Playing video games is good for your brain

heres how
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1.
Mark Griffiths
Director of the International Gaming Research Unit and Professor of Gambling Studies at Nottingham Trent University
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Dr. Mark Griffiths has received research funding from a wide range of organizations including the Economic and Social Research
Council, the British Academy and the Responsibility in Gambling Trust. He has also carried out consultancy for numerous gaming
companies in the area of social responsibility and responsible gaming.
The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, ACU, ANU, ASB, Baker IDI, Canberra, CDU,
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Swinburne, Sydney, UNDA, UNE, UniSA, USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS, VU and Wollongong.
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Your brain, on games. OnlineUniversities.com, CC BY

Whether playing video games has negative effects is something that has been
debated for 30 years, in much the same way that rock and roll, television, and even
the novel faced much the same criticisms in their time.
Purported negative effects such as addiction, increased aggression, and various
health consequences such as obesity and repetitive strain injuries tend to get far
more media coverage than the positives. I know from my own research examining
both sides that my papers on video game addiction receive far more publicity than
my research into the social benefits of, for example, playing online role-playing
games.

However there is now a wealth of research which shows that video games can be
put to educational and therapeutic uses, as well as many studies which reveal
how playing video games can improve reaction times and hand-eye co-ordination.
For example, research has shown that spatial visualisation ability, such as mentally
rotating and manipulating two- and three-dimensional objects, improves with video
game playing.
To add to this long line of studies demonstrating the more positive effects of video
games is a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
by Vikranth Bejjanki and colleagues. Their newly published paper demonstrates
that the playing of action video games the sort of fast-paced, 3D shoot-em-up
beloved of doomsayers in the media confirms what other studies have revealed,
that players show improved performance in perception, attention, and cognition.
In a series of experiments on small numbers of gamers (10 to 14 people in each
study), the researchers reported that gamers with previous experience of playing
such action video games were better at perceptual tasks such as pattern
discrimination than gamers with less experience.
In another experiment, they trained gamers that had little previous experience of
playing action games, giving them 50 hours practice. It was showed that these
gamers performed much better on perceptual tasks than they had prior to their
training. The paper concludes:

The enhanced learning of the regularity and structure of environments may act as
a core mechanism by which action video game play influences performance in
perception, attention, and cognition.
In my own papers, I have pointed out many features and qualities that make video
games potentially useful. For instance, in an educational context, video games can
be fun and stimulating, which means its easier to maintain a pupils undivided
attention for longer. Because of the excitement, video games may also be a more
appealing way of learning than traditional methods for some.
Video games have an appeal that crosses many demographic boundaries, such as
age, gender, ethnicity, or educational attainment. They can be used to help set goals

and rehearse working towards them, provide feedback, reinforcement, self-esteem,

and maintain a record of behavioural change.
Their interactivity can stimulate learning, allowing individuals to experience novelty,
curiosity and challenge that stimulates learning. There is the opportunity to develop
transferable skills, or practice challenging or extraordinary activities, such as flight
simulators, or simulated operations.
Because video games can be so engaging, they can also be used therapeutically.
For instance, they can be used as a form of physiotherapy as well as in more
innovative contexts. A number of studies have shown that when children play video
games following chemotherapy they need fewer painkillersthan others.
Video games have great educational potential in addition to their entertainment
value. Games specifically designed to address a specific problem or teach a specific
skill have been very successful, precisely because they are motivating, engaging,
interactive, and provide rewards and reinforcement to improve.
But the transferability of skills outside the game-playing context is an important
factor. Whats also clear from the scientific literature is that the negative
consequences of playing almost always involve people that are excessive video
game players. There is little evidence of serious acute adverse effects on health from
moderate play.

Study Finds Gamers Are Better Learners

November 11, 2014 | by Justine Alford

photo credit: Steve Petrucelli, "Game on" via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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Video games damage the brain, video games can alter childrens brains, video games boost
brain power. These are all headlines that have popped up over the years, and theyre helping paint a
thoroughly confusing picture about how gaming might be affecting the brain.
While its clear that there are some conflicting studies, research into this area is still very much in its
infancy. But one thing that seems to be consistently demonstrated is that video gaming can
enhance certain skills, such as multi-tasking, perception, attention, task-switching and decision
making.
So what is it about this common hobby that bestows gamers with such a broad range of benefits?
This is precisely what researchers from Princeton University and the University of Rochester were

eager to find out, and they think theyve finally found the answer. Playing fast-paced action games
can improve task performance because it enhances your learning capabilities.
According to lead researcher Daphne Bavelier, this is because playing such games helps our brains
become more efficient at building models, or templates, of the world, which enables us to better
predict what will happen next. The better the template, the better the performance, she explains in
a news-release. And now we know playing action video games actually fosters better templates.
For the study, which has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
researchers compared the abilities of action video gamers and non-gamers on a pattern
discrimination task. This visual test, which involves identifying the orientation of fuzzy shapes on a
screen, is tough at first, but becomes easier with practice. As predicted, the action gamers had the
upper hand and outperformed the others. Further investigation revealed that this was because action
video gamers used better templates than non-gamers.
To take this further, they enrolled a group of volunteers with little video game experience, and trained
them to play video games. Half of the participants were asked to play 50 hours of fast-paced strategy
games, such as Call of Duty 2, whereas the other half were asked to play mellow strategy games,
such as The Sims. They tested the participants on the same visual task both before and after the
training, and found that those who played action games became significantly better than those who
spent their 50 hours playing happy virtual families.
Next, they compared the abilities of action gamers and non-gamers on a perceptual learning task. To
their surprise, there wasnt much between the groups at the outset. However, the gamers became
much better at the task than the non-gamers over time, developing better templates for the task
much faster than the others. According to Bavelier, this demonstrates an accelerated learning
curve. Furthermore, when the groups were re-tested every few months for the next year, the action
gamers still did better than the non-gamers, suggesting their better template building abilities were
retained.
While this study may seem neat, psychologist and video games expert Walter Boot points out
to Popular Mechanics that a recent study tested similar hypotheses, but drew the opposite
conclusion. This could be due to different experimental designs, but Boot thinks it could be because
the participants in Baveliers investigation likely worked out how they were expected to perform,
which could have impacted the outcome. This doesn't mean that either study is wrong, but highlights
how difficult it can be to research this area.