My son Ethan, age 13-1/2, is a natural athlete. Whether it be as a pitcher on his baseball team or a point guard on his basketball team, his skills and competitiveness stand out (and not only to his father). I have often told Ethan that his combination of competitiveness, coordination, anticipation, quickness, and length are ideal for playing tennis, and I believe that this could ultimately be his best sport. However, unlike other sports, Ethan did not pick up tennis naturally. Even though we played, he did not appear to make many improvements, and often both he and I would be frustrated when we played together.
As part of the LearningWorks project, my children had the luxury of having all the latest video game consoles, so during the Summer Ethan began playing Wii Sports. He tried to convince me to let him play for extended periods, because it was “exercise,” and that he didn’t need to go outside and run around. I did notice that he often played in the practice modes of the Wii Sports games rather than in the game-playing modes. In these practice modes, the game player works on refining specific skills that would be useful in the game.
One rainy week in particular, Ethan played a great deal of Wii Tennis. Shortly thereafter, we went out to play tennis again. We started hitting, and all of a sudden, Ethan had a two-fisted backhand with topspin that he could rifle over the net. This was a stroke that he had never hit before, but now he was hitting with a degree of regularity, excellent pace, and often even with placement. I laughingly said to him, “Who have you been playing tennis with?” to which he responded that he hadn’t played since we had last played. We both joked about how it must have been playing on the Nintendo that made him better.
Well, as we have continued to play over the Summer (and also far more frequently, because Ethan wants to play on an almost daily basis now), I began to believe more and more that Ethan had arrived at a “virtual tennis stroke” that was effective in the Wii Sports game, and also in the real world.
I want to emphasize that I don’t think that playing Wii Sports or any other type of video game requiring movement, such as Dance Dance Revolution or Tiger Woods Golf, is a substitute for the real thing. However, I do believe that there may be benefits to playing these activity-based video games. For example, Dance Dance Revolution requires processing of visual information that studies have suggested may help with reading comprehension and certainly may also provide a degree of exercise that might serve to reduce stress.
So this has got me thinking. While I’m not much of a golfer, I wonder if I play enough Tiger Woods Golf, will I actually get better . . .
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