Are videogames good for your kids, or are they playing with fire?

"Go on, stab someone. It'll be fun!" - said a videogame, yesterday. Maybe.

Hello loves! I ran out of time to write something from scratch this week, so instead I offer this: a piece I put together in August 2010 for the marvellous iN Magazine. The brief was to come up with an article aimed at parents, explaining videogame addiction and how parents can deal with it, so it differs quite a lot to the style I use here at the Bucket. Back in August, the World Cup was still big news – which is why Robbie Green keeps popping up – and looking over it again I wish I’d found a less trite and contrived line to to wrap up the article. Nevertheless, it was good fun to write – and iN really is a very lovely magazine – so I hope you enjoy it.

Incidentally, one thing I’ve learnt from reformatting this for the web is that writing online can be a lot more complex than print, because you have to explicitly link to all your sources. Or, in this case, scramble around the net trying to find them all again.

Anyway, here’s the thing!

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You almost have to feel sorry for videogames: they’ve taken the fall for just about everything. In the past decade, they’ve been blamed for rickets, vandalism, obesity, cancer, the destruction of Swedish pot plants and even England’s failure to get anywhere in Euro 2008. Seriously: Robert Green, the goalkeeper whose fists of margarine now live forever in World Cup infamy, bizarrely suggested that other countries performed better because they were too poor to buy Playstations and had to settle for plain old footballs instead. Maybe if we’d paid him less, he would have actually stopped a few more goals during the group stage?

With all this silliness, it’s difficult to know whether games deserve their reputation or not. They’ve long been seen as the enemy of the caring parent, nasty little boxes of tricks that turn your child into a violent maniac, an addicted slave or possibly both. Do games deserve their reputation, and how can parents keep their children safe? The argument over videogame violence is an important and difficult one, with no easy answers. We’ve all heard the horror stories of teenagers supposedly going on the rampage after a bout of Grand Theft Auto, or the American boy who shot his parents after an argument about Halo. However, if you look behind the shock of these headlines, things aren’t always what they seem: the kids in these cases had a history of underlying social problems that confound the issue. The science, too, is unclear: for every research study that says one thing, there’ll be another claiming the exact opposite – so while an experiment from Iowa State University suggests that violent games significantly increase aggression, one from Essex finds that they actually reduce it. Since the folks in white coats can’t seem to make their mind up, what exactly are we parents supposed to do? If your child spends hours daily executing Arabs in Call of Duty, should you stand back and let it happen or try to take the game out of their hands, knowing that they might react aggressively?

The industry’s position on this is clear: kids should not be allowed, under any circumstances, to buy or play adult-rated games. Have a look, for example, at the box for the latest big- money blockbuster – saddles ‘n’ stetsons cowboy simulator, Red Dead Redemption. A phenomenally grizzled outlaw sneers at you over the business end of a shotgun: follow his eyes downwards, and you’re immediately drawn to the huge 18 certificate which glowers like a fat wart from the corner of the box. As with all games, the age rating logo is significantly bigger than those on mere films. Everything about the whole image practically screams, “Parents beware! The man on this cover is NOT a role model for your kids.” He hasn’t even had a shave.

"You just said WHAT about my goatee?"

Back in the eighties, when life was all Pong, Space Invaders and Tetris, nobody would have ever considered that games would be anything other than bright and bleepy playthings for timewasters of all ages. Yet as technology has developed and suddenly the bleeps have become swelling orchestral scores while the vivid colours have morphed into swarthy cowboys, games are starting to become capable of telling more complex stories. Stories that you might not want your kids to hear, but are nonetheless a lot more interesting for us grown-ups. Lazlow Jones, of the infamous Rockstar Games (makers of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption) puts it bluntly: “Our games are not designed for young people. If you’re a parent and buy one of our games for your child you’re a terrible parent. We design games for adults because we’re adults.”

If only it were so simple. Children are pesky creatures, as cunning as a fox and with the annoyance power of ten Go Compare commercials. And they know to strike when you’re at your weakest: when you’re rushing the midweek supermarket run after a gruelling day at work, it’s difficult to object (or even to notice) when the devious devils slip a violent game into the trolley, sandwiched innocently between two DVDs and a jumbo bag of Haribo. So, if your children have managed to get their sneaky hands on the latest violent title, should you be worried? Maybe, but don’t panic. A quarter of all children aged 11-16 identify an eighteen-rated title as being among their favourites, meaning that you’re hardly the only parent in this situation. Most of those kids will grow up to have respectable careers as bank managers, doctors and magazine journalists – only a tiny minority will actually end up showing the violent and antisocial behaviour that games supposedly cause. Indeed, those studies which show that gaming can lead to violence point out that it only occurs when several other risk factors are also present. Social problems, family trouble, depression, low discipline: a child needs to experience several of these in conjunction with violent media before feeling any serious effects. If your children are otherwise happy and successful, they probably won’t suffer any long-lasting consequences from violent games so long as you keep a careful eye on what they’re playing.

The same could arguably be said for addiction, the other – and perhaps more sinister – side of the gaming coin. Addiction is a potentially overused term: a quick trawl of the internet will show you people who claim to be addicted to everything from body piercing and dirt-eating to unicycling and facebook, though sadly not all four at once. If you ever come across a bloke with more studs than skin cells who can balance on a single wheel, leaving one hand free to update his status and the other to stuff his face with delicious soil, let me know: I’d love to see the pictures. Despite all that, it’s perhaps surprising to see that neither videogames nor any of the ‘addictions’ mentioned above are listed in the DSM, the medical manual used across the world to diagnose mental disorders. There are pages on kleptomania and compulsive gambling, but nothing related to gaming. That’s not to say that videogame addiction doesn’t exist: just that there isn’t enough reliable data available yet to make a proper medical decision. Until that happens, it’s up to us as parents to try and decide whether or not our children have a problem. The tricky part is figuring out where to draw the line between harmless play and a troublingly compulsive habit. When your child spends almost a whole day gawping blankly at a screen, it’s natural to be concerned. But it might not be so bad – let’s be honest, most of us have at some point spent six hours straight (maybe more) reading a book, or watching the Hollyoaks omnibus all the way through. Your child might spend the same amount of time with a videogame: that doesn’t mean they’ve got a disorder. They’re just throwing themselves into a new hobby with the sort of energetic gusto that only children can achieve.

So where can we find reliable information on game addiction? Again, not in the newspapers, which are often full of terrifying reports that don’t quite ring true: one story in Lancashire quoted an “expert” as saying that two hours of gaming produces the equivalent high to a line of coke, which might come as a bit of a surprise to those of us who enjoy a spot of Sudoku Master on the DS. With claims like these flying around, it’s a good idea to delve into the science itself and see what’s really going on. First, the bad news: studies of brain chemistry by Dr. Norman Doidge suggest that game playing – violent or not – can indeed be harmful. Whenever you’re enjoying something, your brain releases dopamine: “the fun chemical”. Dopamine doesn’t just make you feel like you’re having a good time, though, it also reinforces the mental pathways involved. In other words, the more time you spend playing games, the more your brain will rewire itself to become better at playing them and even start to expect it. In very young children, whose brains are still developing, this could spell trouble: games, with their fantastical colours and sounds, are highly stimulating and the instant rewards they give the player can lead the brain to expect rapid dopamine hits and become easily restless. However, this can also work the other way: studies by the Mind Research Network suggest that games can improve motor skills and spatial reasoning – turning gamers into expert problem solvers. Meanwhile, communication-based games can develop teamworking abilities and diplomacy. While some studies have found a link between excessive videogame playing and low social skills, a research team from Nottingham Trent University are keen to point out we might have it all the wrong way round. They argue that games are used as a means of escapism by troubled teens: their excessive playing is not the cause, but rather a symptom of their underlying mental problems.

The conclusion, then, is that games – even the violent ones – aren’t necessarily bad for your kids, so long as you take an active approach to parenting. They might even do a little bit of good. In their book Grand Theft Childhood, Drs. Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner explain that the best way to ensure your child’s safety is to get involved and take an interest. Talk to them about the games they like to play and why they find them so much fun, while encouraging them to look critically at how violent the characters actually need to be. Keep the TV and console in a public room so that you can see what they’re playing, and if you’re feeling adventurous, you could join in and play with them – you might even enjoy it, given that the average gamer is thirty-two years old. The key issue is engagement: by talking about games, you’re not only taking an interest in your child’s hobbies but also getting a glimpse of what goes on in their head while they play.

If you don’t like what you see, or your child refuses to talk and you think they might have a problem, don’t react angrily or try to ban games outright: this will just encourage them to retreat further. Try to see if they’re having any other problems, at school or with their friends, which could be leading to this behaviour and encourage them to open up about how they feel. If you think things are really out of hand, if your child can’t walk away from the game and seems to be getting aggressive, if they’re not sleeping or eating properly for days on end, then consider seeking help. Organisations like Broadway Lodge can help you find the right treatment programme to get your child back on track. However, for most kids, this won’t be necessary. So long as you keep games out of really tiny hands while taking an interest in your older children’s gaming, you can make sure that the hobby doesn’t become a habit and find new ways to connect with your children. As with TV and films, games are just another thing that we have to watch closely to make sure that our kids enjoy them in moderation. Otherwise, you risk ending up like England’s slippy-fingered keeper: trying to blame it all on the computer games, instead of keeping your eye on the ball.