If you spend more than an hour a day playing video games, that’s 5 percent of your life. Will this time investment do anything good for your brain?
This is a question that my colleagues and I at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been studying for the past two decades. We want to know whether playing video games can increase cognitive skills: In other words, can game playing make you smarter? We have performed experiments, conducted meta-analyses of research literature and even produced a couple of books: Computer Games for Learning and Handbook of Game-Based Learning.
The results have been surprising — with some bad news, good news, even better news, and some prospects for the future based on rigorous scientific research.
