throwaway823746

My personal opinion is that the findings are statistically significant but practically irrelevant. Certain types of games do make you ever-so-slightly more likely to act aggressively. But so will stubbing your toe. People make a big deal out of the violence-related findings because they want them to be true.

Our experimental group played Unreal Tournament 2004, and the control group played the Sims 2.

Personally I prefer strategy games and sandbox-style games. But my favorite would have to be Dwarf Fortress.

Well, the findings aren't quite as simple as "better at making decisions".

Ordinarily, you see what we call a speed/accuracy trade off. You can go faster but there's a cost. You can get better at a task with training, and even a little faster. But there's a limit for most people in terms of how much faster they can get without hindering performance.

With gamers, they can simply go faster. They have the same trade off as normal people, but it begins to set in a whole lot later. They can get major speed gains without the same accuracy penalty as non-gamers.

So to answer your question, they're not making different decisions or are necessarily better at deciding. They're just doing it at a faster rate. Our lab does training studies where we bring in non-gamers and make them play FPS games for a few weeks. Typically 5 hours a week for 40 hours (5 or 6 weeks) is enough to induce some of these changes. The longer you play the more those gains will set in.

Bear in mind it has to be FPS games. Testing with other genres hasn't given us comparable results.

Thanks!

Our lab, and most scientists, are primarily interested in the underlying processes that are being influenced by video games. Our lab is primarily focused on studying neural plasticity, and the games are only worth our attention because they actually trigger plasticity.

I'm sure other labs are checking other genres of games for all kinds of behavioral changes. But our lab has never made testing lots of different types of games a priority.