Video Games Boost Visual Skills

cmburns69 writes "A new study published in Nature Magazine (MSNBC summary) suggests that playing action games improves visual skills. Among other things, young adults who played action games such as Grand Theft Auto and Medal of Honor regularly could track up to five objects at a time - 30% more than non-players. Apparently, the game type is important, as ten hours of the block-rotating game Tetris failed to improve test scores."

Comments

Hand Eye Coordination...

[Cyno01]

I've been working on improving my hand eye coordination(it has many advantages beyond gaming). This probably sounds stupid, but i've been slowly increasing the gamespeed on Unreal Tournament. Once my stats go back up to what was my average level on 100% gamespeed i bump it up a few more percentages. I'm in the 150%s now, its crazy fast, but not as hard as you'd think.

Re:nothing but pratfalls

[ackthpt]

I've been playing video games my entire life, and yet I've had 5 automobile accidents, countless number of knife mishaps and I am probably up for "most likely to be on 'America's Funniest Home Videos'".

I had lots of accidents when I was younger, but many of them because I was an aggressive driver. One potential problem (note: this is anecdotal) is games may have reinforced a very competitive personality. I.e. those things within my control I'll push to the limit to win, those outside my control I'll just swear at. Solution to the aggressive driving thing, get a vehicle with little pep and decent gas mileage. Patience is a virtue, especially as it keeps you out of many accidents and lowers the points on your record.

so we all know what this means, I need to play even MORE video games, or less Grand Theft Auto.

Delving into the actual study may reveal it's games which encourage good on-the-fly plan developing and limited time spent on it and a good diet (the study center only fed the subjects healthy food.) I know when I was seriously hooked on games I'd skip food until my bloodsugar made me twitchy.

And in other news ...

[DogIsMyCoprocessor]

talking to real people improves social skills, and getting outside for a bike ride improves physical skills.

I have experienced the opposite

[CrazyJim0]

I learned two things from video games:

Strategy and reflexes, both help my driving.

Aside from one incident where I almost rammed someone's car after playing too much destruction derby, I am a wicked driver.

I've physically dodged some wild accidents, and once I powerslided to dodge an accident... Since my car is shorter perpendicular to the road as opposed to straight on it, I avoided an accident by a few inches... People who don't use their turn signal are asking for it.

Mainly I avoid accidents by putting a ton of car lengths ahead of me... Sure aggressive drivers can juke in, but those fuckers are just as likely to juke out too. All that dodging is not a sign of a good driver, just a retard.

It helped me

[msuzio]

I know video games helped me. I was born with pretty bad eyes... astigmatism, near-sightedness, and a strong tendency to be cross-eyed. I was in glasses by the time I was three, and I had to wear *hideous* glasses in pre-school and 1st grade, with tape on the lenses to block my eyes from crossing inwards. I went for vision therapy for several years.
The biggest thing they wanted was for me to get hand-eye coordination. I basically had none. The biggest exercise was a tennis ball on a tether. When they took it and swung it like a pendulum at my head, I literally could not bat it away before it bounced off me (sounds mean, but it was more like a game ). No change after three years of this.

So my parents bought me an Atari 2600 somewhere around age 7. By the end of that summer, I had quite good hand-eye coordination (and had flipped the score on Defender a few times ). My mom was more than glad to let me play games endlessly after that :-). (*)

(*) of course, I think 20 years later now, looking at a CRT screen all the time has probably degraded my vision back a bit too :-)

oh so true so true

[Derg]

no I didnt rtfa, but I can attest to what I have gained from years of game playing. Playing quake and other fps's really tweaked my audio acuity many times over since I read somewhere soon after first getting quake 1, that a truely masterful player can tell where everything is in a room, just by listening. so I did that for a while, about 2 months, I would just listen and try to play through levels. It got very easy, and eventually I was able to beat it on normal skill without turning on my monitor. Nowadays, I can tell what someone is doing behind me or in the other room just from the sounds they generate.

I hope I am not the only one who can attest to years of mudding having increased typing speeds and accuracy. when its a matter of life or death, you learn speedily to type accurately. when I started mudding back in the 7th grade, I was typing at like 15-20wpm /10 errors, now after nearly a decade of mudding, I type ~100wpm /2 errors. I will admit though, that some terms from my mudding days have seeped into my daily vocabulary; more than once I have said things like "let me check my eq" when I meant to imply "let me see if I have that" ... it gets scary...

let us not forget the hours and hours that we gamers have wasted on mini-puzzles and macro-puzzles that are tossed into games so frequently these days. I know for a fact that those skills have come in handy for me in the form of increased logical problem identification speeds.

I think I should shut up know, I have a feeling I am going to be modded into oblivion...