The new issue of Greater Good magazine features a series of essays about play. Contributors to the issue reveal that free, spontaneous, imaginative play is essential to positive growth and development–and yet kids today are doing less and less of it.

At the same time, kids are playing more and more video games: Studies say that 70 to 80 percent of boys and roughly 20 percent of girls play video games on a typical day. The popularity of these games have fueled a wide range of fears. Are those fears justified?

To celebrate the release of its new issue on play, Greater Good magazine is hosting a panel discussion that will reveal the newest facts about video game play, and what guidelines they suggest for parents, teachers, kids, and the people who create the games.

The panel will feature Harvard Medical School psychologist Lawrence Kutner, whose new book Grand Theft Childhood? reports the results of his landmark study on the effects of video games on teenagers. Kutner’s presentation will be followed by questions and responses from a panel of experts in child psychology and video game development, including Stephen Hinshaw, the chair of UC Berkeley’s psychology department. The discussion will be moderated by Jeremy Adam Smith, senior editor of Greater Good and author of Twenty-First-Century Dad, forthcoming from Beacon Press.

Panelists will include:

Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D., is co-founder and director of the Center for Mental Health and Media, based in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and is on the psychiatry faculty at Harvard Medical School. His new book, Grand Theft Childhood?, written with Center for Mental Health and Media co-director Cheryl K. Olson, is based on the results of a $1.5 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice on the effects of video games on young teenagers. Kutner is also the author of five previous books about child psychology and parent-child communication. He wrote the award-winning weekly New York Times “Parent & Child” column, was the “Ask the Expert” columnist for Parents magazine, and has been a columnist and contributing editor at Parenting and Baby Talk magazines. He’s a licensed psychologist and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, which awarded him its National Psychology Award for the best newspaper writing about psychology in the United States.

Stephen Hinshaw, Ph.D., is the chair of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests lie in the fields of clinical child and adolescent psychology and developmental psychopathology. Major themes of his work include the diagnostic validity of childhood disorders, the role of peer relationships in normal and atypical development (particularly ADHD), the utility of identifying subcategories of aggressive behavior, and the early prediction of behavioral and learning problems. Recently, his has also focused his research on the stigmatization of mental illness. He is the author of the books The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change, The Years of Silence are Past: My Father’s Life with Bipolar Disorder, and the forthcoming Breaking the Silence: Mental Health Professionals Disclose Their Personal and Family Experiences of Mental Illness. Hinshaw is also a co-founder of the Greater Good Science Center.

Greg Niemeyer received his MFA from Stanford University in New Media in 1997. At the same time, he founded the Stanford University Digital Art Center, which he directed until 2001, when he was appointed at UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor for New Media, where he focuses on the critical analysis of the impact of new media on human experiences. His creative work focuses on the mediation between humans as individuals and humans as a collective through technological means, and emphasizes playful responses to technology. His most recognized projects were Gravity (Cooper Union, NYC, 1997), PING (SFMOMA, 2001), Oxygen Flute (with Chris Chafe, SJMA, 2002), Organum (Pacific Film Archive, 2003), Ping 2.0 (Paris, La Villette Numerique, 2004), and Good Morning Flowers (SFIFF 2006, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt, 2006) and, with Joe McKay, the Balance Game (Cairo 2007, London, 2007). His current project, the Black Cloud, an Alternate Reality Game, is funded by the MacArthur Digital Learning Initiative.

A Q&A will follow the discussion.