In The Big Inning...

Ok, well, they're not good for you in the general sense, but they are good for your coordination. Sam and I recently bought a GameCube, and we've been playing more video games as of late. Now that I'm older, it's interesting to look back on video games and how they've affected me.

I wouldn't say I was a video game addict as a kid, but I definitely enjoyed playing Nintendo and Genesis. I think I was probably about average in terms of time spent playing Nintendo, at least in late elementary school and middle school, and maybe even a bit in high school. Then, at some point, I discovered real human beings, instead of virtual ones, and I pretty much ceased all video game playing until after graduating college. Believe me, at school there were plenty of opportunities to have an all-night Doom-dorkfest, but for the most part, I resisted.

Sam's experiences were quite different. Because she's much more mature than I, it seems that she never really indulged in video games as a kid, and is just now starting to learn how to play them. It's interesting for me to observe her play and have to learn skills and conventions that were just ingrained in me, and that I had never really even though about.

Let me give you a few examples: The first is just basic eye-hand coordination. There's no doubt that video games improve your coordination, and that's readily apparent. It still takes Sam a bit more time to react to things occurring on the screen. Her learning curve is pretty quick, though. However, beyond that, there's timing. For instance, in many video games, players have to time jumps onto moving platforms. For me, this is second nature, but for Sam, she really has to focus on it. Her skills of anticipation just weren't that developed, but it's actually quite entertaining to watch her learn. She does pick it up pretty quickly.

Then, there are the puzzle-type games. A lot of these games (often role-playing games, but a lot of action games are incorporating puzzles nowadays) involve gather hints about something and then tracking down some item. What's amusing to me is that just like film conventions, I've learned video game conventions. Items are under boxes, or in trees, or buried under an oddly-colored patch of dirt. When Sam watches me and I find a "secret" easily, she often wonders how I knew it was there, as if I was some type of video game savant. Sometimes I wonder too - it scares me that these have become second-nature to me, but it's also pretty amusing. I think these will take longer for her to learn, but it's fun to watch.

The final concept that seems to be important to have learned about video games is patience. I'm pretty anal-retentive when it comes to finishing games - I want to complete every single task and beat every single level before I stop playing. This usually requires a ton of patience. As a kid, I spent countless days repeating the same levels over and over again, trying to beat some seemingly impossible task. I'd keep trying, day and night, leaving the machine on pause if I got somewhere that I likely couldn't reach again easily. I'm sure this led to the premature demise of my NES, and some higher than usual power bills. At any rate, Sam sees me play these games and make progress more quickly than her, and thinks that's just how it's supposed to be. She never went through the days or weeks of repetition before finally getting to the next level. For some games in which you had to start at the beginning every time you played, I could do the first couple of levels in my sleep because I had beaten them so many times, in order to access the later levels. It's (somewhat sadistically) entertaining to see Sam struggle with certain levels and expect to beat them after just ten or twenty attempts. But oh, the satisfaction she receives when she finally does!

Unintentionally, I think I just made a pretty compelling case of why video games (in moderation, of course) are actually good for kids. They increase eye-hand coordination. They teach you about reasoning and deduction. They reward patience and determination. As for whether video games are good for 26-year-old women, well that remains to be seen.