Recently, I was listening to ABC Drive with Rafael Epstein. He had a guest named Dr. Jeff Brand from Bond University on the show and they were discussing statistics around video games in Australia, but what really interested me were the phone calls that were coming in about excessive gaming, and how these people didn’t know what to do about it. You see, much of the research that’s out there tends to speak to the positives of gaming, as long as it’s in moderation. These studies are not wrong, but the thing is there are a lot of families out there worried about how to go about this “moderation”. There aren’t a lot of strategies floating around designed to combat excessive gaming other than “parent harder”. This is partly because it’s difficult to do research on the negatives of gaming according to Dr. Brand. I imagine that would make it more difficult to analyse the problem and come up with solutions.
Later that week, I appeared briefly on the show in hopes of starting the conversation around what can be done to reduce excessive gaming, and make the shift toward intelligent gaming. Here are both interviews from the show. As expected, these interviews are always too short to get to the heart of the matter but there’s a decent soundbyte there for you.