Action Video Game Study: First-Person Shooter Success?
IWhenever video games are suspected of failing to live up to their young status as a cultural asset, point to defense lawyers who do not seem to trust the label itself completely, to studies that have shown that gaming has a positive effect on the perceptual skills and learning performance of video players. Even if these cases are arguments of a kind of indirect profitability, which one believed to have been overcome in the discussion of video games, performance and possibilities to increase it are now the accepted currency – compared to, say, the gain in knowledge.
One such study has now appeared in the science magazine Nature. Eight researchers around the study leaders Ru-Yuan Zhang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) and Adrien Chopin (University of Geneva) try to show that action video games are positively aimed at “learning to learn”. Learning to learn therefore takes place WHEN information or skills that people experience during an unfamiliar task lead to these people being able to learn and cope with the demands of new tasks more quickly.
45 hours of video game play in ten weeks
In two intervention studies each, the scientists divided test subjects who died no more than an hour a week in the past year and the year before first-person or third-person shooters and sports games and simulations, in the past year no more than three hours a week, and Spent no more than five hours a week playing other video game genres the year before, in two groups. One group played first-person shooters like “Call of Duty: Black Ops” (Parts 1 and 2) and “Half Life 2”. The other group played simulation games like Sims 3, Zoo Tycoon 2013, and Viva Piñata. The test participants must complete 45 video game hours over a period of ten weeks, playing at least three and a maximum of eight hours per week.
Before and after the game phase, participants were asked to perform certain tasks. They understand the direction of movement of moving patterns, remember shapes, and correctly sort smileys with changing faces according to their initial stage. On the basis of the evaluation of the two runs with 25 (University of Rochester) and 52 (University of Geneva) samples each, Zhang and in the demanding recognition tasks (higher cognitive tasks) did better than the group that had dealt with life simulations. What do we learn from this now? If shooters also have positive learning effects, then only one thing remains to be considered: There must be enough time to learn on the side.