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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!"
Now only if cheat codes transferred to real life!
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
My first time flying, we flew through a cloud layer heading back to the airport. I flew the approach perfectly, only having to ask where certain knobs were on the kind of plane we were flying.
:-p).
I definitely wouldn't have been able to do that without the hours and hours I spent on MS Flight Simulator (many of which, admittedly, were spent ramming into the Sears Tower in my Cessna
I've found that I've got faster reaction times than most of my friends. I spent a year working at a daycare, and I could consistently catch babies before they fell and hit their heads.
But this discussion begs the question of whether game players develop fast reactions or whether people with fast reactions play games regularly.
I consider myself a pretty good shot (in CS, Day of Defeat, Quake, etc). However, about a while ago I had the opportunity to fire several clips (or magazines? I forget) with a 9mm pistol in a large group of other first time shooters.
When we got the targets back, and the scores were compared, I was significantly below average. I am quite certain that I was well above the average of that groups FPS skills as well.
On the other hand, my good friend, who was a computer gamer but NOT a very good FPS player, joined the military and quickly earned expert marksman qualifications on both rifles and pistols.
There is absolutely no correlation.
no thanks
I found that playing chess on computer has greatly increased my umm... chess playing skills.
They most definitely do. The problem is they get no respect. For example, only people with exceptional leadership and social skills can become great captains in a game like puzzle pirates. But you can't put that on your resume. You'll only get hired on the rare rare rare chance that the person hiring is a player.
Of course other skills go over as well. Problem solving, hand eye coordination, etc. etc. But in this world nobody will care unless you've done something "real".
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I'd say that many skills from gaming definitely transfer to real world scenarios. Things that I have noticed personally are elements of resource management from RTS's applying to efficient living in the real world. Critical thinking and decision making can be taken away from nearly any game, from snap-decisions in FPS games to strategic ones in Strategy.
I'm not so sure about social skills, but efficient team work definitely grows when playing a team game, regardless of the genre.
Something I've noticed before is that it's not so much the subject of the game that is conveyed to our minds, but the mode of thinking that are minds are forced into after hours of play. We begin to think more like machines, efficient decisions, precise moves, cunning strategies, and these roll over into the real world more than raw knowledge (which is something that edutainment hasn't really touched on yet).
I'd have to say that physical actions are something that have very little chance of transferring to the real world, though. Games are nearly an entirely mental experience, and the player is usually quite detached aside from the usual hand-eye coordination. Firing guns and playing sports are entirely different actions on the screen and off.
It depends on what type of shooting you're doing.
Twitch as in skeet or practical pistol, will probably be helped by anything that improves reaction time and hand eye co-ordination.
Logic as in 1500yd or three positional will probably not be helped by having a lightning reflex.
The important question of shoot or not shoot is probably fucked up beyond all recognition in those that play FPS.
"Well officer, the victim suddenly popped up from behind a crate so I fired a warning shot through her chest. Better safe than sorry"
While most PC based sims aren't certified as trainers there is still inherent value in things, like:
*Just shooting landings for a few hours to get the timing and visual cues of things down.
*Planning your cross country and then flying it virtually to make sure you've gotten everthing correct.
*Practicng stalls in a controlled environment
etc... Yes, PC games can give you skills that transfer to real life.
The hands-on aspects of aiming and firing guns probably has nothing to do with FPS skills. On the other hand, I see a strong correlation between people who play FPS's and those who are able to effectively use cover in RL Laser Tag games.
For great justice.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
seem to have a much smaller learning time when using machinery for keyhole surgery, or the various 'scopys.
I can't remember the source (think it was 20/20), but the suggestion was that the abstract skills of manipulating mice/joysticks/etc in games translates well into manipulating the weirdass device used for controlling the camera.
SO that is an affirmative from the medical profession, i guess.
If true, maybe "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" would be a useful training tool for the CIA and Department of Defense.
I'm fairly certain that the game "Driver" on the (Playstation 1) saved my life - or at least my car.
When you're cruising around the city, Driver is fairly similar to Grand Theft Auto - with the notable exception that the traffic behaves realistically and tries to obeys all the rules of driving - including stopping at intersections for lights. The result is that if you drive up some streets at the wrong time, you get a *lot* of heavy cross-traffic.
At first, when I was driving like crazy and encountered a car in the intersection, I would often swerve the wrong way. If it appeared from the left, I'd swerve to the right. Of course, because we were both moving, I'd T-bone the car almost perfectly. Eventually I learned to judge the speed of the cars and swerve towards the rear of them if their speed was sufficient compared to mine - because I'd have a much greater chance of passing behind them.
Then, one night in real life, as I was driving home on the highway - an elk ran across the road. There was a car in the left lane in front that had just overtaken me, blocking my view of the left lane. The first I saw of the elk was when it entered my lane just in front of that car - it was moving very fast from left to right across my field of vision - several car lengths in front of me.
My instinct was to swerve to the right, but I didn't. I knew that if I did that - and based on the speed that it was moving - I would hit the elk straight on. I swerved left... car submarined to the right, tires loaded up, started squealing... my right wing mirror practically touched the beastie on the backside as I narrowly avoided it... and I straightened the car back up again without going very far out of my lane.
If I'd done nothing, I would have hit the elk on the passenger side of my car. If I'd swerved right (what I know I would have done pre-"Driver"), I would have hit it dead-center at 65mph, a 600lb fully-grown male elk would have come through the windshield of my bottom-of-the range subcompact car - and I'd probably have been made dead. I still think that luck had a little play, but the game "Driver" definitely taught me the reactions that I needed to have in that specific circumstance.
I've been an avid FPS gamer since The Catacomb Abyss come out (I was 6 at the time),
and in the past 3 years I've started playing paintball.
I can tell you, being a FPS player gives you no advantage over any other paintball player.
In fact, it might even act as a disadvantage, because playing paintball is so drastically different
both tactically and physically from playing a game, that it is nothing like one would expect it to be.
Paintball plays nothing like a FPS.
In the reverse argument (and going back on topic), I think being a good team leader
in paintball has enabled me to become a better leader in team-based online FPS games.
I was able to practically learn better leadership in real-life, and apply it to computer games.
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.
You wouldn't happen to be into bowling, too, would you?
Someone arrest this man...
--
Anecdotes are fun, but I'd guess that what you're really asking is if there is any research out there on the transferability of virtual skills into RL. Folks like Dr. Carrie Heeter - http://tc.msu.edu/people/faculty/8 (and no, I haven't asked her permission to post the URL on slashdot so please be kind to her server) might know. I know she did research into a place called "Fighter Town" a few years ago, but I don't think she was looking into transferability of skills.
Come to think of it, I'd bet that DOD has a bunch of solid, repeatable data on the subject; at least as far as driving/flying/submersible simulations go. Any slashdotters out there working in a simulation lab that can talk about their work without being arrested? ;-)
Ah yes, "Bowling for Columbine", the answer to the age-old question, "when is a documentary not a documentary?"
Many modern gun games at the arcade require you to shoot off screen to reload.
I'd hate to be the guy standing next to the Time Crisis pro at the real shooting gallery. I might just get shot it the head when he thinks his clip is empty.
This refers to the practise of checking that the safety is off before shooting civilians, yes?
Why not get the real ultimate power?
americas army uses thier video game for exactly this purpose. it is a research tool to investigate if squad based virtual combat will make a soldier that accels "better" in a number of different catatgories. They are not really interested in whether motor skills can transfer. they know they dont and have plenty of research that supports this. the ability of motor skills to generalze to novel situations is well known and somewhat easily predicted. if the simmilarits of the game are close enough to the real thing then the skill will transfer. the question of what is close enough is a minute detail question. common sense can do wonders here, too much theory can muck it up. riding a virtual bike with a joystick is not a skill that will transfer to being able to balance on a bike. but chosing a good route through an envoronment will. the lattter is a more cognitive task the depends on being able to execute the more motoric task of riding a bike. I know studies have shown that general reaction time to targets is improved with fps videogame use but actual transfer of skill such as shooting (aiming at targets) from fps games to actual targets has not held up under scrutiny. you may have a better awareness of targets in a visual field but you will be no more able to shoot them than the average joe. cognitive skills transfer more readily to novel situations than do motor skills. Most of what will transfer from a video game will be cognitive unless the new task involves using a joystick or keyboard/mouse in a simmilar way.
this is not a Sig.
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.
Sure they do. I believe my life was saved quite a few times by hundreds, if not thousands of hours I spent playing Need For Speed series. My reaction to the situations was, every time, reflexive... How many times did you put your car into a controlled skid in real life? How many times did you manage to do a 180 degree turn and bring the car to a complete stop without losing control? Do you know what is lift-off oversteer? Can you make your front wheel drive car oversteer? And so on and so forth.
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. :)
Depends on the video game. America's Army obviously has nothing to do with motor skills, but I have a friend who in high school was nothing all the special, wasn't a jock and if anything did more to support the Area 51 arcade games than probably any other man alive. The arcade owner most likely retired because of him.
Well, to make a long story short, after high school he joined the army. No previous weapons experience of any kind. During weapons training for the M16 (just like in Americas Army) he shot hawkeye (that's 40 hits out of 40 possible targets... somethng like 33 hits qualifies you for sniper school, I think). He did a few years of bouncing around various elite army schools (special ops training in the phillipines, sniper school where he would spend literally days inching through the grass to take out a target, etc etc) before heading off to Bosnia, where he had multiple confirmed kills in Bosnia as both recon and a sniper. He later hooked up with some underworld elements and became essentially a hit man for a very large gang in Long Beach (one that you've all heard of), and currently is up near the top of the list of people in organized crime in LA and Orange counties, despite his young age, all because of his abilities to shoot stuff and shoot stuff well. He's also one of the quickest people mentally I've ever known, but nobody would have noticed that if it hadn't been for his skills with a gun.
I'm not going to go into the morals of what he does... he's good to his friends, but not loved by his enemies - I've seen the bullet holes in him to prove that. The point is that with no arms training of any sort other than arcade games he was able to almost instantly become a sought after crack shot. And, in his own words, he credits that to his many, many, many hours of Area 51 and video game firearms in general. I'm not sure if I believe that, but it's what he says and if anything I'm telling his story on the conservative side so people don't think I'm bullshitting it.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
Of course, being able to shoot in a game is not the same as doing it in real life. But according to this, games can help skills in less direct ways.
I was at a private LAN last summer, out near f-stick Nebraska. My friends there were mostly very good FPS players - DoD and CS. They totally own me at FPS games. I can hold my own against them in BF42 and DC, but that's a different skill set...
.22's and 12 gauge shotguns, but I haven't done much shooting for the last 10 or 12 years. Other than our host, none of the other guys had any significant experience with a firearm.
.22, the host and I were the only ones to hit our targets. Once we moved up to the scatter guns, some of the others did better. With the 7mm, the targets (pop cans) were WAY out there. I only hit one by skipping debris off the ground in front of it. :) Nobody else hit one.
The guy hosting the party took us out for some real target shooting. We started with a Ruger 10/22, moved up to a 20 gauge, a 12 gauge "pumpo", and finally a high-powered 7mm rifle (not sure of the exact size, but it was BFG, much larger casing than a 30-06).
I grew up with BB guns, pellet guns,
On round 1 with the
I do agree that gaming does have some skill transfer to meatspace... like strategy, or driving / flying skills from a simulator (only as a complement with the real thing), but without some real-world practise, I don't think FPS games directly transfer to real firearm skills.
One reason I submitted this Ask Slashdot was because my ass has been saved by video game skuh-zills in the past.
Right after I got my license a few years after age 16, I had a truck and too much testosterone. I was driving down this long, paved road out in the middle of nowhere when all of a sudden I see the stop sign someways off. Now, I'm going about 80mph on what is little more than a long driveway. I hit the brakes and they lock up. All of a sudden I felt like I left my body and did some weird shit with the steering wheel and the stick-shift. All I can remember is something about Daytona USA. When I regained conscious control, I'm about four-feet away from a telephone pole near my door, in the gravel with a car just 10 feet away from my front bumper, probably wondering what the heck is going on.
I suppose this means I did the mother-of-all powerslides without flipping my truck or ending up smashed and possibly killed.
There are other stories too... But yeah, I believe that at least some video game skills transfer to real life, especially sega race car skills:)
I've had my fair share of experiences with Game Skills Real Skills. Here's probably the best 2 (and recent) examples I can provide.
2 Months after joining the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, and a nice safety course later, I was finally cleared to use the rifle range. I had about 2.5 years skill with FPS games, and 0.0 seconds skill shooting a rifle.
My FPS skills did not transfer over. None whatsoever. An FPS teaches you to move a mouse and press buttons on a keyboard. Shooting a rifle requires actual movement. You actually have to squeeze the trigger (not pull it), adjust the sights, reload, and aim. In a FPS, you click the mouse. Big difference.
After 4 months of Practice, I have earned Marksman 1st class qualification. Basically, 20 shots at a range of 10m (32.8ft) were inside a 2.5cm (1 in - about the size of a quarter) diameter grouping. Not an easy task.
As for flying, I had no experience. Zero. No Flight Sim skills, no real life skills, hell, I hadn't even been more than 30m above ground. After months of Ground School and passing the exam (barely, with a 50%), it was time for a flight.
About a week after the flight, my flight instructor burned me a copy of MS Flight Sim 2000. Everything I learned in real life transfered over. Controlling the Eleveators, Ailerons, Flaps, Throttle, Rudder, and other Aircraft controls is a breeze, thanks to the months spent learning how to do it properly.
I suppose to conclude, some skills do, and some skills dont. You have to look at the complexity of the task in real life vs the complexity of the task in the virtual world. Shooting is complex in real life, but overly simple in virtual reality. No transfer. Flying is difficult in real life, and flying is difficult in virtual reality, so there are some transferable skills.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Play FPS games and racing sims has improved my reaction time. I'd also say the level of gore and violence has some what desensitised me to violence. I remember watching 'Black Hawk Down' with my friends, and while those who played quake and BF1942 were laughing it up the non FPS friends and the rest of the crowd glared at or glanced with that "wtf is wrong with you" look. Sorry but if you've made a couple head shots, you've seen them all. War isnt fun but this is just entertainment. Recap: 1. Better reaction times. 2. Less likely to be suprised.
After playing Counter-Strike and the like for years, now I can detect and kill about 5 times more cockroachs crawling in my room than before.... That, or there are actually 5 times more roaches in my room.
"Gimmy your lunch money, four-eyes!"
"Uh, hang on a sec. Got a pen?"
"What? What you yappin about, nerd?"
"Nevermind, found one."
"C'mon poindexter, fork it over!"
"One second..."
"What you writing down there?"
"Hang on, hang on! I... D... D... umm... Q..."
Since i'm not quite sure how Degreelessness mode would work in real life, maybe 'IDCLIP' would be a better choice... hmmm...
#1. Twitch skill. Raw reflexes.
#2. Strategy
#3. Teamwork, patience (and hopefully) maturity
Yes, maturity. I play a lot of Natural Selection, a team-oriented half-life mod. Actually, the team play in that is pretty hard. A lone player (called a rambo) will get killed pretty quick, and be unable to do pretty much anything.
In other words, the little kids who don't want to play as a team get killed, get frustrated than leave.
Just my opinion.
I have fired a gun once. From a long ways away I was able to hit a can on a fence post shooting downhill. My friend who hunts a lot missed. I never let him forget it. I remain 100% in the accuracy department. Now only if I could save a princess.
I feel that playing pac man has greatly increased my pill popping skills.
A friend and I decided to play some real world checkers. Everything was going fine until he jumped one of my pieces. The damned thing didn't move!
We stared at it for 15 minutes, waiting for it to disappear or leap off the board. Nothing. Finally we managed to prod it off with a stick.
Never will I trust a computer game again.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
I'd say many skills do transfer (such as driving), but shooting absolutely doesn't since shooting in a game doesn't remotely rely upon the same real-world skills required for shooting an actual gun.
In one of the Doom 3 speeches or interviews last year, Carmack pointed out that they made the Doom 3 targeting code highly accurate, and everyone in the office was stunned to realize that they were really, really bad shots... And you KNOW those guys have a hell of a lot of FPS seat-time...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
I have improved my skill in stealing cars and beating women...
I've learned more vocab from Video games than I have in school! I mean take Hereos of might and magic three, after I played that game I could use words like Mirth and Moral, and I was only 12!