14 DAY TRIAL // Video games may have the bad reputation of altering one's personality and making individuals more inclined towards violent and antisocial behavior, but we also know that there are a lot of things that video games help with. While this might be a coincidence, the areas of expertise that research the real-life uses of video games generally tend to involve killing people.
After an Army research concluded that the video game America's Army was one of its most successful recruitment tools, but also that gamers had a harder time spotting roadside IEDs, the Navy has now concluded that video games make you smarter.
According to Ray Perez, a program officer for the Office of Naval Research's warfighter performance department, "Video game players perform 10 to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability than normal people that are non-game players," which is to be expected, considering how much time we spend on the lookout for good loot.
"We know that video games can increase perceptual abilities and short-term memory," he said. "They allow the player to focus longer and expand the player's field of vision compared to people who don't play video games." Which is a bit contrary to the Army's IED research, which showed that gamers had a lesser peripheral vision, which came from spending a lot of their attention on the middle of the image, usually where the crosshair just happened to be.
According to Perez, the big changes made to the human brain by video games allow for people to adapt new mental strategies for problem-solving at a faster rate, an improvement previously thought to be impossible. For about 50 years, "fluid intelligence" was believed to be unchangeable, but he thinks that video games can succeed where all others have failed, improving it for 2 to 2.5 years, so you have to be a dedicated gamer, not just a one-time experimentalist.
"Fluid intelligence" is the ability "to work outside your present mindset, to think beyond what you have been taught, to go beyond your experience to solve problems in new and different ways." So, with video games becoming a mainstream hobby, we can expect people to become more and more rebellious and antisocial, more often killed by roadside IEDs, but also smarter and we'll also see a significant increase in technology, as new inventions will become a daily occurrence.