Any correlation between video game playing and admissions results?

Parent Cafe
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<p>Do you have an opinion about whether boys who spend a considerable amount of time playing video games decrease their chances for competitive college admissions?</p>

<p>As an example, my sister forbade her son from purchasing a video game player, or playing on-line games in her home until he was 18. (Of course, on his 18th birthday, he immediately ran out a bought a player!) He was admitted ED to Stanford. (This was several years ago.) There may or may not be any correlation, but it piqued my curiosity.</p>

<p>Recently, we removed our son’s player and games from the house because we were worried they were consuming too much of his attention. After the initial tantrum, he hasn’t seemed to notice their absence much, btw.</p>

<p>Does anyone have anecdotal or other info about the impact of gaming on prospects for college admissions?</p>

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<p>My son played plenty of video games, but we didn’t have a system at home until he and a friend used their own money to buy a Nintendo 64 (or was it an x-box?) together when they were in middle school. It spent one week at our house and one week at his friends house. I thought this was a pretty good arrangement. Once he had his own computer (13), he played any number of games on his computer. Since his grades remained high we never worried too much though we had lots of rules about computer use, that we didn’t enforce as stringently as we might have. He ended up writing one of his essays about creating mods for the Civilization 4 game. He got into Harvard and Carnegie Mellon, he’s at the latter happily majoring in computer science. One thing we did not do is let our kids play any of the multi-player online games that require credit cards from us. There seem to be a lot of free games out there however!</p>

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<p>I played quite a lot of computer games in high school, even to the point of professional competition (yes, I always feel completely stupid saying that, but it is accurate ;)) in a couple of games. Luckily, I was adept enough at managing my time, keeping from getting addicted, and so forth that I was still very successful in high school and am obviously at a good university.</p>

<p>I think it depends very much on the person. Even on this forum you’ll find a poster (ctmomof3, as I recall) discussing her struggles with her son’s video game addiction; yet at the same time a lot of kids are very capable of handling it perfectly.</p>

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<p>My brother and I have had video games in our lives since we were very young. I remember having all the newest systems when they came out. He was very much more the player than I was, but we both spent our time on dedicated consoles and on computer games.</p>

<p>My brother is 20, still living at home. He’s dropped out of high school and has never had a job. I’m 22, heading into the summer before being a super-senior at Cal. </p>

<p>I could blame video games. Certainly my brother has an addiction to them. I am a little more inclined to look at a combination of innate drive and parent support as a possible cause, more inclined to see my brother’s place as a failure of the situation combined with the fact that he’s always been a smart-but-lazy kind of kid. The simple truth is that video games were often purchased and used as a way to occupy the kids while the parents were busy doing something else. I think his addiction arose from the socially tough situation at home – grandparent with Alzheimer’s, mother with a variety of ailments that require constant attention, father who works internationally and is gone for months at a time – more than the video games. </p>

<p>The video games, in other words, are a symptom, not the cause.</p>

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<p>My younger son played a ton of video games and is successfully at an Ivy. I don’t think there’s any correlation either way.</p>

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<p>My son has never played a video game in his life (not that he was forbidden to; he never expressed any interest whatsoever), and is about to enter the University of Chicago. Do I think there’s any correlation? Certainly not as any kind of generalization for kids overall. And even for my son, the only possible correlation I can think of is that he’s spent such a huge amount of his time reading over the years, outside of school and homework. (You know, the kind of kid who reads Proust and Nabokov and Tolstoy and many others because he enjoys them, not because he has to.) If he had spent any substantial part of that time playing video games, would he still have scored 800 in Critical Reading both times he took the SAT’s (both times “perfect” 800’s, that is, every question right)? Would he be the most well-read kid his age that either I or any of my friends have ever met? Would his AP English teacher have allowed him to guest-teach her other classes as many times as she has? There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I strongly suspect that the answer is no.</p>

<p>On the other hand, I know lots and lots of extraordinarily bright, very successful people who not only played video games and computer games as kids, but still do, into their 30’s and 40’s!</p>

<p>So there’s no possible way to generalize.</p>

<p>Donna</p>

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<p>I think games are like a lot of things that can derail a person with an addictive personality. They may even be worse than some other addictions because of the sheer amount of time they can suck up.</p>

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<p>DonnaL,</p>

<p>I would love it if removing S’s video games resulted in more reading! He has never been much of a fiction reader, but he has always loved books, going to the library and bookstore for books with lots of pictures and facts.</p>

<p>Interestingly, when we removed S’s video games (he is 13), he pulled out his old Lego sets again (we thought he was done with them), and spends more time playing his guitar and drawing extremely elaborate pictures. I’m not sure how any of that translates to future benefits, if at all. He does watch all the TV we will allow him, but we don’t allow it on school nights.</p>

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<p>If we’re going with anecdata here, I know tons of folks, both men and women, at MIT (current and alums), who are intensive video gamers. In fact, I would say that video gamers (and gamers in general) are disproportionately represented in the MIT population.</p>

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<p>Anecdata - great word! Yes, I’m not sure there is anything but anecdata on this issue. I guess I’m trying to get a handle on whether I’m making a mountain out of a molehill over video gaming with my son. Thank you for the input!</p>

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<p>Had to laugh a little at this thread. S (HS junior) was not allowed to buy a system, even w/ his own money – although he’d been asking for the last 2 years. I was concerned about it being a distraction from studying. (He also doesn’t have a TV in his room.) When he started a new school as a sophomore, his grades were OK, but not great. For the spring term, I used it as an incentive, and told him he could buy an x-box if he achieved a certain level of grades. He didn’t make it, so he couldn’t buy it. Same deal for fall term this year. He didn’t quite make the cut-off, but his grades were up and he came very close. So, H & I actually bought the x-box as a Christmas gift, and I told him I’d monitor how much he used it, and under no circumstances could he play before his homework was done. So what happened? His grades have gone up for both winter term, and again as of the mid-point of this term. Go figure! Clearly I should have let him have an x-box earlier!!!</p>

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<p>The valedictorian of my school, who is going to Harvard in the fall, has a small reputation for being really good at Super Smash Brothers.</p>

<p>On the other hand, my best and oldest friend in this town is totally addicted to World of Warcraft, and though I know he could compete academically with the top of the class, he shows no interest in academia whatsoever. (He does, however, plan to go to culinary school to become a baker; he is extraordinarily talented in that area and he will probably do very well for himself.)</p>

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<p>That’s remarkably interesting. My brother is the exact same way, from the addiction to WoW to the academic capability and disinterest to the desire to go to culinary school!</p>

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<p>Don’t know about admissions, but we have had friends whose son spent considerable time playing video games at college (since mom wasn’t there to tell him to get the heck off the computer).</p>

<p>Academic probation after his first year…</p>

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<p>First of all, asking this forum isn’t a reliable sample, because everyone here is usually the super-student.
Secondly, mostly the people who did well while playing games will probably respond due to voluntary response bias.</p>

<p>All that being said, I am a gamer. I played several hours every day. On weekends I played about five hours a day, minimum. During the week I played whenever i could, ranging from 1-4 hours a day. I can normally do homework while playing games, and it relaxes me. </p>

<p>I am ranked 3/500. Took 6 AP classes this year, held a job, volunteer work, had basketball and football season, and still found times for games. What I did was probably not the smartest thing, but I think games was a big part in my success. It helped me learn to manage my time believe it or not. I mean, i sleep about 3/4 hours a night, but I would honestly rather play an hour of CoD4 instead of taking a nap. Besides, you can always just sleep at school ^^. By the way, I will be attending UCLA in the fall. Got into Duke, USC, Berkeley and UCSD.</p>

<p>Sometimes i think parents on this forum are a little too overprotective. This is merely my opinion, but when i read posts that say “should i let my DS take 5 AP clases, or should i encourage D to not spend countless hours on myspace?” I begin to wonder what these children will go through once they have complete freedom in college. Sure, the logic is to teach them the right ways now, so they can use them to make the right choice in college, but this seems too optimistic for me. Sorry, it appears that i have digressed, but I still believe parents should let their kids make their own decisions. Perhaps its just a cultural difference. </p>

<p>After all this, I know one thing for sure: Without my computer/xbox360, i would suffer from depression, lose all will to live, and jump off a bridge. Okay, probably not, but if my games were taken away from me, I would find something to fill that void, and it probably wouldn’t be productive anyways.
Thanks for reading all that if you did.</p>

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<p>I gamed extremely heavily in high school & college.</p>

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<p>My son plays too much on some internet game. But the stress level of a large public high school in California also concerns me. It appears that he has fun and relaxes by playing the game. So, we monitor the situation via grades and his attitude. His grades are strong and he is at or near the top of his freshman class. He is also in the Johns Hopkins CTY program, works with the teen version of the Assistance League and plays violin in an orchestra. He has had his mind set on going to Yale or Chicago. I am certainly impressed with some of the schedules that many students keep on this thread, but my son is very determined and at 15 years old it appears unlikely that I can get him to do much more.</p>

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<p>My 14-year-old son, good at math and science, loves his video games. I think it has cut into his reading-for-enjoyment time, but he still does read quite a bit, so I am not going to worry about it.</p>

<p>Too bad they don’t have “Halo” Scholarships.</p>

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<p>Wow, I really don’t think my parents ever took notice of my grades or my gaming during high school. It surprises me how involved some are on this board. </p>

<p>Granted, I never found the time that I wanted to play certain video games, but I did play enough to know a lot about all the major systems and game franchises. Senior year, when I had the most stuff on my plate (7 AP’s, captain of swim, FCA, NHS, etc…) I actually became really good at this one online game and achieved a few top ten rankings in it. I graduated valedictorian too, but didn’t get into tippy-top schools I applied to.</p>

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<p>Girls play video games too, btw ;-)</p>

<p>Certainly there is a correlation, but the amount of gaming that actually affects performance varies from student to student and their workload. I can get a solid 3 or more hours on the computer even with 4 AP’s, etc., while others don’t get any.</p>