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Right. Does Gaming help with the development of a child, or hinder with their schoolwork? Does it help develop imagination, or hinder the personal growth of the player?

Comments appreciated.

I personally think it helps, as it did in my case. I've been gaming ever since I was a lil girl. Used to watch my dad play NES all the time when I was lil and i'd sit there and watch the screen. Reading the words. Then I got my hands on the controller and have been playing games ever since. I think playing games, especially RPG's has helped with Reading. Also with making decisions and handling your money.

I know most people probably wouldn't agree with me, but thats my view on it.

In 1999 I started playing RPGs in English. At this time I had been learning English at school for three years, and it's always been fun to me, but now I had a really good reason to learn everything about this language that got taught. Soon I was the one in my class who had the biggest vocabulary. Yes, playing videogames might be the best thing that ever happened to my English.
And to my imagination... Some of those games are truly inspiring.

The only danger I see in this kind of games (I mean high quality RPGs) is that they might be too captivating at times. They can easily distract from other stuff like learning for school. And depending on the player, it might well be that they will not learn anything of the game, and only have wasted time, so to speak. But the exact same thing could be said about anything that is fun and addictive, games, movies, the internet, books and other things.

I believe in Psychology my professor commented that videogames were likely for the recent intelligent increases in children.

However, they are also likely the cause of growing social problems as well.

Again, for most activities in general, do in moderation.

Actually, I think it depends on the type of games you play - I think RPGs solved, rather than caused, a few social difficulties for me. I always used to be a loner, but I really believe that the strong themes of friendship (and especially love) in the Final Fantasies affected my real life enough that people could notice the change in me.

Mind you, books do the same thing, but i'm still saying - it's like anything, you can't generalise under the one title of 'games'.

I dont think it has a huge effect on education, only in specialised circumstances, like Misao has said.

In fact, I think it its effect can be less positive. I remember I bought GTA Vice City and literally vanished for a week while at university. Luckily. I bought this game long before exams started and by time I was sitting my exams, my desire to play this game 24/7 wasn't huge.

But my flatemate, he got a copy of the game just before he began his exams. He also vanished for while. One day, he came through the door of our flat after sitting an exam and he says to me "Matt...I have wasted my life!"