annotated resource list

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Annotated Resource List

TED Talk Information

The TED Talk video I watched was Your Brain on Video Games by Daphne Baveleir. This talk was about how video games can positively affect the brain. Ninety percent of children in the U.S. alone play video games. Even with that statistics, it’s not just kids playing the games. The average age of a video gamer is approximately thirty-three years old. This being told, video games are quite pervasive throughout our society. Video games are so popular, that just after one month of play after the debut of Call of Duty, the game was played by the world for a combined 68,000 years of game time! Just like wine, video games can be good for you if not played in excess. The proper amount of gaming time has powerful effects on brain activity.

There are many common myths that go hand and hand with gaming. “Screen time makes your eyes worse.” This is a common misconception. It has actual been proven that those who don’t play games have just normal vision, while those who play games have extremely better vision. They can resolve small detail better and resolve different levels of gray easier. Another misconception that goes along with gaming is that “games lead to attention problems and greater distractibility.” This was also proven to be untrue. People who play video games can resolve conflict problems and track objects easier. This allows gamers to be able to track the cars and pedestrians around them while driving. The overall passage of this TED Talk was to disclaim common myths about video gaming and to prove that, to an extent, video gaming is actually good for you.

Annotated Resource List

Book Sources

Dubin, Mark. 2002. How The Brain Works. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Science.

This book provides information that would be very helpful to understand exactly how the brain works. Because this talk is about the brain, this book would be extremely helpful. The book would help make sense of any questions about the brain that someone might have.

Berger, Arthur Asa. 1933. Video Games: A Popular Cultural Phenomenon. New Jersey: Transaction.

This book, for one, helps someone who may not understand video games better understand video games. This book also shows the significance video games have had on our culture of today. Video games have taken over the youth of our nation and this book expresses this in a unique way.

Internet Source

Jenkins, Bill. 2012. “The Truth About Video Games and the Brain: What Research Tells Us.” Last modified February 8, 2012, http://www.scilearn.com/blog/video-games-brain.php.

This site provides a bit of a contrast to what is explained in the TED Talk. This contrast would help with the development of a better understanding among the video game/brain questions. This website also gives a lot of different tests done by other people for more reliable evidence among the subject.

Reference Sources

Ramachandran, V.S. 1994. Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

This reference helps give us good information about humans in general. It helps us understand how humans think and why we do the things we do. Because the talk has a lot to do with the mental processes of humans when connected to video games, this reference will help someone understand why we humans may increase or decrease our knowledge by playing video games.

Assheuer, Jurgen K. Mai Joseph. 2004. Atlas of the Human Brain. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press.

Again, this reference would be a great way for someone to become more knowledgeable about the human brain. This reference provides us with very detailed pictures of the brain, how it is structured, and how it works. This atlas shows parts of the brain that are associated with vision, memory, and multitasking ability which are all mentioned and explained in this TED Talk.

Scholarly Journal Article

Rozendaal, Marco. 2009. “Game Feature and Expertise Effects on Experienced Richness, Control and Engagement in Game Play.” AI & SOCIETY, Vol. 24, Issue 2.

This article explains the extent to which game play is experienced as engaging is an important criterion for the playability of video games. This helps us realize the importance that video games can have with a cognitive brain. This article also explains ways that video game creators can innovate the way they create games in order to create a more educational game play for gamers.