Study Tries To Prove Games Make People Dumber

A study profiled on Yahoo! News explains that students whose roommates - you wouldn't want it to be your child's fault - buy a video game console study on average 40 minutes less per day and thus have a lower GPA. I am sure it's true, as the article points out, less studying generally causes lower marks. It's just fun to see the way they link it to video games when it could just as easily have been televisions, beer fridges or girlfriends.

In fact, that would be a great study. I would bet a lot of money that college guys with girlfriends (and visa versa) lose a lot more than 40 minutes study time a day.

First-year students whose roommates brought a video game player to college studied 40 minutes less each day on average, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Those 40 minutes of lost study time translated into first-semester grades that were 0.241 points lower on the 4.0 grade scale.

The study's authors, Todd Stinebrickner, an associate professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, and his father, Ralph Stinebrickner, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Berea College in Kentucky, were not trying to prove anything about video games. The study sought to determine how much of an effect study efforts have on grades.

Read more here.