Monday, September 13, 2010

In praise of video games: Why World of Warcraft is good for you | The Economist

Sign of the times

The work is published in Current Biology. What was particularly interesting was that the faster reaction times of the video gamers could be acquired by non-video gamers in 50 hours of training over a few weeks. But for the benefits to accrue, they had to play a particular sort of game.

Only those who played fast-moving action video games such as "Call of Duty 2" and "Unreal Tournament" saw an improvement in their decision-making skills. Rather ironically, players of "The Sims 2", a game where one has to decide how to organise an entire simulated world, did not benefit this way. Those trained with action video-games were 25% faster at coming to a conclusion, and answered just as many questions correctly.

In praise of video games: Why World of Warcraft is good for you | The Economist

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