1. Video Games Kan Mak U Smartr
Jason C. Allaire
Anne McLaughlin
North Carolina State University
East Coast Game Conference
April 26, 2012
2. Gains Through Gaming Lab
(www.gainsthroughgaming.org)
• Co-Directors
– Jason Allaire, Ph.D.
– Anne McLaughlin, Ph.D.
• Research Collaborator
– Maribeth Gandy, Ph.D (GA Tech)
• Doctoral Students
– Amanda Trujillo
– Laura Whitlock
– Landon LaPorte
• National Science Foundation
– #0905127, Division of Information & Intelligent Systems
3. Gains Through Gaming Lab
(www.gainsthroughgaming.org)
• Identify commercially available video games that
improve adults’ memory and cognitive functioning
– Characteristics/properties of games
– Conditions under which they are played
• Develop video games that incorporate the
characteristics/properties that produce gains
• Consulting services
– Help developers make games that would ALSO appeal to
older adults
– Not old people games
6. Negative Video Game Stereotypes
• “Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik prepared
himself for the bombing and shootings that killed 77
people by playing World of Warcraft and Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare for a year.” CNN
7. Overlooked Positive Video Game Outcomes
• Greater ability to perspective take
• Better mood
• Deal with post- traumatic stress
• Increased hand-eye coordination
• Reduced levels of pain
• Distraction from snacking
• Increased imagination
• Greater perseverance
• Better cognition
8. Video Games and Cognition
• Adolescents and adults who play video games tend
to have better:
– reaction time
– spatial ability
– problem solving
• When video games have been used as an
intervention improvements in cognitive abilities are
seen
9. Video Games and Cognition
• Increased field of view – action video game (Grand
Theft Auto, Half-life, Counter-Strike, Marvel versus Capcom, Rogue Spear, and
Super Mario Kart)
– Green & Bavelier, 2006a, 2006b, 2007
• Spatial ability - Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault
– Feng, Spence, & Pratt, 2007
• Children improved in mental rotation test (MRT)
scores playing Tetris
– De Lisi & Wolford, 2002; Terlecki et al., 2008
• Increased reaction time – Atari games (Packman and
Donkey Kong)
– Dustman and colleagues 1992
– Clark, Lanphear, and Riddick 1987
10. Video Games and Cognition
• If video games can be used to improve cognitive
abilities in adolescents and adults could they be used
in people who might really need it?
• Our research focuses on improving the cognitive
functioning of older adults….
11. Aging and Cognition
• General start of age related change is over 65
• Most abilities start to decline surprisingly early
Perceptual Speed
1.1 Spatial Ability
Reasoning
Better
Memory
0.7
Knowledge
0.3
-0.1
-0.5
-0.9
Worse
-1.3
20's 30's 40's 50's 60's 70's 80's
12. Why Older Adults?
• Cognitive functioning declines with age
• Declines in cognition can lead to serious
consequences
– Dementia
• Baby Boomers are aging
• Why you should care about baby boomers…..
13. Why you should care about Baby Boomers:
They out number you
• By 2020, 36% of Americans will be age 50 and over
– almost one in five (17 percent) will be 65 or older
14. Why you should care about Baby Boomers:
They have more money than you
• Wealthiest generation in the U.S.
• annual spending power of over $2 trillion.
15. Why you should care about Baby Boomers:
They are already playing video games
• According to the 2005 annual report by the
Entertainment Software Association half of all
Americans are playing video and computer games
– 25% are more than 50 years old
– another 45% are between 18 and 49 (although no further
breakdown is provided in this age bracket)
– the average age of the most frequent game purchaser is
40 (ESA, 2006)
• Gameboomers.com
– Forum with over 300,000 posts
16. Why you should care about Baby Boomers:
They are familiar with the ‘setting’ of many
games
• Star Wars – 1977
– Boomers were 13 to 31 years old
• Dungeons and Dragons - 1974, 1977
– Boomers were 10 to 28 years old
• Wolfenstein – 1992
– Boomers were 28 to 46 years old
• Atari 2600 – 1977
– Boomers were 13 to 31 years old
17. Aging and Cognition: Traditional Interventions
• Over 30 years of cognitive intervention research
• Primary focus is the development use of skills for a
single task
• Memory Example:
– A list of numbers or words
– Teach mnemonic techniques (chunking, categorizing, etc)
– Give a list again and see if they improve
18. Aging and Cognition: Traditional Interventions
• Training in a specific ability produces significant gains
for that target ability
• Little to no evidence that improving an ability
actually translates to improvements in real-life
– No transfer
19. Video Games as Interventions
• National Institute on Aging (NIA) has called for non-
traditional approaches to interventions
• Quilting
• Exercise
• Acting class
• Video games
– Myth vs. Reality
20. Video games as interventions: Myth
• Brain Agetm and Brain Age 2: More Training in
Minutes a Day!
– Over 4 million units sold each
21. Video games as intervention: Myth
• Brain Training Websites
– Luminosity
– Play With your Mind
– Happy Neuron
– CogFit
• All these sites use Flash games that are based on the
principles of traditional interventions
22. Video games as intervention: Reality
• Gains in prose recall with memory games
– Towle, Edman, & Lincoln, 1988
• Gains in memory with in-house games
– Farris, Bates, Resnick, & Stabler, 1994
• Decreased reaction time – Atari games (Packman and
Donkey Kong)
– Dustman and colleagues 1992
– Clark, Lanphear, and Riddick 1987
• Decreases in task switching cost – Rise of Nations
– Basok, Boot, Voss & Kramer 2008
23. Video games as intervention:
The Case of Rise of Nations (Basak et al., 2008 )
• 40 older adults
– average age = 70
– 20 played RON for at least 23.5 hours (RON group)
– The other 20 did nothing (Control group)
• Relative to the control group, the RON group
exhibited substantial on many cognitive tasks:
– task switching
– inductive (abstract) reasoning
– short-term memory
– working memory
24. Video Games as Intervention:
A post-hoc review
• Three common attributes:
– Novelty
– Socially interactive environment
– Attention-demanding tasks carried out over a period of
time
25. Essential properties of the gaming environment:
Novelty
• Interacting with novel stimuli forms new connections
in the brain and strengthens rarely used pathways
– Olesen, Westerberg, & Klingberg, 2003
• A stimulating environment promotes the growth of
neural connections
– Greenough & Volkmar, 1973; Rosenzweig, 1966
26. Essential properties of the gaming environment:
Social Interaction
• Social interaction relates to higher cognitive abilities
in old age
– Barnes, Mendes de Leon, Wilson, Bienias, & Evans, 2004; Lövdén, Ghisletta,
and Lindenberger, 2005
• Older adults with high social interaction show
neurological changes that improve their ability to
deal with stress
– Eisenberger, Taylor, Gable, Hilmert, & Lieberman, 2007
• Social interaction is related to life expectancy
– Maier & Klumb, 2005
27. Essential properties of the gaming environment:
Sustained Attention
• Attention-demanding tasks carried out over a period
of time
– Single task
• Single task is good
• Switching between multiple tasks is better
– Variable Priority Training
28. Our Recent Research Findings
• What we do in a nutshell:
– We test older adults cognitive functioning
– We have them play a video game
• Varying conditions
– We test them again and see if they got better
• World of Warcraft Study
• Wii Study
29. WoW Study
• Experimental Group (n=17)
– Time spent in-game: mean=14.99 hours,
– Average # of quests = 14
– Average level = 11
• Control group: n=20
• Average age = 67 years
• Only 2 people in the intervention group
Whitlock, L., McLaughlin, A., & Allaire, J.C. (In Press). Individual
Differences in Response to Cognitive Training: Using a Multi-modal,
Attentionally Demanding Game-Based Intervention Computers in
Human Behavior. Computers in Human Behavior.
30. Why did we pick WoW?
• World of Warcraft
– Cognitively demanding
– Novel
– Social Interaction
– Sustained Attention
– Switching between tasks
• Finding your way to quest objective
• Killing Defias Bandits that attack you
– Quests are cognitively demanding
33. WoW Study Take Home Messages
• Older adults will play a game called World of
Warcraft
• Playing WoW for a realtively brief period of time
improves some cognitive abilities
• The individuals who need the improvement the most
benefitted the most
34. The Wii Study
• Determine the critical properties of the gaming
environment that produce improvement
• Social Interaction
• Sustained Attention
• Create an older adult specific game that loads on the
critical properties identified
35. Focus Group Results
• 2 groups, 17 participants total
• Mean age 75.15 years
• ~half men, half women
• Discussed and demonstrated games from the task
analyses
• Given knowledge of amount of time required by a
future study
36. Games that fulfilled the Task Requirements
• World of Warcraft
• Riven – puzzle game
• Spore CreatureCreator –creativity game
• BoomBlox – multiplayer puzzle game
38. Design of Study
• Pretest Intervention Posttest
• Interventions Groups:
– Attentional demand
• Lower
• Higher
• Control (no game)
– Social interaction
• Alone
• In a group
39. Measures
• Pretest and posttest battery of psychological
measures
– Cognition
– Well-being
– Health
– Stress
– personality
40. Measures
• Added an
accelerometer
to the Wii
remote
– Record all the
movements
with Wii remote
• Galvanic skin
response (GSR)
– Arousal
44. Is there a Relationship between playing video
games and cognitive functioning?
Play Video Games (0
= no; 1 = yes)
Thinking speed .28*
Spatial ability .31*
Reasoning .26*
Memory .25*
50. Conclusions
• Almost half our sample reported playing video games
at least once a month
• An overwhelming majority of older adults believed
that playing video games did or can improve their
mental and psychical health
– Surprisingly they still believed video games could be
addictive /time consuming
• Individuals who reported playing video games had
better cognitive functioning at the outset
51. Conclusions
• Our BoomBlox intervention significantly improved
older adults cognitive functioning
• More improvements when ability and challenge
were matched
– Low ability + low demand training = improvements
– High ability + High demand training = improvements
• Adaptability of the game to player ability is key
– Easy mode vs hard mode
– Can we push people from one mode to another?
52. Future Directions
• Currently developing a game with colleagues at GA-Tech
• Continue to identify the specific characteristics of games
that produce cognitive improvements
• What factors can be manipulated to make commercial
games more appealing to older adults?
• How can we incorporate factors that improve cognition
into a game without it being obvious?
• We are always evaluating new games for new studies
Editor's Notes
The focus groups indicated great interest in improving their abilities, though we made it clear they will have to devote significant effort to our intervention to achieve change. This is in line with previous qualitative research on older adult interest in gaming (Belchior, 2008). Comments from the focus groups included: “This would be great for someone who is housebound,” “I could see playing games as a way to interact with my grand daughters in Massachusetts” and “I like it because I can see where it would get more difficult, sort of a brain and muscle thing [talking about coordination of the two].” In addition to their verbal comments, we collected opinions on games in general and specifically the games that met our cognitive criteria. Older adults expressed interest in the social aspects of all games, self-improvement, and some desire for competition. Thirty percent of participants surveyed indicated they would be more likely to play video games if they could play with friends or family and, on average, agreed that they "like playing games because of the social interaction with friends" and "like playing games because of the experience of getting better and better in a certain game" (M=4.23, SE=0.43 and M=4.25, SE=0.28 respectively on a 6-point Likert scale raging from 1=Strongly disagree to 6=Strongly agree). Through this process we eliminated games that met our cognitive task analyses criteria but were disliked by older adults (e.g., Spore Creature Creator, “I cannot see any attraction in it,” “I have so little time in my life left I can’t imagine [spending it playing this]”). BoomBlox, a game on the Nintendo Wii, was rated the most highly of the demonstrated games. Unasked, older adults in each focus group mentioned either playing or watching others play Wii games at a local senior center. This excitement and interest from our target population contributed to our choice of BoomBlox and the Wii interface from the list of task-analyzed suitable games (Figure 2).
