Slashdot Mirror
When Gaming Trains You For Work
ac514 writes "Parents should review their education before punishing their children. BBC wrote 'Video game skills and a good poker face online are becoming essential job qualifications in the financial markets, with recruitment drives assessing potential star traders in online gaming exams'. I knew some day these extra hours would pay off."
The traders are just a tip of the iceberg, with the advent of the generation of people who expect instant response to things, the skills of analysing data and leaping to right conclusion most of the time is going to be a major requirement in all fields that deal with humans.
Report 1; warninig pdf
Schwartz (1988). He set out to compare customary teacher-based tutoring of reading and comprehension with practice on a set of computer games derived from analysis of the reading process. 24 primary school children were selected, who were of average intelligence and who were 18 months or more behind their peers in reading comprehension. The children were split into two groups and assigned to teacher-based tutoring or to a computer game training group where they received practice on four computer games. Training in both conditions focused on word decoding and phonics. The study found that almost all students improved their reading comprehension test scores after training, although the poorest readers made significantly greater gains in the computer game condition than in the teacher training condition
study 2 - warning pdf:
"Marble Madness" and effects on spatial skills: A study of 61 children, ages 10 to 11, compared the effects of two computer games on the development of spatial skills--the cluster of skills required for children to visualize and manipulate objects or images in their minds.1 Practice on Marble Madness was found to reliably improve the children's spatial performance, while practice on Conjecture, a computerized word game similar to the TV show Wheel of Fortune, did not. The children playing Marble Madness used a joystick to guide a marble along a three-dimensional grid, trying to keep the marble on the path and prevent it from falling off or being attacked by intruders. After playing the game, children were found to have improved their ability to anticipate targets and visualize spatial paths. ?"Concentration" and effects on iconic skill: A cross-cultural study carried out in Rome and Los Angeles examined the effects of playing a computer game on the development of iconic skills--the skills that enable people to read images such as pictures and diagrams.2Researchers found that after playing the game Concentration on a computer, undergraduate students offered more diagrams in their analysis of an animated simulation of electronic circuits, whereas those who played the game on a board offered more verbal descriptions. ?"Robot Battle," "Robotron," and effects on visual attention skills: A study compared the effects of computer game expertise on college students' visual attention skills, the skills required to keeping track of several different things at the same time--not unlike a pilot keeping track of a row of several engine dials simultaneously.3 Researchers measured participants' response time to two events at two locations on a computer screen, where one target icon appeared more often than another. Predictably, participants who were expert players of Robot Battle (scoring above 200,000) had faster response times than participants who were novice players (scoring below 20,000). But after five hours of playing the game Robotron, all participants responded significantly faster to the target at the low probability position on the screen, demonstrating a causal relationship between playing a computer game and improving strategies for keeping track of events at multiple locations.
So there's more than just getting a job - there's actually advancing mental development.
Iran has endorsed
While growing up, my mom used to tell me that I'd never learn any useful skills by playing video games. Now that I have multiple sclerosis, and cannot work, some of those skills are essential in my daily life.
What use is being proficient with a joystick? Well, when your main means of locomotion is a power wheelchair, being able to manoever sure helps. Being able to judge speed/distance relationships helps, too - both skills fine-tuned in video game parlours.
Life sometimes throws us a curveball, and there's no way to really predict exactly what skillset might be useful at every point in time. Video games are just another skill. Arguably more common than, say, brain surgery, but then, just how many brain surgeons does the world need?
Lemon curry?
My vision of these guys is that they spend their entire days sitting in front of a terminal trading strictly on the numbers.
That being said, most business people need advanced interpersonal skills. That can also be improved with the right kind of computer games. When I taught high school (back when a 386 was a worthy computer), I ran the 'hackers' club. Our computers were networked within the lab and there were a few games that could be multiplayer. The rugged individualists eventually learned that the other guys who cooperated always beat them. They didn't become skilled negotiators but they did learn that they need the help of other people to succeed. I thought that was a worthwhile improvement.
Financial Market Job Qualifications...
1. Being able to parrot in-house analysts information, using words like "paradigm" and "fundamentals" while keeping a straight face and hoping noone asks for definitions
2. Being able to locate a topless or gogo bar within ten miles of any client's office or home when making a housecall
3. Being able to polish off an eight-ball without taking off your $150 YSL tie
4. Being able to "max blast kudos to everyone"
5. Believing that Gordon Gecko was the hero of Wall Street
6. Unlike a used car salesman, who will sell his grandmother a lemon, you must be able to sell your grandmother a car that doesn't even exist, and manage to rip her off again when she comes back to complain.
7. Being able to profit on both turning your client's $10,000 into $100,000 and when you turn $100,000 into $10,000
8. And finally: Having a GED as your highest level of education, and still call yourself a professional with a title of "Executive Vice President" - as if you are a Wharton MBA.
No seriously, stock brokers are the lowest form of life in the galaxy. While there are a small handful of exceptions (Certified Financial Planners who are also training Economists or accoutants), most don't give two shits about their clients, their coworkers, their boss or their current firm. They fly around more than IT people and stealing their firm's intellectual property is both tolerated and expected (firms have routine court cases against each other for the practice of using stock brokers as mediums to move high value clients around the block).
If you can read the newspaper, use online stock analysis tools and place your own orders, you are much better off doing it yourself. Brokers don't have any specific understanding of any market or industry, they don't do their own valuations or formulas and they rely on the same advice that is mostly publicly available for free - and if you have an account with E*Trade or others, you can get the same quality tools that stockbrokers have for free. All they care about is writing tickets, and they don't care if you make or lose money, either way, they get paid.
On the subject of online poker, TillerMan, once a top-ranked Warcraft 3 player, stopped playing Warcraft as a "pro" gamer and became a poker player instead, where he apparently now makes several times what he used to as a "cyber athlete".
Apparently gaming can teach you the skills you need for a very small portion of jobs, but there's little chance of it keeping you employed.
Uh ... Free Trade? Global Economy?
... some machine be doin' it for you, oh woe."
"In the Year 2525, if Man is still alive, arms and legs have nothin' to do
Boy, they sure got that one wrong.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
When laparoscopy was first developed, the surgeon would peer directly through a rigid fiberoptic laparoscope to visualize structures within the body, both for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Nowadays, we just stick a video camera over the eye-hole on the laparoscope, and watch the pictures in real time on an attached monitor. The hardest part about learning laparoscopy is training your brain and hand so that regardless of the orientation, you can move the instruments in your hand such that they travel onscreen in the direction you intend. It's like using a mouse in three dimensions, but with the additional difficulty that moving the mouse "up" in physical space won't necessarily translate into one's instrument moving "up" on the monitor (and within the patient's abdomen). Once you get the hang of it, it's second nature, and you don't even think about the disconnect between what your hands are doing, and what the instrument is doing onscreen.
Even before this study was released, I realized that perhaps by playing more video games I could become a better laparoscopist, with the video game controller forcing my mind to overcome the disconnect between my hand movements and the movements of instruments on the monitor. Alas, I've never been into video games. I sold my copy of Halo because I could never get past the first level. Now my Xbox just chugs happily along as a media receiver.