Video game are making kids act violently toward one another, they are making us all fatter, they cause attention deficits and are generally no good for society at large… or are they. While some factions of the general public and some conservative key opinion leaders may think so, the time has come for science to staunchly dispute that belief, put it to a test, and prove just how fallacious it actually is. Recent research undertaken by a team of experts with the University of Rochester has concluded that playing video games actually improves a set of skills that are highly useful in real life.
These conclusions were reached by testing the children while playing their favorite interactive entertainment titles, but they were also confirmed in controlled setting, via several lab tests seeking to gauge the children’s reaction times. According to Dr. Matthew Dye, one of the scientists involved in the research, the recent findings also disprove the belief according to which gamers have fast reaction times, yet their answers and decisions become increasingly inaccurate as the game’s pace progressively speeds up. Dye explains that this is simply not true: gamers actually have better visual cognition than people who are not used to playing games. This quality was also tested in lab tests, as were several other aptitudes, which the formal schooling environment also strives to teach children. The participants to the test were also scored for comprehension and for their hand-eye coordination abilities. The findings were resolutely in favor of video games, who help people enable their mental rotation skills, as well as their visual and spatial memory. In a nutshell, people who play games are much more adept at multi-tasking and dividing their attention among several stimuli than the rest of us.
The study’s findings have already caused some stir in the United Kingdom, where representatives of the Play England program stated that the very same skills can be improved during outdoor play, and that it is dangerous to encourage video game playing. However, while the above may well be true, Dye added another point to his argument in favor of video games. The cognitive decline that elders experience may well be combatted through playing video games – especially valuable, since the elderly are rarely ever in shape anymore to play outside.