smeirlap wrote:Games don't increase your synaps or neurons, but reading books, studying do.
So, yes, it increase your brain activity, but in a bad way. (my reasoning may seem very stupid, but that is the fact :( ) You won't be more intelligent because you played a game (maybe it can give a few tip for your real life).
As far as my neuroscience knowledge goes, all developing actions create and enforce connections between neurons. Perhaps the point you were trying to make is that games don't help you create new knowledge, but studying does?
I would mostly agree with this point, but not all valuable things are knowledge, nor is knowledge intelligence. Playing games certainly won't help me remember who was the 8th king of England, but that's just memory. I wouldn't argue that a dictionary is intelligent.
Like I said before, intelligence is very hard to define. If we take it to be the ability to create new mental concepts and apply existing ones, there's going to be no competition between studying and gaming. They occupy mostly different time slots though; I don't know any people who would study as much as they play games if there weren't any games. A better comparison would be with watching TV, reading fictional books, or playing soccer. Kicking a ball around hardly makes me any more intelligent :)
There's also the huge problem of 'game' being such a broad term, that it makes any kind of proper comparison hard. I can play chess or solve sudokus on my computer, or I can go and shoot brains out in some random FPS, which I dare say are quite opposite on the intelligence development scale.
If I hadn't been playing games all this time, I'd probably have been out drinking or doing something (more) stupid. Time that would have been better spent studying, sure, but like that would ever happen.
