerometer study drew attention.
But the sense that we have only a tenuous grasp of the link between exercise and weight is backed up by further myth-busting news emerging from the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth this week. Over 200 primary-age boys and girls took part in a four-year study to look at the effects of exercise on their fitness and fatness. After measuring exercise levels, BMI, skin-fold fat and metabolic status, they came to a somewhat unexpected conclusion. Children who exceeded government-recommended levels of physical activity showed a progressive improvement in their metabolic health - their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, for example. But those children showed no change in their BMI or fatness. More exercise did not make the kids thinner.
In any case, the sedentary lifestyle itself may be a myth - much to the annoyance of anti-technology types. We are taking as much (or little) exercise as we ever did, according to research by John Speakman of the University of Aberdeen. He told me recently about his rather surprising findings that we are expending no less energy on physical activity than we did 25 years ago, just spending time doing different things.
And the marvellously straight-talking Australian academic Michael Gard, who I interviewed for my Powering Up book chapter on whether computer games can affect your health, wrote 'an open letter to the anti-fat brigade' to set the record straight on what we know about being overweight - revealing that we actually don't know a heck of a lot. Where computer games are concerned, Gard is quite clear, however: 'TV and computers seem to have nothing to do with how much physical activity children do. In fact, some studies have found that children who watch the most television and play the most computer games are also the most active.'
So we parents don't know how much exercise our own children do. But more importantly, nobody in charge knows either - and yet they'll still make pronouncements about how much physical activity children should be doing. One of the researchers involved in the Plymouth study said: 'There is absolutely no basis for the current 60-minute recommendation'. Perhaps there's less reason than we thought for feeling guilty for under-achieving.
Now, there can't be much wrong with encouraging children in a positive way to do physical activity - it might improve their metabolic status, their sleep, their stamina or their complexion. Who knows (probably no one). But it's tiresome to hear the British Dietetic Assocation, the British Nutrition Foundation and the British Heart Foundation trot out the same warnings about sedentary lifestyles, media use and obesity - because the evidence just isn't there.
At least Alan Maryon-Davis, president of the Faculty of Public Health, freely admitted in a BBC News article that we don't have any idea about levels of children's physical activity. 'Government boffins urgently need to come up with an accurate way of monitoring kids' exercise habits,' he said. What a great idea! And while they're at it, could they also come up with a way to get health experts to stop spouting nonsense and stick to the facts.
For the first time, the Beijing Games' welcome celebrations have included a Digital Games tournament featuring games both sport-themed (FIFA, NBA) and not (Counter Strike, Defense of the Ancients). Teams from South Korea to Kazakhstan, Iraq to Israel won national recognition in heats during July and will go on to compete in finals in China.
Is this a sign of things to come? Academics like physiologist Alasdair Thin of Heriot Watt University are certainly proving that gaming can exercise much more than just your thumbs. His research shows that active gaming can burn as many calories as 'proper' exercise. The Hula Hoop game on Wii Fit, for example, borders on high-intensity activity, according to some of his latest figures.
Alasdair's excellent blog on what he calls 'ExerGames' is updated all the time; not quite sure how he does it. In our interview for my article he admitted there's more potential to reach a high level of fitness through conventional sports. But, he said, 'if you aim to change behaviour and promote a more physically active lifestyle then something fun and enjoyable like an active computer game has tremendous potential.' That's got to be true for those of us who wouldn't list sports among their hobbies (actually, I am not sure I would list hobbies among my hobbies) but might challenge the kids to a game of Wii Tennis or a scuffle about with a football in the garden.
If tennis is too tame, how about extreme sports? Tim Dudgeon, a former Olympic snowboarder, shared the secrets of his FT3 Sports Simulator for my article. The FT3 is basically a super-wide treadmill on which you can ride any kind of snowboard, wakeboard or skateboard to which wheeled trucks have been added. Tim explained where the games come in: 'To add novelty, we fitted a wireless tracking device and a big screen, and developed software based on computer game technology to give people feedback.' Apparently it encourages you to compete - and stay on the machine until you're dripping - but also fools your brain into believing that you're really sliding headlong down snow-covered slopes. For the more adventurous among us, maybe that's the future of active gaming.
This evening’s Front Row on Radio 4 included a textbook example of computer game snobbery. Presenter Kirsty Lang and music critic Roderick Swanson were discussing the influence of Chopin’s music on popular culture, starting off with ‘The Minute Waltz’, heard weekly as the theme music to the quiz show ‘Just a Minute’.
They cantered through examples of popular songs that draw on the music of Chopin, including ‘Always Chasing Rainbows’ sung by Judy Garland, and ‘Could it be Magic’ by Barry Manilow, chewing over whether these were shameless rip-offs or fond tributes to piano favourites learned in childhood. To the strains of the funeral march, they pondered Chopin’s romantic propensity to obsess about death, dream about skeletons and write music accordingly.
When it came to talking about a computer game that used Chopin in its soundtrack, the tone changed. I quote:
Lang: ‘I think the most unlikely place that we’ve found Chopin is in this computer game (stifled giggle). Have a listen.’
(Chopin piano prelude with voiceover) This is my final journey…I can never return to my world again. (Soundtrack changes to arcade-type music) Eliminate them all..this doesn’t look good. (Return to Chopin) Death is a reality that is far too real.
Lang: ‘Well, that is a clip from Japanese game Eternal Sonata in which all the characters are named after …musical terms! (voice choked with laughter). Are you tempted?’ (chortling, snorting)
Swanson: ‘Er…no!’
Lang: ‘I read the mission statement from the director of this video game and he said that most people have heard Chopin’s music but a lot of them couldn’t put a name to it, so this computer game’s going to change all that (more laughter). Well to complete our dumbing down of Chopin, we’ve got a Chopin vodka.’ (Glugging sounds, etc.)
A small amount of research reveals that the seven Chopin compositions featured in the game are recorded by Stanislav Bunin, who won first prize in the 11th International Frédéric Chopin Competition in 1985. Bunin is also a council member of the International Frédéric Chopin Foundation in
I’ve never played Eternal Sonata, and it might turn out to be a naïve attempt at combining two genres. But what was a bit irksome was that neither Kirsty or Rodders had any intention of engaging with it as the serious endeavour it was attempting to be, and that seemed a bit unhip. If it had been labelled ‘contemporary sculpture’ or ‘arthouse film’, they would have been more careful with their derisory snorts of middle class laughter.
Into the fray waded my new book: Powering Up: are computer games changing our lives? which seeks to sift the latest scientific research and present what we really know about how games are changing how we think and learn, our health and identity, our propensity for addiction, violence and brainwashing, and our future. The book goes beyond the usual headlines and finds much more that’s positive than negative about games’ potential.
Many thanks to all who came along to the book's launch event last week at the Science Museum's Dana Centre.
See more pics here.As well as a sparkling audience, the event benefited from expert speakers introducing five projects at the cutting edge of game-think. In the ground floor bar area, Mary Matthews from Blitz Games was showing the bloody imagery and game-inspired action that’s sharpening the skills of medics in triage situations. Simon Lucas and Jonathan Gibbon from Spiral Productions demonstrated their unique blend of game and graphics that get messages across in museums. Upstairs, artist Tristam Sparks was explaining the thinking behind xBlocks – a computer game that jumps off the screen and into 3-D. And if you went upstairs again (we did kind of take over the building) you’d find Caroline Pelletier giving classes in MissionMaker, a game-authoring package she’s developed for secondary school children, while next door, Gianna Cassidy of Glasgow Caledonian University sought to demonstrate that music can make your in-game driving much more accurate – as long as you choose it yourself.
Questions from the audience included whether, with all the virtual options now available, ‘real’ games are obsolete; the idea that gamers as well as games have gone mainstream and are finally normalising gaming (see Ren Reynolds’ Terra Nova blog entry here) and a perceptive question about whether it’s really possible that games intended for training are marvellously effective while violent games magically leave our psyches untouched (I’ll return to this in a later post).
Thanks to all who made it a great evening: the speakers, the organisers and everyone who came along. And the helpful person who sold me a dress to wear one hour before I left for London.
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