Improve Your Vision…Get To Killin…

Check out this story in the New York Times (free registration required but it is worth the time because the story is really cool).

Excerpt:

Dr. Bavelier is an expert on how experience changes the brain, particularly the effects of congenital deafness on visual skills and attention. A few years ago, a Rochester student, Shawn Green, asked to work on a senior project in her laboratory. They agreed that he would help design visual attention tasks for the deaf.

But when Mr. Green tried out the tests, he found they were ridiculously easy, Dr. Bavelier said. So did his friends, who were all devoted to video games.

The professor and her student decided to study the connection between video game playing and visual attention. They carried out four experiments on undergraduates, all of them male because no female shooter game fans could be found on campus.

Excellent. The article goes on to describe how the only games that brought this benefit about were the first person shooter games like Unreal, Half Life, and the upcoming DOOM3 which will be excellent. All of these games are extremely violent and require players to track multiple targets at once in unfamiliar environments.

I like to hear that I haven’t totally been wasting the hours and hours I have spent on this stuff. Now if my wife would only let me get a better computer so I could play the newer games like DOOM3 I’d be able to really improve my visual skills!!!

1 Comment

1. Yes, I have also repented of my anti-gamming views somewhat.

   Comment by Michael — May 30, 2003 @ 12:18 pm

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