They may often be condemned as a bad influence on youth everywhere, but could blasting away monsters, zombies and special agents actually be good for crucial decision-making abilities? Some recent studies seem to say just that.
According to a study published in Current Biology, the visual and acoustic input of fast-paced action games improves a person's ability to make quick, but still precise, decisions. This psychological effect applies to both male and female video-game players.
Researchers refer to this skill as probabilistic inference, the process in which a person can utilize various small bits of information to formulate a good decision.
"What's surprising in our study is that action games improved probabilistic inference not just for the act of gaming but for unrelated and rather dull tasks," said University of Rochester psychologist Daphne Bavelier, one of the lead researchers in the experiment, in an interview with Discovery News.
Lead author Shawn Green commented about the importance of this ability in an interview with the BBC.
"Because there is uncertainty in the world, and in our ability as humans to measure and understand the world, the best we can do when making decisions is to compute how each little snippet of evidence we receive changes the probability that the various alternatives available to us are the correct option," Green said.
A frequent gamer is constantly improving his probabilistic inference powers by engaging in the constant movements and shifting landscapes present in some video games, so the more action-packed the game, the better.
Bavelier and his colleagues conducted experiments by assigning groups of men and women to play two action video games for two hours a day, with each individual playing for a total of 50 hours.\nA second group of men and women played the same amount but engaged in slower-paced simulation games in which they directed the lives of characters to achieve certain goals.
One possible selection bias in the study was that veteran gamers would already have a better set of probabilistic inference skills going in to the experiment. To compensate for this possibility, researchers only selected participants who had not played any video games during the past year.
Perhaps not surprisingly, both groups showed improved game-playing skills after the experiments. The group of action gamers, however, showed distinctly faster responses on the audio and visual tests than the group of simulation players.
The tasks in the experiments required the gamers to accumulate clues to solve problems without readily apparent answers. In addition to showing that action gamers responded faster to the tasks, the test concluded that their accuracy was similar to the simulation-playing group. This comparable accuracy could show that the action gamers were not simply "trigger-happy," as Green termed it.
U.Va. Gamers Co-President Katrina Lobaton used her personal experiences to offer some insight into the research. She agreed that video game playing may well help one to make decisions faster, but she said she could not confirm whether those decisions would always lead to a preferred outcome.
"It depends on how well you're playing the game," she said.
Other research has shown that video games can improve skills such as visual memory and the ability to change mental tasks quickly - two abilities crucial to the navigation of the trails and mazes, as well as to the dodging of enemies and bullets, present in many fast-paced games.
"You learn to react to signals," Lobaton said about playing video games, especially action-packed ones. "The fast pace forces you to learn what signals and what sounds to react to, whether it be the vibration of the controller or something blinking on the screen."
Lobaton could not conclude whether the Gamers Clubs' winningest members equally display the best decision-making skills outside of game-playing but noted that the club's experienced gamers all appear to be better at multitasking.
"The games train you to pay attention to a lot of things at one time and force you to become better at learning a task," she said. "It may even improve one's ability to learn something new initially based on the fact successful gamers must adapt better and faster to new things."
Still, as researchers hope to unlock more information about the benefits and allures of video games, these findings and insights may just be the beginning.
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