Do Videogame Skills Transfer To Real Life?

macshune writes "Lately, I've been wanting to try my hand at firearms, just to see if a youth spent playing Duck Hunt and an adolescence playing FPS games has given me a preternatural shooting ability. This got me thinking, do videogame skills, both reaction-based and of other kinds, transfer to real life? My friends that play D&D are good storytellers, but do games like Counter-Strike build teamwork skills? Inquiring minds want to know!"

Comments

Re:FPS skillz != firearm skills

[Alkaiser]

Same here. I'm deadly accurate in light gun games, and with the sniper rifle in Q3 and CS...I've fired 9mm guns, .45s, etc.

If you're shooting not expecting the full pyhsical force of the kick, it totally messes up your aim, moreso than someone who's coming in not expecting anything.

A gamer's going to level his sights, and expect to hit where the crosshairs says he's going to him. The normal guy's going to aim lower like the people teaching them tell them to.

Bravo

[vga_init]

After reading the question, I was prepared to write a response that was very similar. So similar, in fact, that you've pretty much summed up everything that I would have said.

Reading through the many responses, it is obvious that the vast majority of posters are seriously preoccupied with guns. While many games have guns in them, many do not, and, setting all that aside, this is hardly important at all.

What many people fail to realize is that what people really gain from playing games is much more abstract. The things you learn to do don't really have anything to do with actual firearms (or cars, or anything else mentioned). As you have put it, they teach modes of behaivor and ways of thinking.

There are other benefits that deal with general knowledge; that is, you can learned raw facts from a game, but usually this is not the case.

People are trying to simplify too much

[AvantLegion]

As often happens here, people are trying to apply simple answers to what may appear to be a simple question. But it's really not. People can say "yes" and "no" and both be partially right, because there isn't an iron-clad, applies-in-every-situation answer.

Humans can learn from many things. We learn from text descriptions of things, as well as abstract diagrams or photographs. We can also learn from interactive simulations - depending on how much they deviate from what they simulate. Obviously, learning from simulations (like flight sims) has been much discussed elsewhere, with a lot of anecdotal data to suggest that it helps greatly (and the military's own anecdotes and interest in sims should help make the point - not just flight sims, but things like the game that will be released publically as Full Spectrum Warrior soon).

That accounts for learning of mental skills, but there's also the physical ("twitch") factor. Of course, people here are often failing to apply sound logic. Being good at a FPS doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be good at firing a real firearm. That said, one could argue that the same person might have been even worse at firing the real firearm without the FPS skills. The question isn't if one makes you automatically good at the other. The question is if one helps with the other. But people are answering the question as if it were the former.

The original question asks specifically about teamwork skills. Interpersonal skills are, in my view, totally separate from mental or physical skills. I would argue that, yes, playing cooperative games would help build your cooperation skills more than not playing coop games. Interpersonal communication is a very dynamic thing, and does not exist in a vacuum - working with people in CounterStrike is not somehow a totally different human skill than other kinds of cooperation.

This could be a very good discussion, but there's been too little insight so far. This post here wasn't all that great either, but hopefully it will spark some true insight. :)