Nearly a decade after Haier’s study, Gee hit upon an explanation. He found that even escapist fantasy games are embedded with one of the core principles of learning—students prosper when the subject matter challenges them right at the edge of their abilities. Make the lessons too difficult and the students get frustrated. Make them too easy and they get bored. Cognitive psychologists call this the “regime of competence” principle. Gee’s insight was to recognize that the principle is central to video games: As players progress, puzzles become more complex, enemies swifter and more numerous, and underlying patterns more subtle. Most games don’t allow progress until you’ve reached a certain level of expertise.
To understand why games might be good for the mind, begin by shedding the cliché that they are about improving hand-eye coordination and firing virtual weapons. More than 70 percent of video games contain no more bloodshed than a game of Risk, and are popular because they challenge mental dexterity. Among the best-selling game franchises, The Sims involves almost no hand-eye coordination or quick reflexes. One manages a household of characters, each endowed with distinct drives and personality traits, each cycling through an endless series of short-term needs (companionship, say, or food), each enmeshed in a network of relationships with other characters. Playing the game is a nonstop balancing act. Even a violent game like Grand Theft Auto involves networks of characters that the player must navigate and master, picking up clues and detecting patterns.
Gee contends that the way gamers explore virtual worlds mirrors the way the brain processes multiple, but interconnected, streams of information in the real world. “Basically, how we think is through running perceptual simulations in our heads that prepare us for the actions we’re going to take,” he says. “By modeling those simulations, video games externalize how the mind works.”
Even if Gee is right and video games are learning machines, one question remains: Do the skills learned in the virtual world translate into the real one?
the answer comes from a slew of recent studies, one of which began when then cognitive sciences research assistant and ardent gamer Shawn Green worked with University of Rochester cognitive sciences professor Daphne Bavelier on a project investigating visual perception in video game players. On standard tests that measure attention span and information-processing time, Green found that gamers consistently outperformed nongamers. When Green tweaked the tests to make them challenging enough so the gamers wouldn’t have perfect scores, the nongamers sometimes performed so poorly that their answers might as well have been random guesses. The researchers addressed an admitted weakness of the study—that visually intelligent people were more likely to be attracted to video games in the first place—by immersing a group of nonplayers for a week in the World War II game Medal of Honor. They found that the group’s skills on the standard visual tests improved as well.
Green did the initial research as part of his honors thesis, and after graduation, he and Bavelier continued the study. Nature published the results in May 2003. Since then the pair has also found that gamers can visually track more objects simultaneously than nongamers and that playing video games improves this ability. Their latest research on the visual precision of gamers is forthcoming in Psychological Science and the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Green says his main interest is the brain’s plasticity, but cautiously concedes there may be practical applications to playing video games. “Strong peripheral vision is useful to law enforcement, firefighters, and the military. They need those enhanced skills,” he adds.
The notion that video games can develop abilities that apply to real-world situations has been expressed by many and is increasingly being put to the test. In October 2006 the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) endorsed video games as a potential means for teaching “higher-order thinking skills, such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change.” They cited “owners mode,” a component of the video football game Madden, which lets players manage an NFL team, as teaching basic business skills. Team games, such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, develop cooperation and communication skills that the FAS says are useful in business settings.
A prime example of gaming that tangibly improves professional technique comes from James Rosser, director of the Advanced Medical Technology Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. He found that laparoscopic surgeons who played games for more than three hours a week made 37 percent fewer errors than their nongaming peers, thanks to improved hand-eye coordination and depth perception. The Harvard Business School Press published a new book in November 2006 by John Beck, who has looked at three distinct groups of white-collar professionals: hard-core gamers, occasional gamers, and nongamers. The findings contradict nearly all the preconceived ideas about the impact of games. The gaming population turned out to be consistently more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively. They also showed no evidence of reduced attention spans compared with nongamers. “It wasn’t surprising that gamers were more competitive, or more strategic, but the social and leadership skills that they exhibit don’t fit the stereotype of a loner in the basement,” Beck says.
