For so long we've been told gaming is rotting our children's brains and at times even promoting violence but new overseas research shows video gaming may boost kids' cognitive abilities.
A gaming researcher said parents should even encourage their kids to play video games over watching TikTok and YouTube.
It comes after new overseas research found around 70 percent of US kids under the age of 17 play video games.
The research found those who played at least 21 hours of video games a week exhibited better cognitive performance.
Video gamers were also found to exhibit better cognitive performance involving response inhibition and working memory as well as altered blood oxygen level-dependent signal in key regions of the cortex responsible for visual, attention, and memory processing when compared with non-video gamers.
Gaming researcher Dr Simon McCallum told AM on Tuesday video games teach people how to make quick decisions.
"It's basically training your brain to be able to kind of look at information, see kind of the differences between two things and make decisions quickly and so you can kind of evaluate things really quickly," Dr McCallum told AM fill-in co-host Patrick Gower.
"So what you do as a gamer, you're constantly making choices. You're making choices about if it's a violent game, what you shoot at, but in Minecraft, it's what you build, how you build and you got a plan of what you need to click to build different things. So you're constantly exercising your brain."
Dr McCallum said "actively doing something with your brain" like playing video games is much better than "passively" watching YouTube or TikTok.
"If you're playing a game, you are in control, you are in charge and it means that as a human, you kind of build that sense of, actually, I can make decisions and my decisions matter," he told AM.
"Whereas if you sit there and passively just get told what to view, you start losing that ability to say I'm going to choose what happens here."
Dr McCallum also urged parents to play video games with their children and use it as a chance to build relationships.
"If you play those games with your kids and then have discussions about it afterwards, you can actually build a much stronger kind of understanding of what's acceptable and when is acceptable, and not acceptable and they build that relationship with you," Dr McCallum explained.
"Rather than answering those questions by watching random TikTokers doing stupid things. So be involved and play those games with your kids and it builds relationships."
Watch the full video above.
