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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'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.
Things that I have noticed personally are elements of resource management from RTS's applying to efficient living in the real world. Yeah, I've found that too. In fact, I've got the kids out back in the yard collecting food and my wife is chopping up a tree for the wood. Meanwhile I've got the dog digging in the basement for gold and I'm nearly finished building a new wonder on the patio :)
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.
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.