With themselves born into a digital era and exposed to brand new, significantly improved technologies, traditional games seems to become a ‘has-been’ for most children nowadays as they pivoted to new mediums for entertainment. Some argued that recently, however, that modern children’s games barely helped in developing a spectrum of necessary skills when compared to the traditional ones. Although the statement appeared to be convincing to a great sector of the public, are the preferred modern games as useless in education as purported?
Apparently, traditional games such as chess and puzzles do help with the development of the cognitive abilities of children in terms of their logical thinking and critical thinking skills via keeping them engaged in thinking and finding out varied ways of solving the problems and winning the game. Traditional multiplayer games (e.g. board games), in addition, teaches the young players skills of communication and teamwork through the gameplay. Nevertheless, a range of video games, as representatives of modern games, also have the same utility since they adopted the same features of traditional games——indeed, they are same to the core in the ways players accomplish goals and acquire happiness.
Aside from that, features that cannot be added to traditional games are available in video games due to its great capacity to make the gameplay diverse and of more utilities. To give an example, the settings of the games can be described in a more detailed manner and that allows development of skills of particular subjects such as literature and history. Yet it is true that certain skills cannot be developed in modern digital games, such as the ability to create crafts as the children cannot involve in interactive games in the digital worlds.
In hindsight, the conclusion will be double-sided: modern games are not as weak as claimed by the public in helping children to develop skills that do not require interactions in real-life and are even better than traditional games.