No Surprise: Gamers Don’t Read Much

Earlier this month, researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Texas published a study they performed to determine whether playing video games affected adolescents’ time spent reading and doing homework. Their unsurprising results: adolescents who play video games spend less time doing homework and reading than their non-gaming counterparts. They took a sample of 1,491 youths aged 10-19, 36% of whom regularly played video games, and had them keep logs of how they spent their rime. Compared to the non-gamers, the young people who played video games spent 30% less time reading and 36% less time doing their homework. The study also found that boys tended to spend more time playing games than girls. However video games did not seem to alter their social lives, as the time they spent with parents and friends wasn’t impacted.

I’m surprised they needed to do a full-blown study for this. Try this some time: go into an online game — almost any online game — and try to start a discussion on any book that hasn’t been made into a movie. I can practically guarantee that you’ll be met with a mixture of outright ignorance and verbal abuse; possibly a racial and/or homophobic slur or two.