by Tinker » Sat May 21, 2011 8:14 pm
The benefit of video-games is cognitive skills that they would not otherwise have.
Look at the video-game Portal whose ad-campaign is, "Think with Portals", this provides the players of the game with a way to challenge their assumptions on how they model 3 dimensional space. I have played with it, not in terms of going through the actual game, but in terms of creating infinite loops and other such things and then falling through them and trying to target things in the room. I could feel the part of my brain that understood this as an action as opposed to simply as an idea.
This is what Virtual Reality AKA video games does for people.
It should not be used at the expense of physical activity though. My daughter at 4 plays a lot of video games, but she is a highly active young girl.
The canary didn't die because this mine is dangerous, it died because it's lazy and wasn't raised with a proper work ethic.