14 DAY TRIAL // A new study put together by the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam and the Leiden University, both from The Netherlands, shows that playing first person shooters actually helps players prepare for the problems they might face in their every day life.
The research paper is wonderfully named “DOOM'd to switch: superior cognitive flexibility in players of first person shooter games” and was published in Frontiers in Cognition. Two groups of 17 adults, one made up of gamers and the other of non gamers, were enrolled for the study, with experience in titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Unreal Tournament, the various Battlefield and Grand Theft Auto IV being necessary.
The study found that those who had experience with videogames were able to react to most visual and auditory stimuli quicker, especially when they were high moving. They were also able to quickly switch back and forth between subtasks. The correlation was maintained even when the researchers controlled factors like age and IQ. The study suggests that those who are playing first person shooters might be more suited to some jobs and that continued play might help them acquire and develop skills, which otherwise would be inaccessible.
Apparently, one thing that playing first person shooters does not do is actually increase one's accuracy with a weapon. The study says, “VGPs [those playing videogames], who are often accused of being antisocial or aggressive in the media, might have been more intrinsically motivated than NVGPs [non VGP] to accomplish the task. However, the data do not provide strong support for this possibility: even though VGPs were somewhat (but not significantly) faster than NVGPs, they tended to be somewhat (but not significantly) less accurate, suggesting that the overall performance in the two groups was rather comparable.” This can be taken as further proof that there's actually no link between violent videogames and real-life violence.