| Hmm, where to start. This is addressing he premice not everything that has followed. First, lets clear a few things up:
ADD: in one word, "daydreamer". They are not easily distracted so much as just never giving anything at all attention. Video games do not feed this directy, rather they are just fun and thus when people with ADD play them they are willing to put for the mental effort it takes to keep playing.
ADHD: in one word, "spaz". These are truely short attention span people and are best described as thinking 1000 miles an hour and chifting gears every few seconds. Sadly many dont have the self control to keep from sharing these changing thoughts constantly. Video games really do feed these because they are fed a continuous feed of new information that needs processing. As a result their mind is pushed to shift as fast as it woudl otherwise.
The working theory is that TV in particular and possibly video games can acutlaly manifest this problem in children since they grow accustomed to being spoon fed and when they are in a situation where they have to actually try to entertain themselves they must switch information feeds as often as the TV does.
Please note: ADD and ADHD are totally unrelated conditions that have completely different symptoms and probably conpletely different causes. Brain scans of both have shown that even the physiology between them are competely different. Also, this is a gross oversimplification in any case. Processing disorders are categorized into 17 groups any of which can be ADD or ADHD or can exclusive.
As far as MMOs. I believe the premice is flawed to think that since an MMO is a single thing. Lets build a context around what an ADHD (what you likely meant) kid goes through. Clay is introduced and they play with it. While moulding it a new idea wanders into their head and they begin to sing out loud. A word in the song reminds them of their favorite TV show, so they start spouting lines from the show and laughting. That clay is now in a hundred pieces because they just started mashing it while no tpaying attention. The supervisor (probably a teacher) asks them to please no be so loud, and they immediately respond, "What I didn't say anything."
"You were talking about your favorite TV show, you said ..."
"Yeah, there's no anythign there, see I was right!"
Hopefully you get the idea from the scenerio. (Invented but I've seen 100s like it.)
So, clay is a kenetic exorcise, nothig more. the student gains only tactile input from it and as a result their mins wanders because it's "bored" and wants more to process. It invents stuff to process on it's own and it's even possible that it is partially if not entirely subconsious.
An MMO is Kenetic as well (keyboard/mouse), but also has audio, visual inputs and through some crafty game design, there are measureable goals that can be obtained. Each time a goal is met, a new stimulous begins as the prior one ends. A new mob is attacked, old one dead. New sound when new zone is entered. visual fireworks... all kinds of good stuff to keep a brain at peek processing.
well, that's my $.02 anyhow. | 