Legal Niches

Study: Shooters Good for Your Brain

By JamesWilton64

Games may not bad for you after all, according to a joint study conducted by the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. More precisely, first-person shooters are better at training you for the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and less effective at making you a killing machine.

"DOOM'd to switch: superior cognitive flexibility in players of first person shooter games," a research paper published on Frontiers in Cognition (available here in PDF format) reveals results that run contrary to most of the research we've read about video games here in the United States. You know, studies that say, for example, that first-person shooters train people to be killers..

While the study focuses on the benefits of playing first-person shooters, there's an interesting fact that most anti-video game advocates probably don't want to read: first-person shooters don't do a very good job at training players in the art of accuracy. More on that later.

read more

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on April 27, 2010 (boomark / email).