“If educational video games are well executed, they can provide a strong framework for inquiry and project-based learning”, says Alan Gershenfeld, co-founder and president of E-Line Media, a publisher of computer and video games and a Founding Industry Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Games and Impact. “Games are also uniquely suited to fostering the skills necessary for navigating a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing 21st century,” he adds.
According to Isabela Granic and her fellow researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands, attaching labels such as “good”, “bad”, “violent”, or “prosocial” largely overlooks the complex picture surrounding the new generation of video games now available. Players are drawn to the video games they prefer and the benefits or drawbacks to how they interact with these games are largely shaped by their motivation for playing.
Granic also highlighted the possibility that video games are effective tools for learning resilience in the face of failure. By learning to cope with ongoing failures in games, she suggests that children build emotional resilience they can rely upon in their everyday lives.
Mean while, Daphne Bavelier, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, New York, says “We need to be far more nuanced when we talk about the effects of video games.”
Bavelier and her friend published a research in 2003, where they used a series of visual puzzles to demonstrate that individuals who played action games at least 4 days per week for a minimum of 1 hour per day were better than non-gamers at rapidly processing complex information, estimating numbers of objects, controlling where their attention was focused spatially, and switching rapidly between tasks.
Play action-based games and you could make accurate decisions 25% faster – According to scientists from the University of Rochester, they have conducted research where participants aged 18 to 25 were split into two groups. One group played 50 hours of the action-packed first-person shooter games “Call of Duty 2″ and “Unreal Tournament,” and the other group played 50 hours of the simulator game “The Sims 2.” The action game players made decisions 25% faster in a task unrelated to playing video games, without sacrificing accuracy.
Lastly but not least, Surgeons can improved their laparoscopic skills by playing video games – doctors who spent one month playing either Wii Tennis, Wii Table Tennis, or a balloon warfare game (called High Altitude Battle) performed better in simulated tasks designed to test eye-hand coordination and movement precision, according to the study published in the Journal PLOS One.
Note: laparoscopic is a procedure in which a thin tube with a camera is inserted into the abdomen to see organs on a screen, instead of cutting patients wide open.
That’s a great finding. Everyone should try playing video games whenever they had a chance.