Are There Benefits of Video Games?

This week I have been spending a lot of time playing video games in the evening. I got to a point Monday night and had to ask myself if I was having fun or just killing time. To be honest, I really felt like I was just killing time and felt like I could be doing something more productive. It turns out I wasn't making any progress in my game and when I figured out what I was doing wrong, it became much more entertaining. However it got me thinking about if there are any benefits of video games.

Video games have been a part of my family since I was very young. My Dad had a DEC PDP-11 computer installed in our house and I used it to play a Star Trek game when I was about 10 years old. There were a few other games but Star Trek is the one I remember the most. Later we had an Atari 400 computer and it had the arcade version of Pac-Man. My dad wanted to know if there were any benefits of video games and had a hypothesis that they could help you read faster. He used Pac-Man to test it. Every so often an item appears in the Pac-Man maze and if you eat the item, you score points. The first item is a cherry and it is worth something like 100 points. The more points an item is worth, the faster everything goes. The nice thing about the Atari 400 version of Pac-Man is that you can choose which item you want to appear in the maze without having to start with the cherry. That means you could set the game to the "key" or highest level and everything moved amazingly fast.

My dad would bring in a bunch of kids from the neighborhood and time them reading several pages out of a book. Then he would have them play Pac-Man at key level for 30 minutes followed by having them read different pages out of the same book. I forget the exact numbers but there was a significant increase in reading speed for everyone my dad tested. My siblings and I used that as justification for playing more video games.

Now I find myself wondering if there are more benefits to playing video games. We all have only 24 hours in a day and I would not recommend spending all of that time doing one single thing. I know that after a busy day at the office I just want to relax. In the past I have watched television or read a book. I still enjoy reading and have been keeping that up. I have completely given up on TV though. I figure that replacing television with playing video games is a fair trade. Am I wrong? Comments welcome.