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Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility
First time accepted submitter briglass writes "Imagine being a total non-gamer and then suddenly playing an hour of StarCraft a day for almost two months. A new study of mine demonstrates that a group of female gaming novices (seriously novice, as in 0 to 1 hour of gaming per week novice) demonstrated increased cognitive flexibility after playing StarCraft, a sort of fast-paced chess on steroids. The control group played The Sims. It's been well known that video gaming can lead to psychological benefits, such as faster perceptual information processing after playing first-person shooter games. But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions. The StarCraft game was customized to be adaptive and remain challenging as the newly minted gamers honed their skills, and in-game behavior was recorded to determine what aspects of StarCraft leads to the boost in flexibility."
...start making apps. An hour or more a day for a year. Tacks will start saying they are as sharp as you.
is in my opinion better and open source as well. http://wz2100.net/ - Graphics are a little dated but the gameplay is very addictive. I would say if the girls were tested with this game they would have been playing for longer than an hour per day ;)
bitches!
that the author is a Starcraft gamer. Look Mom, I'm not playing a stupid game, I'm improving myself.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Games have nothing to do with it. It seems rather self-evident that doing that involves learning something reasonably challenging for an hour a day for two months would boost cognitive flexibility.
...or that will undo all the cognitive gains you get from playing.
... at the cost of unrepairable damage to your self-confidence, complete destruction of your morale, a phobia of and inferiority complex towards Koreans and a decade off your lifespan due to intense, repeated stress from matches and ladder anxiety permeating your life. I'll stick to Harvest Moon, personally.
On the broad scale, girls aren't pushed/lured towards the same activities as boys are. How do we know that Starcraft is as effective a contributing factor as, say, team sports or competitive card games?
The dupe is in the first link of the article. It links back to this same page.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah, you thought they were doing their homework, studying and avoiding drinking parties, but no, no it was always the Starcraft.
Miracle-cure to go!
Tests also revealed that hearing "Nuclear launch detected" when you're expecting to hear "Carrier has arrived" can be extremely demoralizing.
It turns out that playing video games on a regular basis trains you to be better at the skills those games demand.
It also turns out that some video games train valuable skills while still being fun, and other video games train you to be a vegetable.
News at 11.
When you referenced a study that you did with a link, and I clicked that link, it just took me straight back to this page. Can you please edit your submission with a link to your study?
Also, why are we talking about a 15 year old game? Am I missing something here?
Slashdot is turning into a bizarre circle jerk.
Can make you bonkers !!
Should go to: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201308/can-video-games-make-you-smart-or-least-more-flexible Thanks for the comments!
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"Those who quote others are more likely to one day be quoted" -Tom Planter
I doubt anyone who makes such a claim has ever seen high level fast-paced chess.
The first one links back to itself.
The third link (to the actual study) leads to server not found/broken page.
Closer to the thruth.
This is great news! No one ever had a clue that training something might improve the abilities used to do that thing! This changes everything! (who the f*ck comes up with these bullshit studies?)
If you really want to exercise your brain try this sail boat navigation game: http://sailonline.org/
Sooooo... you were BM and surprised he became BM in response?
I think the fact that I had to use a search engine to discover that this means "bad-mannered" is indicative of how hard it is to discover etiquette, especially for the Asperger demographic (like myself) that's attracted to computers in the first place.
Moreover, the implication that 6 pooling is not a valid strategy is subjective. [...] Try 6 pooling over and over again, btw, you'll quickly discover it takes some flair
In other words, when the cheese beats you, you should move with the cheese in order not to be a scrub.
But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions.
do you really believe studies from a magazine that cant even spell it's own name right.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I imagine that if you played Chutes 'n' Ladders competitively, for time, you would get sharper in some ways, too.
It's all relative. Why did they study Starcraft, rather than Warcraft? (Or Everquest II, or...)
We've already made such observations with chimps.
Why is it surprising it works with women too?
Pick up a math or problem solving book and go through it! Seriously. I wasted so much time in my 20s playing Quake 3 and Starcraft, it isn't even funny. I was pretty good at it and quitting wasn't easy. What I would give to have that time back to actually do something productive.
If playing Starcraft could boost your cognitive flexibility, then playing Zero-K could shoot it through the roof all the way to the moon and back.
Some geek finally figured out the best way to get a bunch of women to play video games while letting him study them doing so.
It is now completely obvious that Abathur increased broodmother's limited cognitive flexibility by having them play SC2.
From what? Where you get to be if you spend 15 hours a day playing other video games? Great.