This week's key reading: A Significant Cognitive Artifact of Contemporary Youth Culture
Authors: Henderson, L. http://www.digra.org/dl/db/06276.11341.pdf
Relevance to field: While not specific to adults (as seems to be the case from almost all research in this are), this article documents profound advantages to the use of video games on children, using their cognitive properties to enhance their learning skills
What is known about the field: It is made known that video games are generally looked down on as useful educational tools early in the paper, and seeks to disprove this by using a real commercially released game, Final Fantasy IX. The author took five students, each of differing "teacher-rated" ability, and observed and interviewed them as they played through the quest. To her surprise, the author found that many of the cognitive learning skills that were known to result from playing video games were put in play by all the students, regardless of academic ability. It makes known that it isn't just specific educational games fostering these abilities, but also those already on the market
What's missing: Admittedly, testing 5 students is a fairly small observation pool to draw many conclusive results from. It is also curious that of these 5, only 1 is female (resulting in skewed data). This seems to ignore the differences between girls and boys in play, as well as not having sufficient female representation to present conclusive results for her female student "Eyore". She also puts forward at the end that similar tests should be run on multiple age groups.
Comments: A lot of research has been carried out on theoretical games or on small demos. The author has instead chosen a commercially available and successful title as the basis for her research. This instantly gives her fair more relevance to study of serious games and the thought processes they evoke.
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