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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!
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.
...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
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.
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. ;-)
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.
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
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.
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?
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!
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'.
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.