More A-Grade gamers

I was in a pub at the weekend and they had an old school games machine that had the likes of PacMan and Space Invaders on it. Naturally I went and had a go, as did my mate that I would never have picked as a gamer, let alone someone that’s in to classic games. The embarrassing thing was that he was bloody awesome at it – way better than me – even though (as he confessed) it had been a long time since he played.

He is, of course, yet another victim of the “I’m too old to play video games” culture that has kept many adults away from a whole host of games consoles for decades. Which brings me to the point of this post –another attempt to get people to think about gaming in a different way.

New findings discussed at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Boston (the home of my favourite beer, Sam Adams) looked at the effect that playing video games has on people. We’ve already heard about the recovery of rehab patients using the Wii, or surgeons improving their hand-eve coordination, but according to psychologist Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University, games are “powerful educational tools and have many effects we might not have expected they could."

MyTake – Surprise, surprise, yet another academic that thinks gaming is a good thing. We have to get over our pre-conceptions about gaming and jump-in. I went to a conference a while back where someone described Facebook as a giant game and I reckon they’re right, the only difference between this and gaming on a console is the negative connotations placed on console gaming by technophobes that refuse to embrace new technology (and probably think that the internet is a bad thing). Jump-in, experience it because in the next two years gaming, social networking, TV, entertainment is all going to be the same thing.