Tomorrow's finest leaders may well be today's gamers
Above is the link to a chewy article that avenges the idea of spending an awful lot of time playing video games. It focuses on the fact that gamers, by playing video games, must have developed good problem solving skills and better logical thinking among other things (resource management, risk analysis, micro management, efficiency, etc.) and are therefore fit to become future leaders.
Although it greatly depends on its genre, video games, especially the modern ones, are essentially bundles of problems that need to be solved. This means that playing a game is similar to solving many problems either simultaneously or linearly. Gamers are therefore good at thinking of solutions because of the amount of problems that need to be solved before completing a game.
Games are made by piecing ideas in a logical manner. I think that playing them develops logical thinking because the players have to understand the logic behind the game in order to play effectively.
As mentioned earlier, the learning factor depends on the genre of the game because, I think, a gamer can learn more from a strategy game where the player devises strategies and implements them in order to achieve a goal rather than a death match first person shooter where players just roam around and kill each other. The latter is fun and thrilling but not very enriching because at the end of each match, the player wouldn't have planned and just acted out of instinct. Meaning, the player wouldn't know what he/she did wrong and most likely repeat the same thing in other situations. This can be good though in developing fast decision making.
So in a sense, playing video games is not only something to fend off boredom. If anything, depending on how the gamer takes it, it can be very enriching allowing gamers to develop skills that are cool to have.
