Lets stop defending video games by talking about hand eye coordination.

               Every now and then a study pops up which says that video games are linked to some sort of small psychological benefit. This is inevitably followed by the gaming community extolling the values of their hobby. This is foolish, because this is not a good reason to play video games. It is simply a pleasant side effect for a specific type of entertainment. It is a very child like defense of an art, and whenever I hear it my mind immediately goes to a child attempting to justify some bad behavior to his mother.  "But Mom why can't I have pizza?! Pizza has tomato sauce on it, and tomatoes are a vegetable!" Instead of this, why not discuss the range of emotional experiences this medium can provide, or the time and energy that goes into creating the a games assets, or the ability of games to offer a societal critique.

                I am going to start off with the idea that video games increase your hand eye coordination. The most recent study to explore this idea compared the skill of laparoscopic surgeons who played video games to those who did not play video games. For those of you who don't laparoscopic surgery involves making small incisions and using cameras to see what is happening inside a patient. So the surgeon is looking at a screen while doing this type of surgery. It turns out that gamers are better at this type of surgery then non gamers. I don't mean to minimize the work of these researchers, but this is pretty obvious isn't it? Doing complex tasks on a screen correlates directly to doing complex tasks on a screen. This is not a good reason to play video games, it is just a fairly intuitive circumstance. It might have some interesting implications for the development of surgery training simulators, but that is about it. What makes video games a worthwhile experience is the feeling of complete serenity one gets from playing Flower, or the emotional catharsis one experiences when they retrace the steps of a missing family member in Gone Home. Who cares about a gamers reaction time when creators are exploring such interesting new methods of storytelling.

                Another recent study of gamers determined that they have "an enhanced allocation of spatial attention over the visual field."(Nat Geo) They tested this by running a number of different tests such flashing objects on a screen and asking people to point out where they were, and asking people to state how many objects were on screen at a given time. Not surprisingly people who played FPS games did well on this test. Once again why does this matter?  Yes these people might be a bit better at identifying objects in their field of view, but how does this justify someone spending their time on this medium. The answer is it doesn't. No one is playing these games to prepare themselves for situational awareness, so let's stop acting like it's such a big deal. If we are going to be defending video games let's talk about their merits for telling stories, not for shaving milliseconds off one's reaction time.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0528_030528_videogames_2.html