Video Games Can Be Helpful to College Students, a Study Concludes
By SCOTT CARLSON
A report released on Sunday suggests that video games are a vital part and positive part of college students' social lives, although games may be keeping them from their studies.
The study on which the report was based was conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which sponsors research to gauge the effect of the Internet on various aspects of everyday life. In the study, the researchers made distinctions between different types of video games -- those played online, those played through a personal computer, and those using a dedicated video-game console, such as a Sony Playstation.
Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, supervised the study. He says the study showed him that for this generation of college students, gaming is not a "displacing technology" -- that is, it is not edging out other activities.
"It's been with them forever, and they have never had to choose between gaming and other things," he says. "It's already been in the mix for them since the kindergarten days. So they have incorporated it in interesting ways. It's not that disruptive, as a result."
The researchers distributed paper surveys to more than 1,100 students at two-year and four-year colleges across the country. The findings are accurate within 3.5 percentage points, the report says.
The study's least surprising finding is that most college students -- 65 percent -- said they were regular video-game players. One in five respondents said that video-games helped them develop, and even improve, friendships. Sixty percent of the students said that video games provided a pastime when friends were not around.
Although video-games figured strongly into the students' social lives, two-thirds of the respondents said that video games were not consuming time that they would otherwise spend socializing with friends or family.
The genders showed differences in the ways that they approached games. Women played computer and Internet games more than men, and both sexes played console games at about the same rate. The researchers guessed that console games were more violent and featured stereotyped gender roles, and that this was less attractive to women.
"The men were telling us that gaming was a standard part of the entertainment and media mix for them, and it was something they looked forward to doing," Mr. Jones says. "Women were telling us that they were doing it to kill time, so it wasn't as prominent an activity in their everyday lives."
The time spent on gaming and socializing does seem to be cutting into classwork. About half of the students said that gaming distracted them from studying. For one in 10, gaming was a procrastination tool. A third of the students said they played games during class.
However, in a somewhat contradictory finding, two-thirds of the students said that video games had no effect on their college performance. The researchers noted that the amount of time the students spent studying closely matched other surveys of college students' study times. Sixty-two percent of the students said they studied about 7 hours a week, and 15 percent said they studied 12 hours a week.
James Paul Gee is a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison whose latest book discusses video games and education. He was not heartened by the figures on students' study habits -- merely an hour a day for a full load of college courses.
But he added that in his research of high-school and middle-school kids, he has had a hard time finding students whose schoolwork is damaged by video games. "From the earliest ages, the game is one among multiple tasks that people do and switch between," he says. "This scenario of the kid loading the game and writing a paper -- this multitasking -- is something they have been trained to do since they were little kids."
Mr. Gee thinks that gaming is a much more integral part of students' social lives than the study suggests. "The report is a good first swipe, but with any new technology, you want know what the niches are," he says, adding that he would like to see how the data breaks up along ethnic lines. "Games are creating cultures that transcend our typical academic view of race and class."
Mr. Jones said that the study was just a start for research on video games -- something that could be used to push the creation of educational games for students. "Those of us working in higher education could do more to show some of the positive sides of gaming," he says. "In some ways, it's unfortunate that we call them games, because that makes it hard for us to take them seriously."
The full text of the report is available on the Pew Internet & American Life Project's Web site. It can be viewed using Adobe Reader, available free.
