Regular gamers have rapid reactions

Many computer games require quick reactions: whether it’s negotiating a hair-pin bend or dodging the swing of a Minotaur’s axe, the faster a player can react, the better they’ll do. It also turns out that the quick reactions learned in action-heavy games carry over to real life, according to a recent study by American researchers.

Are all of those hours playing games good for you? Image: Hypothesisnow

By looking at many different studies published by others, the researchers compared the reaction times and accuracy of regular action game-players to those of novice gamers. Regular action game-players performed, on average, 11% faster on a range of tests designed to measure reaction times.

So gamers are fast, but do they gain their speed boost at the expense of accuracy? The data would suggest not. In fact, the accuracy of both regular gamers and novice gamers was almost identical, at 92.76% and 92.75%.

The researchers also carried out a simple experiment to test their findings: a group of novice gamers were asked to play action games (Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty 2, in this case) for fifty hours over eight or nine weeks. The gamers improved their reaction times by around 13% while maintaining the same level of accuracy when compared to novice gamers given The Sims to play in the same period of time.

So playing action games regularly can train gamers to react to what they see – known as visual processing – faster than non-gamers, or even when compared with gamers whose preferred games don’t rely on quick reactions. Speedy visual processing has been linked to better reasoning and judgement, so playing action games might help elderly people retain their mental agility for longer. It could even help people who have suffered brain injuries by boosting their mental performance. Unfortunately, the researchers point out that the content and difficulty of many modern games means they’re probably not suitable for therapeutic uses in young or elderly patients.

So we probably won’t ever see doctors prescribing a course of Modern Warfare 2 for elderly patients, or a few laps of the track on Colin McRae for people suffering head trauma.  For now, it’s just good to know all those hours of gaming are doing us all some good!

“We’re all individuals!”

Who sets the latest trends – the advertisers and media organisations, or your friends? According to American researchers, both have an influence on the trends we follow.

By looking at how people interact and share things in the on-line world Second Life, the researchers were able to show that around half of the virtual goods people acquired (indicating which trends they followed) came directly from friends. The rest came from virtual shops.

Second Life's trend-setters? Really? Image credit: Linden Lab

They also showed that the chances of an individual following a trend increased dramatically as more of their friends did so. However, those people with lots of friends were less easily influenced by any one of their friends, as the effect of each friend was lost in the crowd. Trends also spread very quickly through groups of friends, possibly because they had similar interests, but they reached far fewer people this way. This suggests viral marketing campaigns can be powerful tools to spread the word about products aimed at small, specialist groups, but will be less effective when trying to reach large audiences.

One advantage of carrying out the study inside Second Life is that interactions in the virtual world leave a record of when and how they occur. This allowed the researchers to establish exactly when someone acquired something new, and from whom. The researchers could never hope to record such detailed information in real life.

Real life is complicated, and reliable data can be hard to collect. By using virtual worlds, scientists can access much more specific information about how people interact. My favourite example of this was the escape of a virtual plague in the on-line game World of Warcraft. The spread of the plague through the world’s population allowed researchers to examine how real people’s interactions can help or hinder the spread of real-life diseases.

Testing hypotheses about how diseases are transmitted, how people interact socially, or even how economies function can be difficult, and quickly encounter ethical and moral barriers. Virtual worlds circumvent such problems, and I suspect they have a long future as testing grounds for answering all manner of otherwise unanswerable questions.

Be a better person – play computer games

Behavioural adjustment free with every console?

Do violent computer games turn players into violent people? Perhaps. On the other hand, do games which encourage players to think about the needs of others make us better people? Recent studies suggest they do.

Researchers from the USA, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia combined the results of three very different studies to suggest people who play positive, or “prosocial”, games are more helpful to others afterwards. The three studies each investigated the effects of games on the behaviour of children or students in different contexts and over different timescales.

The researchers’ conclusion is that playing computer games does not, in itself, lead to anti-social behaviour, but that specific game content can encourage those who play to adopt similar behaviour themselves.

Using what they call the “General Learning Model” the researchers suggest that any stimulus can lead to behavioural changes. Computer games prime players to behave in certain ways – whether positive or negative – and, importantly, reward or punish players according to how well they perform these behaviours. The reward or punishment reinforces the chosen behaviour, encouraging players to carry it over into real life.

So if playing violent kill-fests such as PS3 shooter Killzone 2 makes us less pleasant individuals, imagine the good that comes from playing positive games such as popular on-line strategy game Food Force, or even the beautiful Ico – arguably one of the most prosocial games ever created!

Ultimately, understanding the effects computer games have on ourselves will allow us to make better-informed decisions about the games we play, and those we buy for our children. With the UK’s adoption of the PEGI content classification system, as announced in this week’s Digital Britain report, this has become even easier.

The long-term effects of computer gaming will, however, undoubtedly continue to be the subject of much debate.