Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, just as accurate | Hacker News Reader

Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, just as accurate

arstechnica.com

99 pointsevo_944 comments

Regardless of the subject, this article is superbly written and a great example of how to cover psychology articles as a reporter.

Instead of simply stating the most headling grabbing implication of the research and leaving it at that, it went in depth to show the "what if" questions researchers controlled for rather than leaving us to guess or hunt down a copy of the real research paper (the reader is lazy, were not going to do it). Hopefully we get more submissions likes this when it comes to psychology articles and less 'scientist found X, the end'

I was genuinely thrilled that the article brought up the points about causality vs. correlation.

Then I was sad, because it reminded me how rare it is. Almost every news article about research I've read the past 20 years has been of the form "Scientists have found that X causes Y, and here is the correlation along with some uneducated speculation."

http://xkcd.com/552/

When I am in the zone playing COD for instance, I can run into a room, see three people and determine an optimum shooting strategy in under a second. For instance, if one guy is turned I can shoot him last and instead shoot the closest then the second determine the best place to duck to reload if needed. All the while, I process sound from everywhere else, keep a running map in my head (I'm very good with spatial orientation) and can check off where explosions have taken place or possible spawn points coming up.

I can also tell the difference between a player with an 80ms ping and a 30ms ping.

This all comes with a caveat. I have been playing for ~8 years off and on so I have experience and confidence in my abilities. Also, to achieve such a state to determine split second actions, my heart rate is well above a sedentary resting state. Once I figured this out, I stopped playing as much as I can only assume that the adrenaline rushes from gaming while sitting can only be bad for my health.

Two cents..

My personal zone generally starts with a round or two of F-Zero or Unreal Tournament at 130-150%. Once I get accustomed to those speeds, I've been kicked for aimbotting because I tend to enjoy weapons like the lightning gun, and am reasonably accurate on even bad days. It's like playing Halo instead of UT - people just float around, comparatively. Keeping track of a handful of people in a firefight becomes easy.

I wish I could switch it on and off as needed, but it definitely drains you more quickly, and gets harder to achieve after the first round or two. But it's exhilarating.

Yes. That's why I liked Quake 3 much more than the original Unreal Tournament. It was just so much faster paced.

How do you play a FPS without a mouse?

I got used to controller after about 40 hours of gameplay. However, the first 10 hours were quite damaging to my self esteem. You have to be mentally strong, just keep grinding, it can be done.

From my years of top-level competitive FPS gaming I eventually determined the same thing.

A high level of play is greatly facilitated by a high heart rate and an adrenaline rush.

The best gamers, by far, are the ones who combine years of practice with amphetamines.

It works for the airforce and it works for gaming.

I decided that the constant self-induced adrenaline rushes were bad for my health and so I stopped playing those kinds of games.

I used to get distracted in tense Quake 3 duels because I would become aware of my heart racing.

I play driving games. In my case I should be more relaxed, and much more consistent than I currently am.

It could work for you.

The fact that I'm a huge gamer helped me decide instantly that this finding is correct.

And will also help many more people on many more social sites decide that it needs to be upvoted, while the ad for Halo Reach at the bottom of the article will ensure that the publisher gets paid handsomely for their work.

Nice little trifecta: article topic, emotional impact, and commercial-event tie-in. Very nicely done.

Couldn't the same be said of people who play sports or jazz or any other thing that involves making fast decisions?

It's like there's this desperate need of justifying playing video games with every new study that says 'look! I am not actually wasting my time!'

Personally I think no silly justification is needed as there's nothing wrong with enjoying entertainment.

Yes, but playing sports or jazz isn't as demonized as playing video games is.

Not any longer. Jazz was once evil, too.

I think the fact that this is comparable to sports or jazz is exactly the point. While I imagine that you'd have to go back prettaayyyy far to find the time when sports were demonized as anything from an utter sin to a slightly pitiable time-waster, jazz certainly endured those characterizations when it was emerging into popular culture.

The same is true of any number of other media that now enjoy nigh-immeasurable popular esteem: the novel, for example. If we'd had the same educational-industrial apparatus then as we do now, surely some enterprising PhD candidate would have staked his career on studies illuminating the benefits of reading novels.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this - the real question that remains is just how valuable this effect of gaming is in the non-gaming world. And boy is that a doozy of a question!

ability in sport = martial prowess / hunting skills / good health in general / good genes in general -- It has always been more or less universally respected.

Jazz players always had subculture specific social status, same with hip-hop pioneers, early rock musicians etc.

Jazz players always had subculture specific social status, same with hip-hop pioneers, early rock musicians etc.

As have gamers.

"social status" that doesn't get you laid =//= social status that does

Yes—but saying that "games" improve your cognition speed cuts to the heart of the issue, because a game is, by definition, an artificially-constructed scenario involving time-limited decision-making. It's basically the lab-experiment equivalent to sports/jazz/etc., with all the irrelevant factors removed.

According to The Invisible Gorilla (very interesting book btw) there have been other experiments done with gamers that supposedly found improved cognitive abilities resulting from intense FPS gameplay. However, the authors of the book did more digging and concluded that some of those experiments on gamers were never independently confirmed by other experimenters. Here's an article on the subject: http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/blog/2010/04/20/the-limits-of...

That sentence is not entirely clear to me.

Did it imply that the experiments were never repeated or that the experiments were repeated and the results were negative?

results were negative.

Seems logical. After hours and hours of poker I find it easier to figure out my odds in all sorts of situations. The same concept could be applied to video games.

Maybe it isn't really the same concept. While playing poker, you usually take your time to calculate each move, but the reaction time is much, much less in video games (faster decisions).

That might be true if you're playing live or mainly for fun, but when you're playing 12 or more tables, poker starts to look a lot like those video games in terms of decision speeds. Throw in the need to remember how you've been playing on 12 different tables in addition to how 100 other players have been playing, and your attempt to trivialize poker playing looks somewhat silly.

The history of probability and statistic show us that a gambler can distinguish between two states whose probability is very similar (1/36 or so), so if a gambler has more information that a nongamer then he can use that information to be more accurate and make a faster decision.

Do you have more information about those findings?

I started playing blitz chess online recently instead of normal chess (I play 2 mins with 7 second increment, rather than 15 mins with 30 sec increment). I'm not sure playing chess makes you better at anything else but I think it let's you learn a few things about yourself. For instance, I don't think it's made that much difference to my game, suggesting most of my thinking time had been going to waste previously. Also tells you how much failure is down to stupid mistakes vs. the other player being smarter.

My guess is it's all about trained muscles that make eyes do microscopic movements.

Eyes can see only things that move, and to see a static picture there are special muscles that make retina move all the time the eyes are open (that's why blinking or closing eyes for short time gives them rest and helps to relax).

People that have these muscles more developed and move faster are able to notice and comprehend more visual information in shorter times.

Playing games and being all the time on the watch out for every pixel on the screen makes these muscles to work out and become stronger and faster.

Yep, it's just a workout.

Nope. FTA:

> The same thing happened when the test was switched to a similar task based on tonal differences, indicating the success of gamers wasn't simply the result of their focus on visual cues.

Why can't it be a combination of factors?

I think that it probably is a combination of factors. However, I was responding to your initial comment:

> "My guess is it's all about trained muscles [...]"

[all about] != [combination of factors]

I voted you back up to 1 because even though it seems you didn't finish (or even read?) the article, your post did have interesting content.

Yeah I skimmed through article and missed the point of tonal test..

Interesting and convincing. I would love to see similar studies for different kinds of games.

For example, after playing Braid for 4 hours straight, I had trouble performing normal day-to-day tasks naturally for about half an hour.

A weaker version of Braid-syndrome can happen if you have a game with quicksave/quickload and use it extensively.

Both were shown a screen that had a set of randomly moving dots, and asked to determine whether there was any coherent motion, meaning that, despite the apparent randomness, the dots had a tendency to head in a single direction

This article should have been titled, "Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers at video games." Duh.

Maybe you should read the entire article.

Am I missing something? All the tests were based on interfacing with a screen.

From the friendly article:

"The same thing happened when the test was switched to a similar task based on tonal differences, indicating the success of gamers wasn't simply the result of their focus on visual cues."

It's sad that I first heard this was true when the whole high school shootings were happening. The shooters were "trained" via video games to shoot for the head, one shot, and then move on to the next target, whereas a novice would keep shooting all over multiple times to make sure they got it right. So, it backs up the claim above, and yet, still doesn't make me want to let me kids play video games.

Boy Scouts would teach knife skills and knot-tying — both useful skills for kidnapping and torture — but I doubt you have similar misgivings about that. Making somebody competent at efficiency and rational decision-making under pressure doesn't make them a killer. Video games are not strongly correlated with homicide, that one data point 12 years ago notwithstanding.

(Incidentally, I'm not the downvote. I don't think your logic works here, but it's an interesting correlation.)

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