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What Gamers Have In Common With Top Athletes
nk497 writes "It's no surprise that professional gamers aren't quite as fit as elite athletes, but they do have something in common. According to a British academic, top-level players show similar psychological attributes as top athletes, such as the ability to manage anxiety, and have reaction times on par with fighter pilots. Dr. Micklewright said, 'When I first got asked to do [the study], my initial reaction was "don't be ridiculous, gaming is nothing like sport." But the more I thought about it, the more similarities [became clear], and I became more and more convinced that it was close in many ways to sport.' While sitting in front of a screen might not have the same physical demands as running a marathon, neither do playing snooker or darts. Still, while gamers show good reflexes, their health was worse than expected, with one 20-something professional player showing the same aerobic health as a 60-year-old smoker." This story is based on a BBC radio report which you can currently hear, although that link seems to say that it won't last.
I may be a gamer, but my right hand has the stamina of an 18 year old!
AS long as Google still shows OTHER hits for such searches I would say let BP pay Google through their nose to get their links to the top of the list.
Many of them are obvious suggestions, but here are some tips on how to stay healthy while gaming. I hope it helps some of you folks out.
Mods, please mod this post offtopic or troll due to website pumping.
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Like Ronaldo? http://karatedesantacatarina.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/ronaldo-gordo.jpg
Not much.
Bah, who needs em. I'm going to have better sports. With blackjack,alcohol and hookers. Infact forget the sports.
Athletes meet cheerleaders and gamers meet avatars, and those avatars are probably better looking than the cheerleaders. And don't tell me I'm sexist because there is almost no chance that you are 1) female, 2) heterosexual, 3) a gamer, and 4) reading this post.
They both get overpaid to play a game.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Since it's been shown that aerobic exercise can improve reaction time, I can't help but wonder how much better of gamers they would be if they also exercised a bit as well. They wouldn't need to go to a gym. Just some running, or crunches, or something on a regular basis would help, I would bet.
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Sports typically have one or two major common injuries associated with them, like knee damage for cross country skiing. I wonder if this will show on gamers in 20 or 30 years.
I'm specifically interested if mental problems occur later in life from over-use of the brain. Some gamers typically work a mental job, then come home and engage in 5-6 hours of very mentally intensive activity. Your brain gets hammered pretty heavily over the course of a day.
Another possibility is eye damage. During intense gaming sessions I notice that I dry my eyes out repeatedly focusing by not blinking during specific events. I wonder if this will effect me in 20 years. On another note, most gamers I've met have the same vision as me and we can wear each other's glasses without issue.
Might not? Might not?? Hell, making a sandwich has more physical demands than playing the vijimagames.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Is the 20 year old "Professional gamer" with the "aerobic health as a 60-year-old smoker" in that condition due to gaming, or is he gaming because that's all he can do, because of some pre-existing limitation?
I ask, because it takes longer for a sedentary life style to put you in THAT bad shape than your typical 20 year old would have in the interval between highschool and their 20th birthday.
Where does one get a job being a "professional gamer" other than working for a game developer?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Online gaming actually helped me understand real-life sports. When I was a kid my dad took me to Hockey and Soccer and other organized sports, and I never really "got it". I didn't have any aggression in my personality and when the parents were saying "it's not important to win, it's important to have fun" I actually took them to heart and didn't care about the game, at all.
I finally figured out the pleasure of cooperative sport playing Counterstrike in my bedroom. I actually got pretty decent and had moments that parallel great sports stories: one time I single-handedly cleared a team of 6 players, finishing the last one with my knife. It was my full-length touchdown run and there was actual human adrenaline pumping in my veins.
After my kinda-sorta epiphany, I actually left the house and joined a ball hockey team. I still suck at hockey but I understand the pleasure of the game and that everyone is working together to become better players.
Anyway, I'm not surprised that the top "cyber athletes" have the same mental processes as top athletes. Competition is competition..
Other studies show that the sky is black at night with little white speckles, gray when it's raining at noon and blue when it's not.
What's next, they're going to study where bears shit and what religion the Pope is?
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In most cases, Eye Hand Coordination is a big factor in sports, and a big factor in gaming .
Obviously there are exceptions like soccer and checkers, but yeah there is a lot of cross over.
I would have thought this was immediately obvious as someone who has both played video games and sports competitively.
The biggest difference from a competitive point of view? Video games put you completely at the mercy of developers, and it sucks.
Who wants to spend a year refining a particular talent for a video game, and then have a new patch completely change the balance and gameplay dynamics.
Also if you put 8 years of your life into the game, what happens when it's out of date? Even if it's a game with big tournaments and prizes, they all go out of style.
Mainstream sports, on the other hand, date back thousands of years and should experience very few changes in our lifetime.
As an adult, I could never devote myself fully to a game in that manner...
As a child I guess I had nothing better to do =)
I wonder if the study focused on whether or not both groups display high levels of testosterone and high levels of competitiveness. I always figured that the constant tea-bagging and shit-talking in Halo and such were just virtual depictions of the same male-centric dominance instinct that athletes display by making fouls, being unnecessarily belligerent, or just being douchebags in general. I know both groups often (though not always) display an attitude of elitism towards those that are not part of the, 'club.' I know that competitive sports are so popular because they, essentially, allow for the enactment of modern alpha-male style dominance displays. I wonder if the same can be said of gamers. I can't count how many times I've heard a Halo player blow his verbal load on Xbox live talking about how good he is and why he is so much better. There has to be a link in those attributes too. I wonder if further studies are going to look into that or not.
That said, I think football and soccer would be funnier if the scoring team tea-bagged their rivals every time they made a point.
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"Whoa man, there's ProGamer69"
"Yeh, he's uber leet, look at the size of him"
"He must put in some serious sessions to get a bod like that, just look as them rolls of flab"
"Yeah, I just wanna grab them and roll about in them"
"You're working on a pretty nice gut yourself, how do you manage it with this pro-fitness thing everyone is forcing on us?"
"Oh that" *scoffs* "CoD7 + Mountain Dew all the way bud"
I play video games and I'm quite good. I always rank high in reaction time games like racing and also RTS games too. I was actually the #7 ranked platinum player in the Starcraft II Beta before it reset :) and I guess I break the stereotype because I'm extremely fit and in shape. One reason is I have a gym membership that I actually use and secondly, I play Dance Dance revoltion! The estimates of calories burned per song are between 10 and 35 and they're all under 2 minutes long. I have freakishly strong legs now because of that and pretty good aerobic abilities. I never actually run anywhere but if I suddenly decided to do so, I bet I could get a couple miles. Last time I played someone's Wii I was sweating too so if I had one of those, I'd be so healthy it would be crazy :-P Then there's that glorified eye toy thing that's coming out soon that will force people to move around so I think this all these things will get gamers in shape pretty quickly. But as for right now, some of us are already quite fit FROM gaming.
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Youtube Pavel Datsyuk or Ovechkin and tell me that hockey is boxing..
Yeah, there are fights in hockey, but there normally it isn't like there is a fight a game.
I played hockey and football growing up, football was so easy it was sickening. Watching a play unfold was simple...
In hockey you are moving at 25 MPH (easy) and the goalies are stopping pucks moving at 90+MPH...
Hockey is nothing like boxing, very few players get paid to fight anymore, most are paid for goals or a nice +/-...
So what they found is that video games select for those qualities that result in superior performance. Fast reflexes, increases in focus with pressure, etc.
Make a game that consists of holding a heavy rock motionless in your hand and you'll find a class of players with different qualities.
People without those qualities are not likely to progress, and eventually not likely to continue playing, certainly not to be promoted to more-skilled competitions.
Like, duh.
This explains why I am always winded after a good game of UT.
Of course many video games involves hand-eye coordination, managing anxiety, ..
That's why pilots train with flight simulators (hello video game).
They should get this guy to study is water really wet, is the sky really blue, and a myriad of other less obvious questions.
A lot of pro football players play Madden and the like as a simulator. It's especially beneficial to amateur players who don't have the benefit of having their whole career dedicated to football.
When a fighter pilot finishes his work, bad guys are dead.
When an athlete crosses the finish line, he's got a trophy, and probably a beautiful girl on his arm.
When a gamer gets his mage to level 80, he's still a fat loser in his mom's basement.
Right?... Bueller?...
ceci n'est pas un sig
It was good for him
Apples and oranges. Video games rarely if ever require me to find a creative solution to a problem. Likewise my job never requires me to be in constant twitch mode ready to shoot anything that moves. Two different parts of the brain.
If you can drink beer while performing the activity, it's a GAME, not a SPORT.
Still, while gamers show good reflexes, their health was worse than expected, with one 20-something professional player showing the same aerobic health as a 60-year-old smoker."
Impressive. If I was into something like that I would make sure to cut my junk food, avoid overeating and substitute 30 min of gaming a day for a walk.
Chicks dig us, and so we get laid a lot.
How to use square brackets
There are two uses of square brackets (which, confusingly, Americans call simply brackets):
* to set off an interruption within a direct quotation [Churchill said of the Battle of Britain: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few [the Royal Air Force pilots]".]
* to set off material which is extraneous to the main text, such as the examples of the usage of punctuation in this essay or comments in a draft document which are not intended to be in the final version
In which way?
Sportspeople in particular are in a savage market, they are actually "sold" when in reality they are just changing employer (when it comes to some sports outside the US, where the cartels controlling salaries in the guise of sport leagues keep things under tabs).
They are worth so much money because ovbisouly the entertainment value they provide is worth it.
The indictment should be on a society willing to pay so much for something of dubious social value, not on the sportspeople themselves.