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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."
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'".
so we all know what this means, I need to play even MORE video games, or less Grand Theft Auto.
Mike
I knew Virtual Valerie had to be good for me.
Several friends of mine credit their above average vocabularies and problem solving abilities to RPGs among other games. There's a reason why most nerdy smart people play video games!
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
And Mom always said Video Games would kill all of my brain cells!
suck1ng y0u n00b, y0u n33d m4d CS sk1llz t0 b3 l1k3 n30...
(CAUTION: preceding is sarcasm; post-disclaimer for the retarded)
But everybody was cheating so it didn't matter anyway.
... is that people who can't track that many objects at once are turned off by games and don't play them. The article doesn't say whether they tried to account for this factor or not.
Makes sense to me.
Grand Theft Auto: "Shat! That cop's gonna catch me! I gotta pay attention!"
Medal of Honor: "Shat! That nazi's gonna catch me! I gotta pay attention!"
Tetris: "Shat! That block's gonna... fall... somewhere... Ehn, no big loss."
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
masturbating 3 times a day got rid of my carpal tunnel...
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
...test subjects forced to play ten straight hours of Tetris exhibited twelve times the rate of violent activity seen in the control group.
University of Rochester would like to thank the following sponsors of the study: Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Rockstar Games and Electronic Art.
(Please make check payable to Thomas H. Jackson, President, University of Rochester.)
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.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I had to track radar, what weapon i was on, ammo amounts, and what direction my top toros was facing!
what did they say about mech games!
oh man, I feel so left out.
But on a more serious note. I think these games do increase twitch re-actions for people, to be even remotely good you have to be able to identify a things distance, and even slight variations on where it exists in space to determine if you are going to fire at it.
Just taking medal of honor for example, many times on servers which force the skin type, it can be very hard to determine if someone is behind a wall because of the lack of contrast between default uniforms and the background.
The ability to know how thick an object is can really help determine how abnormal its shape is versus what it should be.
Anyone thats played these games a while, and has become familiar with where things are on there maps can almost run them backward. I used to play on a map called canalzone (the original for qwtf) that was "huge" and I could run it backward, or looking straight at the ground, as long as i knew where my start positon was. You need a good feel for how large the 3d space is relative to your character in the game to be able to do these kinds of things.
Now on games where weapons have travel time in space, knowledge of 3d space is even more important, games such as mechwarrior 4, coupled with some lag, require to know the movement speed in space so you can lead the target. If you dont have any idea how they are going to change relative shape vs distance in space, you are much less likely to hit your target.
so the hypothesis that games can affect how you determine things in 3d space seems completely plausible to me, because having "trained" people to play many 3d games myself (planetfortress.com/canalzone) (www.themfb.com search on wayback machine or google) I can tell you that the ability to have a good twitch instinct and judgment factors about objects in 3d space can really help.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I had been playing quake3 for well over a year and my rail skills were pretty good. I went to camp for a month and took an elective called shooting sports. I got to shoot a shotgun for the first time in my life. My first time to ever shoot at moving targets. I was in a class with people who shot lots of guns, and I did the best :P
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Teenage males that use the Internet regularly can identify pr0n actresses with 70% greater accuracy than teenage males that don't use the Internet regularly.
-Teckla
regularly could track up to five objects at a time - 30% more than non-players.
That's 3.5 objects for a non-player... hrmmm... I'd like to see that guy who only tracked half an object.
talking to real people improves social skills, and getting outside for a bike ride improves physical skills.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Sitting in front of a CRT all day playing games does wonders for your eyes. Those l33t visual skills aren't going to help when you can't see more than 10 feet in front of you. You're better off playing with yourself, at least going blind that way is an urban legend.
I think the ability to program is far more valuable than the marginal hand-eye coordination/spacial orientation that playing video games offers. You should feel fortunate that you childhood was spent in more valuable ways; I pissed mine away with nintendo, and sometimes I regret it.
Because of this, my vision and reflexes are kind of sharp -- at least in a specific way. I've had many moments that remind me of the scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where the older lady knocks over the cup to test the young girl's reflexes. She snatches the cup without thinking. I'm always catching things while they are being knocked over or grabbing things out of midair, just out of conditioning.
However, I suck at a lot of other physical things, most sports, and am a bit of a klutz at times. It's kind of like working on your bicep over and over, but neglecting other things. You've got this unnaturally strong bicep but the rest is much weaker. And I don't juggle, thinking of how this is going to pay off in all these other ways. I just like to juggle.
I'm pretty much just speculating, but I would suspect that playing a lot of video games gives you good visual skills that probably don't translate into a lot of other real-world stuff simply because the abilities that are developed are so narrow.
Compare to a football quarterback (you see, Marge, there are jocks, and nerds. Being a jock...oh, sorry, I digress). As a QB, you have to track several receivers, the pass rushers, keep an eye on the game clock, and keep your wits under the very real-world threat of being flattened by some steroid-raging linebacker. Plus all the physical skills, and the playbook knowledge (no, it ain't the same as programming C++, but you don't have 300-lb Bubba bearing down on you while you are coding either). There's a much wider range of skill development there, that encompasses both the physical and mental. Not to say that there are not other ways to develop those things, but let's just say that if you gain any skills out of playing Quake 12 hours a day, be thankful.
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.
God spoke to me
Without games you probably wouldn't have survived this long. Imagine all the additional auto accidents and knife mishaps you would have suffered without all the training. ;-)
...but at what cost. You have the loss of social skills, not to mention they lower sexual skills. Does not seem like a fair trade off to me.
i tell my wife that's the reason for me buying games. helps keep my laparoscopic surgury skills honed.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Friends, ever heard of hand-eye coordination? It's just another way of saying "visual skills." Hand-eye coordination was first hyped in the 80s as a benefit of videogaming. Here is a USA Today article that makes mention of that "benefit." (BTW, I'm putting the word in quotation marks because I'm wondering how important it is to have good visual skills/hand-eye coordination. Does that benefit truly outweigh all the damn time we hard-core gamers waste?)
So, um, those who spend more time training their perceptual systems to track and identify objects are better at tracking and identifying objects? Next thing you know, they'll start telling us that spending more time reading makes people better at reading...
"young adults who played action games such as Grand Theft Auto [...] regularly could track up to five objects at a time"
not only that, but these young adults were also 22% more successful at car jacking, 46% had better aim with lethal weapons, and 27% could on average outrun law enforcement officers.
yay everybody wins
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
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Benefits:
- Boost in visual skills
- Games teach problem-solving abilities, perseverance, pattern recognition, hypothesis testing, estimating skills, inductive skills, resource management, logistics, mapping, memory, quick thinking, and reasoned judgements. (Click here for the source of that info.)
- Games boost self-esteem. (Here again is the source for that.)
Drawbacks:
- Massive amount of time spent playing. I can't count how many times I've at my computer from 6 PM to 8 AM playing Civilization III. (The time spent playing could have been better spent studying, reading, exercising, getting to enjoy the world, travelling, etc.)
- The solitariness of most games. There seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle in which a socially-isolated person plays games in order to avoid having to be around other people. But then the act of being alone playing games makes you even more socially isolated. I wasted most of my childhood with Nintendo when I should have been outside playing. My college years were similarly wasted with computer games.
I guess the main point about games is, don't the drawbacks outweigh the benefits? (BTW, I'm on week number 3 of overcoming my computer game addiction. I had to go cold turkey. Good luck to others if you're in the same boat.)
You must play videogames.
I have access to the full text through a site license as a student at a major research university, and not only can I not find that text, the article starts on page 534.
On page 537: "Competing interests statement: The authors decleare that they have no competing financial interests."
Mod this libelous garbage back to where it belongs.
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...
I'm a little tea pot.
IIACP: Having read a few comments I'd just like to clarify a few things. I haven't read the paper itself, but from the summaries I've tried to work out what the findings are. In a way the main thrust of the paper seems to be being missed because of the headline grabbing video games element. Basically, from what I've read, the authors are claiming that game players (either from self-report or through training) perform better on tests of *visual selective attention*. Please note, this is not the same as saying "can see better" or "are more intelligent". Instead, this refers to the efficiency with which visual items can be selected and processed. The more important finding here is not really that "computer games are good for you" but that there is transfer of perceptual learning across domains. Now, it is no secret that training improves performance on visual attention tasks; I myself was invovled in a study where people did a simple keep-the-cursor-on-the-target task for *20 days*. This may surprise you, but they never reached asymptote ("maxxed out") performance. They just got better. And better. And better. But normally, practice effects are restricted to specific domains; if you practice tracking targets, you improve only on tracking targets. Another test of visual attention, say detecting letters amongst a stream of rapidly presented numbers, wouldn't benefit. Thus what makes this paper Nature worthy (I'm sure many biochemists etc. are were wondering) is that training on video games benefits a number of domains of visual attention. Now, this said, a simple hypothesis comes to mind which is that, of course, video games like Medal of Honour or whatever contained a variety of elements; spatial 3D (navigating around), spatial 2D (reading gauges, checking health), an element of reaction time/twitch responding etc. Thus it is perhaps not entirely surprsing that there is transfer of perceptual learning from a modern FPS to a range of attentional tasks. By contrast, we would not expect Tetris to generalise so widely because it is very specific in what it requires players to do. It is purely 2D, motion is one direction only etc. A counterpoint to that argument is to suppose that visual attention isnt a grab-bag of individual elements as I argue above, but rather a unified ability that somehow a modern FPS can uniquely tap (this appears to be what some of the commentators are saying, its hard to tell though). I'd say this is fairly controversial. Finally, it is important to note that the paper simply does not speak to arguments about personality and character and social behavior: whether games "make you clever/dumb/violent/passive/etc." Its really addressing a more technical issue.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Tetris only has one important object on the screen at a time, I wonder how much visual object tracking would improve someone made a version of Tetris where you had to control two or more falling bricks at a time.
This reminds me of when I began to study music theory, and started to listen to multiple instruments at the same time. Most people who listen to classical music, or any highly arranged music, can pick out and track multiple melodies, including subtle ones whose only purpose is to enhance the piece. Contrast that to most rock (or any popular music,) where there is one main melody, a bass line that hardly varies from the melody, and no complex vocal harmony.
Most of my friends cannot listen to and enjoy complex music (other than as relaxing background noise.) The human mind adjusts too in environment, and if exposed to complex auditory stimuli, we learn to understand it quicker, and follow it with greater detail. If exposed to complex visual stimuli, we learn to parse it faster. This probably applies to all senses.
The real question is, as games improve in areas such as 3d audio, will other senses besides visual spacial object tracking improve?
This is true. As a kid I spent hours and hours even days and weeks in a hospital due to a heart condition. What do you think I did while I was laying in that bed? I played games, tons of games, sometimes even with one hand when they had the IVs running through me. It was not until I was 12 or so that I actually was able to run for more than five minutes and I was amazed when I found out how good my basketball skills were. I have a great feeling that games helped this out, as I have a great ability to track random crap and am pretty good at marksmenship as well. I may never know if this is what helped me out, but I sure believe it did.
One feature I found remarkable on the TI-99/4A that I couldn't really exploit at that age was the speed of the tape drive. it was 1200 baud if i'm remembering correctly, rather then the more typical 110 / 300 baud of typical tape drives. It was most useful for exchanging programs via leaving them on friend's answering machines. While this is jack squat by today's standards, this was circa 1982 when your typical 300 baud modem was, I don't know cause my only resource for hardware at the time was "Best", some out of business consumer electronics shop, who were selling 300 baud modems for $300, or rather not selling one 300 baud modem for $300.
It's usefulness didn't extend much beyond that, as it sorta required that the reciever had access to a TI, while you could do this on other systems, the TI offered blinding high speed in contrast.
Games like hunt the Wumpus had a sorta magical quality to them. They were entertaining and offered some form of logic skill development. There were others too, but essentally TI tried to hit the educational market, something that apple was far more sucessful at, for better or for worse.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I've been playing video games since I bought my first Nintendo at age 12 (or so). I played Doom through college and Half-Life through medical school (I studied a little too ;-)
As a resident, I'm learning to do endoscopic procedures, such as colonoscopy, upper GI endoscopy, and a few other procedures ending with -oscopy. Manual dexterity and coordination play a significant role in performing these procedures well. You can read the entire endoscope manual about which wheel looks left, right, up or down, and which button takes a picture. But, you've gotta get your hands on the scope and start driving to gain any proficiency.
After my first day of endoscopy, I called my mom to tell her that all those hours spent in front of the Nintendo were now benefitting my career. She scoffed and said it was probably because I could play the piano. But, I remain convinced.
Just my $0.02!
(*) 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 :-)
Indeed. My eyesight is now only called that out of habit. A normal person wearing my glasses can see through time.
The coolest voice ever.
My theory is this. The reason it seems that more smart people play RPGs is due to Darwinism, survival of the fittest. A person with below average reasoning skills would most likely become frustrated with the in game puzzles provideed by RPG's and quit playing when they can't figure out how to do something. A smart person would grab a stratigy guide and learn to enjoy the game by reaping the knowldege provided by people who have played the game more times than they ever will.
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
I can track lots of objects at once.
h -duh ....
The main drawback is that my ears only respond to two alternating pitches.
Duh-duh
Duh-duh
Duh-duh
Duh-duh
Duh-duh
Du
Duh-duh
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Researchers discover that television improves valuable looking skills.
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Driving is number one on my list. If you can track everything going on on all four sides of you by watching all mirrors and peripheral vision at once, you are going to be a lot safer... over the years I've avoided several rear-endings by other cars because I knew when I had to stop with any degree of quickness they would be right on top of me and got out of their way while they slid halfway through where my car would have been if I hadn't been paying attention.
So not only tracking multiple objects, but understanding the "thinking" behind those objects (all of which you are doing in most video games) can keep you safe while driving. I find a lot of drivers are like a very badly written AI that telegraphs future behavior by every means except through the cars indicators!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I used to get run over by tanks everyday, but after play GTA it doesn't happen so much.
Learn tracking even more objects with juggling.org.
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I credit my vocabulary, grammar, and spelling to reading good old fashioned books, which I've been reading since I was about six. Of course, one hazard of learning vocabulary from novels is that it may take a while to learn how to pronounce the words. It took me years to realize that the "b" is silent in subtle.
1. Buy yourself a car with anti-lock brakes. No, I'm not kidding, you're a fucking fool if you pass up this wonder of technology. Uneven streets, potholes, oily spots, sheets of water, steel plates...ALL of the above and more can cause you to lose traction when you brake. Streets suck, and they're only getting worse.
2. Assume everyone around you is a complete idiot. On multi-laned highways, never sit in a driver's blind spot, either give a half a car length or pass him. Even more, be aware of other drivers and their intentions. Watch them, you will notice distinct patterns, such that you can anticipate a driver's intent even when the asshole doesn't use a signal. BE CAREFUL OF ANY ERRATIC DRIVERS, these are the worst because you cannot possibly predict their intent. Give them plenty of ground and sneak past only if it's safe.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
The three axis of abnormal psychology illustrate what happens when attitudes towards such things as escapism become a reflex to any and all contact with others
You haven't played a real RPG, then.
The game was based on contact with others; it's a fundamental aspect of finding people, getting together on a regular basis, and "working" towards a common goal.
I don't give two bits about how "unpleasant" your life may be, or what you consider the proper judge of "unpleasant" to be. (Christ Allmighty, I used "unpleasant", not "hard", "difficult", or any other substantial complaint! Leave my language alone!)
The point is, excerising any skill makes humans better at it. FPS games give better visual acuity and electronic response. Chess improves forethought. Baseball improves speed and athletic ability. And real RPGs improve social skills, basic math skills, and creativity / inspiration.