Gaming Skills Directly Linked to Surgical Skills

Orinthe writes "According to Reuters, a new study involving 33 surgeons at a New York hospital shows 'a strong correlation between video game skills and a surgeon's capabilities'. A statement by the senior author of the study even suggests the use of video games as a training tool for surgeons. Another of the study's authors cautions parents to curb excessive gaming, however: 'spending that much time playing video games is not going to help their child's chances of getting into medical school'."

Comments

Problems with the methodology

[scheme]

The criticism that was also given after the article raises from valid points. Mainly whether the "mistakes" that were being counted have any effect on the clinical outcome and whether the the speed of the fastest surgeons indicate better skills or whether it indicated that they were not thinking of the test as a video game and not as a simulation of a procedure on a person.

So no great surprise then

[RogueyWon]

Children who participate in an activity that encourages fine motor controls, a steady hand, spatial awareness, the ability to assimilate new information rapidly and a requirement to perform under pressure in an actual win/lose environment (increasingly rare both in schools and in more traditional orgnised childhood pursuits) tend to increase their aptitutde for a profession that requires the same skills. At the same time, children who focus on said activity to the exclusion of all else put themselves at a big disadvantage.

Not exactly surprising, is it?

With games, as with everything else, the key message is always moderation. A 16-hours-a-day World of Warcraft addict is no more suited to be a surgeon than a steroidally enhanced jock, but just as a measure of sporting prowess can be helpful for some career paths, so the skills you learn from gaming can be of use elsewhere.

Arrgh

[koreaman]

Have the media still not figured out that correlation does not necessarily imply causation?

Re:A quick question

[Xaositecte]

least three hours per week

who had never played video games before.

---

There is still some room for variation between those qualifiers. Perhaps the ones who had played, but not for at least three hours a week, were not statistically significant.

Not the only problem with this study...

[ssummer]

One important point that I think the article and the critique fails to mention is the claim that laparoscopic skill trainers (and by extension video games) decrease intra-op complications/deaths. The author sites two previous articles that define the objective measures of laparoscopic skill which are tested by these trainers but it has yet to be proven whether improving these objective measures has any outcome at all on operative outcomes/complication rates.

So essentially they proved that video games improved surgeons' scores on objective measures of laparoscopic skill but the objective measures of laparoscopic skill have yet to be shown to improve surgical outcome.

P.S. - for those too lazy to read the article, the video games they used were Super Monkey Ball 2 (Gamecube), Star Wars Racer Revenge (PS2), and Silent Scope (Xbox). Sorry, no Trauma Center...