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What Do Kids, Video Games and Reading Skills Have in Common?

blog top 03-14 - Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a dozen times: video games are bad for your children! They make kids more violent and generally numb their brains with all that glaze-eyed button-mashing, right?

Well … I’ve mentioned before that the truth isn’t quite so simple. What if I were to tell you that some researchers from Switzerland recently proclaimed that video games can help gamers improve their reading skills? Sounds almost counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But it’s apparently true.   

According to a study reported in Neuroscience, gaming can actually help kids develop a number of specific skills that people don’t usually equate with, or think about in relation to, reading. Reading requires a number of essential mechanisms such as “knowing how to move our eyes on the page” and using memory to “link words together in a coherent sentence” that can be aided by some game play. And that’s not all.

“Skills, such as vision, the deployment of attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, are known to be improved by action video games,” noted Angela Pasqualotto, one of the authors of the study.

Of course, these scientists didn’t just hand kids a copy of Grand Theft Auto and step back to see what happened. They actually designed a game for their purposes. But it wasn’t some big book of stories, either. They put together an action game peppered with lots of specific time-limited mini-games and then gave it to 150 school kids between the ages of 8 and 12.

After the kids played with the game, the researchers determined that the young participants improved their reading attention span “seven-fold.” They improved reading speed and overall understanding. And the kids’ writing improved, too. On top of that, the study points out that the improvements were long lasting.

OK, so this study doesn’t necessarily mean that your young gamers will automatically be literacy champs after an hour of gameplay, but it does say that picking up a controller doesn’t mean instant harm for them either. The scientists claim to have discovered a long-existing connection between games and improved reading skills. And CNN reported on a BBC survey that mirrored that conviction, and even suggested that mental well-being is a gaming benefit as well.

So, there you have it. Go play a fun game with your kids. And, hey, give ‘em a good book, too. Good things could happen.

Bob Hoose

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

3 Responses

  1. -I really enjoyed this article. Games are a medium as valuable as any other, and their degree of interactivity and encouragement of non-linear problem-solving is something that a lot of other media don’t have. And indeed to complement what you are saying, as for “making kids more violent,” I would cast a critiquing eye on domestic and foreign policies, and some factional religious ideologies demonizing various demographics as being less than human or not being fully made in the image of God, before I would blame games or Hollywood.