Action from the Video game Soul Calibur 3. - file

Today's column is a continuation of last week's on myths about video games.

4. Almost no girls play computer games.

Historically, the video game market has been predominantly male. However, the percentage of women playing games has steadily increased over the last decade. Women now slightly outnumber men playing Web-based games. Software designers were spurred by the belief that games were an important gateway into other kinds of digital literacy, and efforts were made in the mid-90s to build games that appealed to girls.

Huge crossover successes

More recent games, such as The Sims, were huge crossover successes that attracted many women who had never played video games before. Given the historic imbalance in the game market (and among people working inside the game industry), the presence of sexist stereotyping in games is hardly surprising. Yet, it's also important to note that female game characters are often portrayed as powerful and independent. In his book Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones argues that young girls often build upon these representations of strong women warriors as a means of building up their self-confidence in confronting challenges in their everyday lives.

5. Because games are used to train soldiers to kill, they have the same impact on the kids who play them.

Former military psychologist and moral reformer David Grossman argues that because the military uses games in training (including, he claims, training soldiers to shoot and kill), the generation of young people who play such games are similarly being brutalised and conditioned to be aggressive in their everyday social interactions.

Grossman's model only works if:

1. we remove training and education from a meaningful cultural context.

2. we assume learners have no conscious goals, and that they show no resistance to what they are being taught.

3. we assume that they unwittingly apply what they learn in a fantasy environment to real world spaces.

The military uses games as part of a specific curriculum, with clearly defined goals, in a context where students actively want to learn and have a need for the information being transmitted. There are consequences for not mastering those skills. That being said, a growing body of research does suggest that games can enhance learning. In his recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Gee describes game players as active problem solvers who do not see mistakes as errors, but as opportunities for improvement. Players search for newer, better solutions to problems and challenges, he says. And they are encouraged to constantly form and test hypotheses. This research points to a fundamentally different model of how and what players learn from games.

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