Are Electronic Games Making Us Stupid?

Posted: 9 April 2012

What is the obsession with electronic games? Last week a business woman was standing in front of me on the train physically shaking her mobile phone to ‘mix’ some sort of potion. Just yesterday the man sitting next to me was hitting his screen like a mental patient in a quest to break open coloured balls and release stars. Why are seemingly normal people filling their time with activities that would serve to occupy the intellectual capacity of a four year old?

Now granted, not all electronic games are about mixing potions or breaking open coloured balls. In the most popular mobile phone game Angry Birds – downloaded 50 million times – players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playing field. There are games where one can grow and harvest crops, save the world from alien invasion or match up coloured tiles. One friend told me she caught two students in her classroom milking a cow on their iPhones! Read the rest of this entry »