Study Finds Video Games Help with Decision Making

It would appear that video games may not be such a waste of time after all.

A new study conducted by the University of Rochester and featured in the September 14 issue of Current Biology finds that gamers who regularly play action video games – particularly shooters such as those in the “Halo” or “Call of Duty” series – are better at making quick and accurate decisions.

For the study, gamers and non-gamers alike were presented with a series of dots and were told to identify the direction of the dots’ motion. There were varying levels of difficulty based on the number of dots that were moving in the same direction. It was discovered that gamers who spent a lot of time playing action video games could identify the direction of the dots faster and more accurately than those who didn’t play action games. Researchers therefore reached the conclusion that the unpredictability of shooters and other such video games play a factor in how quickly gamers could make decisions. It was even suggested that these games could be used to train people such as surgeons or soldiers who need to make quick decisions in life-and-death scenarios.

While standard learning paradigms often have very specific solutions, the very unpredictability of many modern action games ensure that situations are very rarely repeated. Modern gaming requires gamers to “think on their feet” and process information on the fly since there is almost never one solution to a given problem. Gamers have also been shown to be able to track up to 30 percent more objects in motion than non-gamers

This isn’t the first time that video games have been found to be beneficial to the average gamer. A similar study conducted in 2003 by the University of Rochester found that video games can boost visual skills, and that an avid gamer was often more attuned to their surroundings while performing tasks such as driving down a residential street. That study also suggested that video games could be used to rehabilitate someone who was visually impaired or to train soldiers for combat.

These findings should come as good news for those gamers who need an excuse to stay home on their Xboxes all day. As with anything else, gaming should be done in moderation, but at least gamers can claim that spending three hours playing the latest “Halo” game isn’t without at least some benefits.

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