Do video games make kids smarter?

"Mom, if I don't play video games 8 hours a day, I'll end up mowing lawns instead of doing quantum physics."

I remember some years ago reading that video games might make kids into better fighter pilots. Now a philosophy professor named James Flynn seems to have found evidence not only are ppl getting smarter, but he suggests that some of it may be attributable to playing video games:

The best example of brain-boosting media may be videogames. Mastering visual puzzles is the whole point of the exercise - whether it's the spatial geometry of Tetris, the engineering riddles of Myst, or the urban mapping of Grand Theft Auto.

The ultimate test of the "cognitively demanding leisure" hypothesis may come in the next few years, as the generation raised on hypertext and massively complex game worlds starts taking adult IQ tests. This is a generation of kids who, in many cases, learned to puzzle through the visual patterns of graphic interfaces before they learned to read. Their fundamental intellectual powers weren't shaped only by coping with words on a page. They acquired an intuitive understanding of shapes and environments, all of them laced with patterns that can be detected if you think hard enough.

Steven Johnson has the story in Wired. Parents everywhere: Be afraid. Be very afraid.