I have a suspicion that "screen time" whether it be TV, videos or games, has a detrimental affect on: attention span, tranquility and susceptibility to advertisements and psychological mass-manipulation in general.
I suspect it matters very much what is on that screen. Music videos and action movies are practically designed for people with ADHD. Many video games are the same way.
On the other hand, there are some high quality documentaries and prerecorded college lecturers will not hav ethe issues you describe and as an avid (though very bad) GO player I personally feel that there is very little difference between playing on a screen and playing in front of a board.
Let's stop throwing around the word ADHD. It encourages people who just don't have the discipline to focus to give themselves an excuse, while lessening the perception of the problems for people who are actually debilitated by it.
There's no media-driven conspiracy to alter your mind. There has been an evolutionary trend to favor the animal who could quickly notice the approaching bear versus the animal too intent on its task. Conversely, human evolution has needed intense concentration to drive innovation in things like tool development, construction, and art.
There's media that caters to both. WIth action-packed movies and games thriving on quick attention-shifting, and grinding-based MMO's relying on the ability of players to do repetitive tasks for hours on end.
One could give the same attention-reducing arguments against books and for oral stories. That said, you shouldn't just make a blanket statement against all screen media. Teach your kids how to discriminate between what's good for them and what's not.
"There's no media-driven conspiracy to alter your mind."
I think that's wrong. Forget whether it's a conspiracy or not; many things are effective conspiracies. These days, media is designed to be sticky and most media is driven by advertisements, the goal of which are to make you think you're not good enough unless you buy certian things.
Video is a think pipe directly into your brain, and I believe there is evidence to suggest that "screen time" does alter the way your mind functions.
Meanwhile, back in reality, my wife complains when I ask her to mute the booming commercials in the latest USA Network cop show.
Sadly, legislators are not specialized enough to grasp the notions of loudness and compression in commercials so they could be legislated out of existence.
I don't know how you're using the word "concentration" here, but playing an FPS (for example) usually demands that you pay attention to something new every few seconds, and definitely does not encourage lengthy focus or sustained thought. I think tends to be even more true for console games than games in general.
In any case, I doubt it's so much that video games are detrimental and more that you ought to have a hobby which actively cultivates concentration.
Maybe something like UT or CS, where it's all over in 3 minutes, that's true.
I remember being a kid and playing games like Tomb Raider where you would have to really think and work hard to unlock puzzles. Even games that offered you the opportunity to just fly through them usually had some form of deeper gameplay. For instance, SF Rush was all about things flashing by really fast, but the real challenge was to collect all the keys in the game, which often required a lot of innovative thinking about finding things to jump off.
The main difference here is between action and puzzle games. I personally disliked the pure puzzles because they felt too restrictive. Large-scale strategy games like simcity were a better fit for me. The same pattern shows up in my coding. I really don't like simple puzzles, but love challenges where I feel like I'm building something, not just solving it.
You know, that's a pretty good point. Most console games have some "completionist" aspects that usually encourage some degree of cleverness and persistence, if nothing else. I know that I always enjoyed that aspect when I was a kid, although I don't know if it's the prevailing mindset.
