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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."
The forums are bad indeed. But even worse are in-game chat if you make a deviation from a standard, automatic "glhf" at the start and "gg" at the end.
I remember one game when my opponent 6-pooled me (Extremely early rush that either right out kills an unprepared player or loses you the game) and his assault got crushed because I scouted it. But instead of responding to his "gg" in a standard way, I said "game could of been better without the cheese".
That hit a nerve: He/she went nuts! For the next 3 minutes me, my play abilities, all my closest relatives and my pets were called "gay" in a certain miss-spelled and obnoxious way that is stereotyped to 13 year olds. If you enjoy trolling, it is comedy gold. For some reason people playing this game take it extremely seriously.