According to the mainstream media, video games are the cause of almost every evil to befall mankind; I honestly believe that certain journalists suspect Eve was tempted into original sin by the popular arcade game Snake. Of course, this could not be further from the truth, and gamers have recently been shown to enjoy huge social and medical benefits from their past-time so were going to take a look at some of the reasons everyone should be gaming regularly. Then, the next time your partner, parents or friends tell you youre ruining your eyesight or wasting your time," just forward them this article... then hand them a controller.
10. Multitasking
I was playing a mini-game on the Wii when my girlfriend wandered over, momentarily curious as to what Id been doing for the past half hour. The game is ridiculously simple, and consists of watching several cages switching positions on the screen, and afterwards identifying those which you saw at the beginning to have birds under them. Almost any gamer can do it easily, but she watched for a couple of minutes before shaking her head in disbelief that I could follow several objects moving at the same time so easily. That got me thinking, so I did some research online. Perhaps youve read about the many health benefits that video games offer, but sometimes its hard to apply them to real life. Well, multi-tasking is definitely a useful life skill in anybodys book, and video games
will help you do it. Period.
Prove It Professor Bavelier at the University of Rochester has conducted more than 20 studies related to video gaming, one of which specifically examined peoples capacity to multitask. Typically, the reaction time of an average person increases by 200 milliseconds while multitasking (around 30%), but that of a gamer increases only by 85 milliseconds (or 10%). The test was performed on previous non-gamers who were trained for a few weeks to play action games. Another study, published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, had similar findings. Click Next to read about the other benefits.