How I Came to Notice and Appreciate Unexpected Benefits of Gaming

Dearest reader, as a follow-up to last month’s blog post, Video Games: My Journey from Hateration to Toleration, I would like to share with you some additional benefits to gaming that I have noticed in my home in recent years.

Firstly, video games saved my son’s binocular vision. My son was 6 and in the fall of Grade 1 when we learned that one of his eyes has much better vision than the other. He was starting to have eye turns (https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/strabismus.html), and his optometrist recommended that we patch his stronger eye over the winter break to help his brain strengthen the neural pathways that connected his left eye to his brain. I had heard an offhand comment on CBC radio about video games being used to treat lazy eyes, and I asked my husband (who knows more about video games than I do) to investigate. Though the study wasn’t exactly applicable to our situation, we adapted the protocol in the spirit of “Well, it can’t hurt!” We put polarized film on one half of an old phone, and over one of my son’s eyes, and then let him play a fast-paced racing game for about an hour a day. The polarized films meant that his eyes had to work together to see the whole screen, and at the next monthly check-up his eyes were working in concert again. We have had no further issues with his lower-vision eye. In fact, his vision in this eye has increased steadily in the past decade.

Breaking the seal on video games in the vision experiment caused me to rethink my position that video games are an unmitigated evil, and I started to observe additional pros related to video games. I noticed my kids collaborating together on video games, and helping each other with reading and spelling in Minecraft. You may be interested to learn, as I was, that Minecraft use has been associated with earlier reading (https://research.avondale.edu.au/entities/publication/08a2df22-d428-4194-9008-f1e95ab1d88b). 

Video games also require frustration tolerance, and a willingness to try again after an initial disappointment. Over the years, my kids have become interested in more complicated games, which require a considerable degree of coordination and data management. My kids research their games, learn about their development, their back stories, and their lore. Video games have also become a place where my male children feel safe, and encouraged to play with fashion and presentation. One of them in particular has discovered a lot of personal joy in this aspect.

The Pandemic really hit us all hard, and I was thankful that my kids had video games to fall back on. It was already a semi-regular thing for them to organize a time with pals to play online. They would get together and do a quest, and chat with each other over headsets as they moved along or competed in the games, even through lockdowns and school and park closures. We moved across the country during the pandemic, and this video game-enabled connection helped my kids maintain friendships that might otherwise have slipped away.

 This was a lifeline for one of my kiddos, who struggled to find his people in our new small-town home. Immediately following our family’s move, I became envious of gamers. I wished my pals and I had an established way to hang out and work on a project together, maybe smash a few aliens as we commiserated about parenting through change, and working through the experiences of moving our family.