5 Ways Playing Video Games Can Make You a Better Person

Video games as a popular entertainment medium are over three decades old. Pundits and mainstream media watchdogs have been clucking tongues and wagging fingers about the effect video games would have on the nation's youth, and society's moral fiber. A series of studies over the past decade have brought some surprising revelations to light, however: there are many instance where video games can help make you a better person, and possibly improve the life of those around you. Here are five of the most surprising ways video games might make you a better person and the world a better place.

5. Video Games Can Improve Your Eyesight

That's right, according to a 2006 study by the University of Rochester, video games may do more than improve your hand-eye coordination. They may just help you see better. Researchers concluded that playing video games that contain lots of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve one's vision. Researchers had half of the students play Tetris, a game that required a fair amount of motor control, but was not visually complex. The other half of the group played Unreal Tournament, a first-person shooter, which was visually complex and had an equal amount of fine motor skills required to play the game. Students played their respective games in their respective groups for 30 hours over the course of one month.

When that month was over, the group that played Unreal Tournament improved their vision by 20 percent as measured by performance on a series of eye exams. An update to the Rochester study on first-person shooters increased the amount of playtime of Unreal Tournament to 50 hours over nine weeks. This time the Unreal Tournament gamers saw a 43 percent increase in the ability to recognize shades of gray. Visual improvement was shown even in areas where the eye wasn't specifically trained by the video game. That suggests that patients with conditions such as amblyopia might also increase their overall visual acuity by using special rehabilitation software that mimic the way a first-person shooter requires a player to be able identify objects quickly.

4. Video Games Can Keep Your Mind Sharp, Even In Old Age

There are myriads of ways people try to battle the effects of aging. You can take yoga classes for your joints, vitamin supplements to stay healthy, and if some cognitive researchers have their way, an hour a day of real-time strategy games to keep your mind sharp.

Researchers at the University of Illinois conducted a study in 2009 where they had one group of elderly volunteers play the real-time strategy game "Rise of Nations" for a total of 23 and a half hours, while a control group spent that time sitting quietly and doing nothing. After playing only one day's worth of real-time strategy games the RTS group showed significant improvements in concentration, short-term memory, and multi-tasking compared to the control group that did nothing at all.

Even if you're not old enough for an AARP membership, you can still gain cognitive benefits from playing video games. If real-time strategy games aren't your bag, you can still give your brain a bit of a workout with a first-person shooter. In 2009, research teams from the University of Rochester and University of Queensland conducted a joint study of the brains of those who played Terits and those who played Medal of Honor regularly. The Medal of Honor players actually scored higher on cognitive tests than the Tetris players. It turns out that the benefits of having ot multitask in a 3-D like environment helped overall cognition more than a game in a 2-D environment that focused on placing a single block at a time.

3. Video Games Can Make You A Nicer Person

How many times did your parents tell you that learning to take turns at the video game console was learning to share, and that sharing was caring? Have you every counted your game playing with your best buddies as socializing? Well, your parents and your perceptions are backed by an Iowa State study conducted in . Researchers took 160 students and had each student play one of six different games; three games labeled as "violent" and three games labeled as "pro-social".

After playing their assigned game for 20 minutes, the students were paired together. Each student then had to assign their partners ten different puzzles, knowing that their partner would win a prize for completing the puzzle. For the most part, those that played "pro-social" games gave their partners easier puzzles. Those that played violent games tended to give their partners harder to solve puzzles.

The study concluded that playing the games labeled "pro social" put students in a better mood. A similar German study showed similar results. In a study conducted by in 2009, subjects that played Lemmings (which is about guiding and helping the titular Lemmings to work together to reach the exit to a level) also exhibited more tendencies to pro-social behavior after playing than subjects that did not.

2. Video Games Can Make You A Better Doctor

While you may not think there's much correlation between a few rounds of Pac-Man and being a better surgeon, a 2003 Iowa State study says otherwise. While you still need to pass your MCATS, part of a regimen to become a better doctor might be a prescription of at least three hours of video games per week.

Researches at Iowa State University gave medical school residents and practicing doctors three different video games that tested hand-eye coordination and fine motor function. Surgeons that played these games for at least 3 hours per week were able to carry out laparoscopic surgical procedures 27 percent faster then those who did not. The gamer surgeons also made 37 percent less mistakes than their non-gaming counterparts. These are very significant benefits, because laparoscopic surgery is a very challenging procedure. Dr. James Rosser, a participant in the study likened laparoscopic surgery to "...tying your shoelaces with three-foot-long chopsticks", because laparoscopic surgeons conduct the procedure by using joysticks to navigate fiber-optic cameras through the body's cramped innards.

1. Video Games Can Help Figure Out How Diseases Spread

World of Warcraft is one of the world's most popular and well-known MMORPGs. And as it turns out, not only is the game good for simulating hordes of fighters, clerics and shamans raiding the lair of powerful monsters, it's also good for simulating vectors of disease, and how it spreads. And like penicillin, World of Warcraft's contribution to disease fighting happened completely by accident.

In September of 2005, Blizzard created a virtual malady to spread all over the game world. The digital disease was called "Corrupted Blood". The programmers at Blizzard only meant for the Corrupted Blood plague to infect elite high-level player character, but a bug in the programming made it infect everyone, from the lowliest beginner player character to non-payer characters like shopkeepers and blacksmiths.

While WoW admins focused on trying to quarantine those with corrupted blood as the plague slowly spread to every corner of the virtual globe, epidemiologists noticed that this event closely modeled how disease spreads in the real world, especially in regards to human vectors and responses. Normally, epidemiologists have to rely on statistics for the past to extrapolate the trajectory of a disease. The Corrupted Blood event give them a virtual world filled with players reacting like those caught up in fleeing real-world pandemics, from people trying to flee cities, heal the sick, or accidentally spread the disease themselves. World of Warcraft turned out to be a contemporary tool, with data gathered from the Corrupted Blood plague providing interesting insights into how diseases spread across the real world.

So the next time you hear some mainstream media pundit blustering about how video games contribute nothing good to society at large, you now have a handy list, backed by research that shows how video games can help make you a better person.

Sources:
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2764
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13726738
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=08121125-strategic-video-game-improves-critical-cognitive-skills-older-adults
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4685909/
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1655109,00.html