By Caroline Ghisolfi, The Sacramento Bee, July 17, 2019.
Video games often come under fire for their violent and potentially addictive properties. But a new study from a UC Davis researcher and a Swiss colleague has found that they can have their benefits.
UC Davis researcher Seth Frey and Swiss scholar Robert W. Sumner studied users of the online game “Minecraft,” in which players build structures, creations and artwork by breaking three-dimensional blocks. The game has nearly 65 million users and is “one of a few games with a decentralized, amateur-driven hosting model and a large user base,” UC Davis spokeswoman Karen Nikos-Rose said in a press release.
For their study, Frey and Sumner scanned the internet every two hours to visit and observe 150,000 “Minecraft” communities to see how the “virtual world” teaches leadership and community-building skills that they may be able to apply in real-world domains.
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