by 
An article in the Boston Globe offered the latest defense of video games as a great brain developer, quoting The Education Arcade’s Eric Klopfer:
“Video games are hard,” said Eric Klopfer, the director of MIT’s Education Arcade, which studies and develops educational video games. “People don’t like to play easy games, and games have figured out a way to encourage players to persist at solving challenging problems.”
The games aren’t just hard–they’re adaptively hard. They tend to challenge people right at the edge of their abilities; as players get better and score more points, they move up to more demanding levels of play. This adaptive challenge is “stunningly powerful” for learning…
The article also cites a recent paper out of UC-Irvine which showed that three months of playing Tetris made teenage girls’ brains more efficient. “Parts of the cortex, the outer layer of their brains responsible for high-level functions, actually got thicker.”
However, no one knows for sure if that kind of improvement leads to long-term, generalized smarts. “Until now, people have been asking can you learn anything from games?” the Globe quotes Klopfer as saying. “That’s a less interesting question than what aspects of games are important for fostering learning.”
