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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
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.
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. ;-)
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 tell my wife that's the reason for me buying games. helps keep my laparoscopic surgury skills honed.
However good your skills may be, I don't know how many people are going to want to be operated on by a doctor who spells the word 'surgury'.
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.
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'.