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By Kirsten Houmann, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent
ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A recent study reveals that video games can enhance creativity.
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As parents lecture their kids on spending less time playing video games like Halo and Mario Kart, researchers are looking into new ways that games like these can be used as serious communication tools. A recent study reveals how video games can be used to enhance creativity.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University studied creative abilities following video game play. After playing the popular video game Dance Dance Revolution, participants took a creativity test. Researchers also measured the participants levels of arousal, or physical excitation and valence, or range of positive or negative feeling.
Findings suggest that the players amount of physical excitation is key to post-game creativity, and this excitation must be either high or low. In other words, people who are either very happy, with a positive attitude and high levels of excitement, or very sad, with a negative attitude and low levels of excitement, will be the most creative.
Those two, we found in our study, are optimal kinds of emotional states for generating creative problem-solving, Shyam Sundar, Ph.D., professor of film, video and media studies at Pennsylvania State University, told Ivanhoe.
Dr. Sundar hopes these discoveries will help bring about video games to enhance creativity in classroom teaching and corporate decision-making. These games should encourage the emotions that trigger creativity, he explained.
Games that are designed for you to become ecstatic are good for creativity, but they should not frustrate you when you lose, Dr. Sundar said. Games ought to be designed such that you lose calmly and win excitedly.
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Source: Ivanhoe interview with Shyam Sundar, Ph.D; International Communication Association Conference, Montreal, Canada, May 22-26, 2008
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
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