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Videogaming Keeps the Brain From Aging
Ant wrote to mention a Globe and Mail article stating that videogames keep the mind young and help in quick focusing on different tasks. "A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks. A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable."
Do you know what this means? The "Hot Coffee Scene" is good for you!
Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tas--
Yeah, whatever. Dude!! Check out this score! w00t!
Now.. what were you saying?
Plenty of complaints about immature guys have been heard over the years.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
You can prove it yourself just go on any counterstrike server even the adults act like thay are 12 years old
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
People who are capable of changing tasks quickly enjoy playing videogames.
I'm bilingual (2 1/4 to be correct) gamer, so $subj :-)
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
I knew I should keep playing video games all night instead of studying...I'm keeping myself alive longer, so I can study more!
Well OK, games are often about solving problems and getting around situations which try to trick you.
I think real world exercises would be of equal benefit, assuming that the exposure is broad enough, but this at least confirms that simulations are a good way of training people, which has been understood in aerospace since the 1960's.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
weird. i'm bilingual, and i play videogames pretty often, but i have a lot of difficulty filtering out distractions.
Now this study comes out...my whole life friends, family, and significant others thought I suffered from ADHD when really I'm just...
Civilization, the death of dreams.
i playd vidoe games all way thru hi scooll, and i faled a lota clases, and my parents kiked me out of home, but now even in my old age of 32 i feel yung @ haeart. so... i think they r ryte.. i thank vid. games for ervrything i have.. my gf i met on hallo xbox online, my dog (but ive been layuing lots of vid. games lately and i dont know hwhere he is), and my fun job @ teh bowling allie.
long liv vid. gamnes!@ keeping us yung 4 ever!
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
To stay young, play:
Halo: El Combate Ha Evolucionado
Prof. Bialystok first noticed bilingual children were proficient in blocking out irrelevant information about 20 years ago. When asked to identify a grammatically correct sentence, for example, both bilinguals and monolinguals are, by age 5, able to choose, "Apples grow on trees," over "Apple trees on grow" as the correct one. But when it came to asking "Apples grow on noses" versus "Apples nose on grow," only the bilingual children were able to choose the right answer. Although the first sentence is grammatically correct, monolingual children could not get over its silliness. "That's crazy," they'd shout, "You can't say that!"
Maybe this is good, maybe not. If this is training people to move on and solve the problem, even though they understand that there is a problem with the validity of the sentence, then it is a good thing. On the other hand, if they are able to do better because don't even notice the problem, then maybe it's not so good. I've seen plenty of times where everyone's so focused on solving a problem that they don't realize they're solving the wrong problem.
I personally play a ton of video games still in my mid-thirties and support this wholeheartedly. The thing about video games, to me, is that they constantly challenge your mind.
I remember a gentlemene that was in his seventies telling me once that he kept mentally spry simply by reading, doing puzzles, and the like. He said that most adults are effectively senile early on because they quit reading and generally idle in front of TV. TV bores me; it doesn't challenge you to do much of anything except look, so I'd imagine that ANYONE who plays any kind of games requiring use of their brain would be a step up on people who don't.
Anyway ... I play to be playing games until I can't see and hear them anymore. Hopefully in my old age we'll have decent VR and can simply "plug in" ;)
Okay, so they surveyed 100 college students. Of gamers I know in college, a very large percentage tend to be engineers, and many of those tend to be Asian American...and speak a second language because of their heritage...and very likely came from families that really emphasized math and sciences. Most "mental tests" tend to lean in favor of that population.
If this is true than this generation should prove to be more mentally healthy than previous generations into old age. Video games didn't exist for the Boomer's childhood and didn't hit mainstream till adolecence for Gen X. But Gen Y and later have had the availabilty of this sort of therapy since they were old enough to hold a joystick. This increased time should (in my theory at least) mean greater mental ability into old age than the pervious two generations.
I wonder if the type of game or level of difficulty have any effect either. I find today's games are a lot more complex than when I was young. Yet you still see young people able to master them. Perhaps this will enhance the effect due to the additional hand-eye coordination and problem solving skills needed to navigate in a modern first person shooter (where vertical/rotational perspective has to be tracked independently of actual character movement) vs. the simple side scrollers we started on (like Super Mario Bros).
Like the idea long ago that 65 years was very old age one would be lucky to make it to, perhaps someday the idea of the mentally feeble old man will be tossed as people stay sharp in mind far into their twilight years.
Watch any older adult try to pick up a game controller and play a videogame. *IF* they manage to get the hang of using the controller, they typically are overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the modern videogame and the number of things they must simultaneously (and QUICKLY) keep track of. This has always been, IMHO, at least anecdotal evidence that videogames clearly develop a certain set of mental skills that very few other activities develop so effectively.
I've certainly noticed it's improved my memory and allowed me to become more adept at finding my way around new places. Expansive games like GTA: SA have allowed me to learn locations & glean directions with just a cusory glance at a map. Thanks videogames!
Wanna get nasty? - DaNasty
On the other hand. if you instead of spending your time playing VG's you spend it studying, working, reading an educational book, socializing with fun or interesing people, the benefits would far surpass the whatever skills these ppl claim you acquire.
...)
(Not to mention the increased number of opportunities to meet chicks, unless of course you are this guy
http://media.putfile.com/PurePwnage-WoWisafeeling
most Europeans speak 2 or 3 languages... and yes, they consider Americans stupid.
This exact point is covered in the extremely excellent "Everything Bad Is Good For You" which I'm sure Slashdot has reviewed...let's see. Yep.
It's an excellent book and well worth the time and money. Covers a huge range of topics from watching TV to playing Grand Theft Auto, and it does so in a well informed and enlightening way.
I think you misunderstand. The complexity doesn't come from the interface.
Take my father, for example. He's been driving since he was in high-school, so I'm pretty sure he's caught onto that. He's got an IQ of like 140 or so, so he's no idiot.
Now, place a Playstation 1 controller in his hand and let him play a racing game. Pick an easy one with just the analog stick, brake and gas. (Yes, I've done this.)
The result is pathetic. He actively WANTS to play it. He asked for it. He repeatedly runs into the walls, forgets which controls are which (There's only 2!) and generally just fails at the game. He played for a few hours with the same results. He asked me like 3 or 4 times over the first hour or so what the controls were. (Admittedly, the last time was a confirmation, not a question.)
This is something any kid I can name would be able to do quite easily. He did not grow up with video games of any sort, and does not touch-type.
He's an amazing industrial engineer, but the simplest of video games eludes him. It's not the complicated UI, it's a thought-pattern he never developed. Maybe if he spent enough time at it, he could pick it up, but he never will. He's got too many things to do that are actually fun for him.
I think the study fails to recognize that there are thought-patterns associated with being a good gamer, but gamers definitely tend towards more agile thinking and better motor skills, at least for the hands.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I've entered university two years ago and I've been styding various programming algorithms there (like width- and depth- searching in graphs, data flow etc).
When I recently played Warcraft (haven't played it for three years or more) I've found out that I'm applying the stuff I've been studying. Particulary, using width-searching when I'm developing my home base. As a result, I'm beating the computer all the time and often even some of my hardcore-gaming friends.
Well, if I haven't entered university, I would be actually not playing games better. So, it's my education that's helping me play better and not vice-versa.
And about bilingual players: if your native language is not English and you know only one language it's kind of hard to be playing non-translated English games.
One more interesting fact: my native language is Russian, but while I was playing Doom 3 (in English) for the first time I found myself swearing in English. Was kind of funny when I found out.
It's at least as intuitive as a car's controls. You turn a wheel to make the car change direction? Which way is clockwise, left or right? You press a lever down to make it go forwards. You press an identical level to make it stop? And you press it the same way! You have to move a stick to different positions for different gears (it would appear as speeds) and it also handles reverse? But there's only 1 gear for that? If you'd never seen a car, it would be very unintuitive.
For the psx, there's just a stick that goes left or right to make the car go left or right. You press a button to go. You press a button to stop. (And most race games make this the reverse as well.) So you've got forwards and backwards as buttons. It changes gears for you and handles reverse automatically.
Nothing except a car teaches you how to drive a car. It's the same with video games. It's a different thought process to learn so that it becomes almost instinct for you.
This is so much the case that we are even now still exploring new control methods. Nintendo Revolution has created a 'new' method. (If you listen to Nintendo, they invented everything but the paddle and joystick.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
But what about the body? Sure, gaming is good for the brain... so is readin, drawing, studying, thinking, fantasizing, and pretty much anything else you do with your mind. How do I know... simple - if you stop you're dead.
But more importantly, as I said, what about the body? I'm pretty sure it isn't helped by those 48 hour MMORPG maratons. Really want to have the mind of a 12 year old in the body of a 75 year old... when you'r thirty, or maybe forty? Really?
I think I'll diversify a bit more myself. Maybe pick up another language... or I dunno... not game so much.
Just one more level.
I already tested the Alzheimer's idea at my local nursing home. I put half the residents on a regime of Tetris, and half on Grand Theft Auto. The tetris players showed a marked improvement in cognitive skills, right up to the point when the GTA players jacked their wheelchairs, shot them for their money and took their meds to sell.
"These aren't 'mental skills' - they're learned behaviors."
Learned behaviors are mental skills. Seems our brains are geared more for reacting to events around us than to ponderous analysis. This makes sense if you think about our evolution: Which is going to let you live longer to successfully breed, thinking about running away from the obvious danger, or just running and maybe thinking about it later.
Some suggest that we do actual thinking only to the point where we find a valid, working reaction. We then use that same reaction until it's obviously not working any longer, at which point we learn a new behavior. In other words, we react to events far more than we actually think about them. This explains many annoying things about human behavior.
Cheers.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
When I turned 60, I didn't turn myself in for euthanasia, either. Star Ocean is lots more fun, and I've learned to appreciate those annoying AI bugs.
On a serious note, I apparently had a minor strokelet a couple years ago that left me unable to understand the color red in the context of traffic lights, stop signs, tail lights, etc. Red means stop, of course, bear with me here. When I see red in any more or less urgent context involving driving a car, red is simply invisible.
I have to TELL myself, in words, what it means. I've got the tickets to show for this weirdly anecdotal condition, and I've learned to love my 2000 Honda Civic's ABS and V-Tek engine in consequence. That was then.
These days, several months after the worst of these episodes (it was never life-threatening, fortunately), my "red reflex" has rewired itself almost back to normal -- and the only major change in my lifestyle has been videogaming. Post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that jazz, Doc, but I think there's something to it.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
This must be why my wife says I always act like an 8 year old..
I have ADD, I have a terrible time focusing my attention, but when I do, it locks on harder than a bell hop at a bunny club. In any case, I tend to play games for the exact reason that they give me something to focus on. Gaming really helps me to relax at the end of the day and gives me a bit of a break from the maelstrom of conflicting signals we encounter throughout our day to day lives. I'm guessing that I'm not the only one, and that many people with concentration issues are drawn to gaming as a kind of self-medication.
Gaming did wonders for me back in college, by the way. I was struggling to get by because of lack of focus—I couldn't pull myself together to get my work in on time—yet, the semester I finally started gaming (plodded my way through the Final Fantasy series, if anyone's interested), my work habbits shot up, my grades improved, and I started getting back on track. There were other reasons too, but I think I owe quite a lot of my improvement to daily gaming.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I think the most intriguing part is where he reviewed about 5 minutes in the mind of someone playing Wind Waker. He litterally has to use up pages and pages of hierarchical lists to demonstrate the thought process, and then at the end says, "this is something like 1/100th of the entire game". Having played games in the series, I think he hit the nail on the head.
My only qualm with the book is that he originally had setout to do a book about video games, but then realized that his theories paralleled other entertainment mediums as well, and then devoted about 1/4 of the book on games. He didn't really dive into the psychology nearly as much as he could have; he could have easily written an entire book just using gaming, and it probably would have been a lot more informative.
I don't remember him talking much about GTA, except for trying to gently curb its negative media coverage towards the beginning of the book. I don't remember him really going into detail on it, though.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Someone recently referred to raid healing in WoW as "health-bar whack-a-mole". You spend several hours staring intently at one small section of your screen, clicking a mouse button in response to changing colours. and they wonder why healers go a little crazy with the DPS occasionally.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Most driving games require the discrete analog version of turning. i.e.,
turn slowly = tap... tap... tap
while
turn fast = taptaptaptaptaptap
I've found that as I get older, the harder it is to play games that require this. For instance, playing Gran Turismo 4 , I find that it's harder to control the cars as well as when I played the first one. note that I don't like the analog pad; maybe it's my controller, but it is way too sensitive.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
The fact is, games started with a simple interface, if only by virtue of not having CPU or RAM for more complex stuff. Pong only had two directions: up and down. Pacman had four. At this point we're not even talking about a fire button yet: just the directions. Then games got a fire button. Then two. Then gradually... well, have you looked at a console controller lately? A PS2 one sports no less than 12 buttons, including the thumbsticks which can _also_ act as buttons, in addition to their normal function. And then there are PC games which put even that to shame: using two dozen buttons or more is the norm in some genres, like flight sims.
Then we've had to learn other stuff. There are all sorts of concepts and reflexes which got added one by one. And we gamers learned them one by one, over the course of two decades or more. We already had the previous concept, and the time to get thoroughly used to it, before we got the next one dumped upon us.
Another poster a while ago compared it to a "game grammar". (In the same kind of way as an XML Schema is called a "grammar".) It tells you what goes where, and what kind of thing is expected in which sequence. Quite often cotrary to any RL rules or experience.
E.g., you already know that if it's a RPG, you're supposed to walk up to every single person in a major capital and talk to them. (IRL that's not what it's expected.) Or that it's just normal to try all conflicting option in a dialogue until something happens. (What would happen IRL if you said the exact opposites within 5 minutes in the same conversation, is left as an exercise.) Or you're supposed to already know distinctions like between "named NPC" and "generic NPC". (IRL everyone is named. Other than in medieval Japan, noone was ever simply called "a rice farmer".) And about a thousand other little things like "quest", "random drop" (e.g., that you don't get wool by shearing a sheep or meat by slaughtering a pig, but both might -- or might not -- "drop" when you kill one. Or that when asked to bring 4 zebra hooves, that doesn't mean one zebra.), etc, etc, etc.
Or here's some more anecdotal evidence that a co-worker randomly provided in a conversation: he said that his old father, in spite of otherwise being an intelligent man, has trouble understanding that the same button can perform several different and unrelated functions, depending on the "mode" the game/device/etc is in or on what other buttons are pressed at the same time. The guy has a lifetime of experience telling him that, say, in a car, the windshield wiper button does only one thing: start/stop the wipers. And if you need a different function, like accelerate, it will be a different button or pedal, not switching modes and using the windshield wiper button to accelerate. Now look at the gamepad use in many games, and you can surely see how its use is based on the exact opposite assumption.
There are all these things that you're supposed to already _know_. And even when the game gives you a tutorial, it's usually just the fine points, not the basics you're supposed to already know. (If it were a RL language's grammar, imagine your very first tutorial being "how to use the Ablative mode in the Less-Than-Perfect tense", but no explanation wth is the Ablative and wth of a tense is that to start with, or how do you form either from a normal word. That's game tutorials for a first time gamer.)
That's the problem with first time gamers, especially if they're adults who can't spend 16 hours a day for 8 years just learning all that the hard way. They're expected to already know some two dozen years of game concepts evolution, and they just don't. It's not that we gamers are smarter or have a bigger, more flexible brain. We just know that "game grammar" already. We do ok with just some advanced tutorial to refresh that grammar, or the fine points used in that game, but a first timer simply lacks the basic notions he's expected to already have.
And to get back on topic, I expect it's the same phenomenon that they're s
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I suspect it's just that, actually. We gamers are used to solving the wrong problem (by RL standards) in the right way, or for that matter working with rules and problems that make no sense whatsoever by RL standards. We've got over two decades of experience saying that such stuff is just _normal_, if the game says so:
- that wolves, or for that matter insects, carry coins or pieces of armour, or that you can get a 6 ft two-handed sword as loot on a 1 ft rabbit
- but, conversely, things you'd expect each of them to have IRL, like meat on a pig, is equally a random drop and you might need to slaughter 20 pigs to get a pound of meat
- that shooting enemy planes leaves giant coins floating in the air, and you can collect them by ramming your airplane into them
- that the exact same armour piece, e.g., maille boots, fit a gnome or a half-giant equally well
- that, conversely, the "recipe" for frying a trout over a camp fire (you know, just stick it on a stick and hold it over the fire) works only on trout, and you have to buy a different "recipe" to fry a different kind of fish over a camp fire. Or that having learned to hold a sword by the handle doesn't also teach you how to hold a flanged mace by the non-flanged end, and you have to buy that skill separately. (Note that at this point we're not talking about using it well, or effectively. We're talking just being able to hold it at all.)
- that skills are only learned from trainers and you can't teach anything to another player (e.g., that if I'm a master swordsman and travelling for months with an archer, I couldn't possibly teach him to use a sword. He'll have to wait until he finds a proper weapon trainer for swords.)
- that, depending on your class, there are things you're physically unable to learn or wear. (E.g., if you're a hunter, you can't ever learn to even hold a mace or warhammer... although you already know how to use a sword or axe. And at least the axe is IRL literally the same kind of impact weapon, as medieval fighting styles went.)
- that smithing skill can be used to make a new sword or breastplate, but you can't possibly use the same skill to repair its edge or hammer the breastplate back into shape after it's been used in combat
- that the ingredients used and the type of item you end up with are completely unrelated. (E.g., that engineering headgear made out of medium leather in WoW counts as "cloth", so your mage can wear it, but you can't wear leather boots for example, although they're equally made of leather.)
- that things work differently during the cut scenes than in the actual game (e.g., that they couldn't use a Phoenix Dawn or spell to revive Aeris, although that's how it works the whole rest of the game. Or that the same handgun does 1% of your current HP in the actual game, but can kill or be threatening enough for a character to surrender in a cut scene.)
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically my take is that we gamers are so used to working with absurd rules, that we don't even really notice them any more. (Other than maybe for a quick smirk.) If a game sent you to pick apples from noses, the average gamer would just go and dutifully do just that. Sure. Why not? Compared to some other things I've done in games, that doesn't even start to disturb me.
Basically it's not that gamers can mentally turn off _any_ one aspect of a problem, to work on the others. It's just _this_ particular aspect which we've been beat upside the head with until it stopped bothering us. Yes, so gamers aren't bothered by absurd rules or sentences like "apples grow on noses", and can completely ignore the absurdity in that. No surprise there. But I'd be more interested if _other_ aspects of a problem can be mentally turned off by a gamer as well. My guess is that it might turn out to be a lot less natural to a gamer too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I wonder if people have noticed that right at the end of the article, the study's author, Ellen Bialystok, states "I really would prefer my child read a book."