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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 ;)
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.
Possibly... but they are also neuroscience and psychology PhDs at UT Austin.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
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.
Yes, but assasinating the ghost beaming the target designator can often save your ass. *always* have anti-cloak detection systems with an effective range large enough to reveal enemy ghosts! Always!
(Flying observers work very well here. Set them on continuous patrol. If the enemy player aggressively tries to eliminate them, you know they are planning to nuke, and can pre-empt the strategy. Coupling the observers with some low level flying harrasment craft will give you the "engaged the enemy" alert, pinpointing the location for you. This lets you kill the ghost quickly.)
Many, many more variables to account for in Starcraft than Chess. Also, Chess is turn-based, while SC is real-time, so obviously there is the potential for your move to be countered before you even finish it. Now, the amount of memorization done for Chess is far greater than for SC, especially if a game goes deep. SC is so much more loose and more open-world than Chess that it doesn't lend itself to memorization of moves like Chess and its rigid structure do.
Just making a point that having a PhD doesn't mean the person is free from bias and a sceptic all the time. If they want to believe, they'll probably find evidence, just like the scientists who fell hook line and sinker for Uri Geller. The cynic in me tends to agree with what the OP said.
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.