This link has been bookmarked by 26 people . It was first bookmarked on 18 Aug 2007, by brent gg.
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24 Apr 17
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The U.S. military has long supported the premise that learning through games can prepare soldiers for the complex, rapid-fire decision making of combat. Since 2002, they have offered new versions of their own game, America’s Army, which lets potential recruits play at everything from boot camp to Special Forces missions. According to the gamemakers at West Point, the purpose of America’s Army is to “give the player an idea of what it’s like for real U.S. Army soldiers to train for duty.” More than 4-and-a-half million registered players have completed the game’s basic training.
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students prosper when the subject matter challenges them right at the edge of their abilities.
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Gee’s son Sam, then 6, had been clamoring to play the game, which features a little boy who dresses up like his favorite action hero, Pajama Man, and sets off on adventures in a virtual world ruled by the dastardly villain Darkness.
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Most games don’t allow progress until you’ve reached a certain level of expertise.
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Among the best-selling game franchises, The Sims involves almost no hand-eye coordination or quick reflexes. One manages a household of characters, each endowed with distinct drives and personality traits, each cycling through an endless series of short-term needs (companionship, say, or food), each enmeshed in a network of relationships with other characters. Playing the game is a nonstop balancing act. Even a violent game like Grand Theft Auto involves networks of characters that the player must navigate and master, picking up clues and detecting patterns.
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Gee contends that the way gamers explore virtual worlds mirrors the way the brain processes multiple, but interconnected, streams of information in the real world. “Basically, how we think is through running perceptual simulations in our heads that prepare us for the actions we’re going to take,” he says. “By modeling those simulations, video games externalize how the mind works.”
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Gee’s scholarly interest was also piqued. He sensed instantly that something provocative was happening in his mind as he struggled to complete the puzzles of the time machine. “I hadn’t done that kind of new learning since graduate school. You know, as you get older, you kind of rest on your laurels.”
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These scholars are the first to admit that games can be addictive
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the answer comes from a slew of recent studies, one of which began when then cognitive sciences research assistant and ardent gamer Shawn Green worked with University of Rochester cognitive sciences professor Daphne Bavelier on a project investigating visual perception in video game players. On standard tests that measure attention span and information-processing time, Green found that gamers consistently outperformed nongamers. When Green tweaked the tests to make them challenging enough so the gamers wouldn’t have perfect scores, the nongamers sometimes performed so poorly that their answers might as well have been random guesses. The researchers addressed an admitted weakness of the study—that visually intelligent people were more likely to be attracted to video games in the first place—by immersing a group of nonplayers for a week in the World War II game Medal of Honor. They found that the group’s skills on the standard visual tests improved as well.
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But they now recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience.
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If you create a system in which rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks.
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Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging.
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Since then the pair has also found that gamers can visually track more objects simultaneously than nongamers and that playing video games improves this ability.
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“Strong peripheral vision is useful to law enforcement, firefighters, and the military. They need those enhanced skills,” he adds.
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He found that laparoscopic surgeons who played games for more than three hours a week made 37 percent fewer errors than their nongaming peers, thanks to improved hand-eye coordination and depth perception.
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He was learning in spite of himself.
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The gaming population turned out to be consistently more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively. They also showed no evidence of reduced attention spans compared with nongamers.
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“It wasn’t surprising that gamers were more competitive, or more strategic, but the social and leadership skills that they exhibit don’t fit the stereotype of a loner in the basement,” Beck says.
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28 Oct 15
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Gee’s epiphany led him to the forefront of a wave of research into how video games affect cognition. Bolstered by the results of laboratory experiments, Gee and other researchers dared to suggest that gaming might be mentally enriching. These scholars are the first to admit that games can be addictive, and indeed part of their research explores how games connect to the reward circuits of the human brain. But they now recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging.
All of this, of course, flies in the face of the classic stereotype of gamers as attention deficit–crazed stimulus junkies, easily distracted by flashy graphics and on-screen carnage. Instead, successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think.
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06 May 11
Carrie CallowayGreat article by James Gee
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Mind & Brain / Machine-Brain Connections
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<!-- main content area -->This is Your Brain on Video Games
Gaming sharpens thinking, social skills, and perception
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Gee’s son Sam, then 6, had been clamoring to play the game, which features a little boy who dresses up like his favorite action hero, Pajama Man, and sets off on adventures in a virtual world ruled by the dastardly villain Darkness.
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James Gee, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Wisconsin, was profoundly humbled when he first played a video game for preschool-age kids called Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. Gee’s son Sam, then 6, had been clamoring to play the game, which features a little boy who dresses up like his favorite action hero, Pajama Man, and sets off on adventures in a virtual world ruled by the dastardly villain Darkness. So Gee brought Pajama Sam home and tried it himself. “I figured I could play it and finish it so I could help Sam,” says Gee. “Instead, I had to go and ask him to help me.”
Gee had so much fun playing Pajama Sam that he subsequently decided to try his hand at an adult video game he picked at random off a store shelf—an H. G. Wells–inspired sci-fi quest called The New Adventures of the Time Machine. “I was just blown away when I brought it home at how hard it was,” he says.
Gee’s scholarly interest was also piqued. He sensed instantly that something provocative was happening in his mind as he struggled to complete the puzzles of the time machine. “I hadn’t done that kind of new learning since graduate school. You know, as you get older, you kind of rest on your laurels.”
Gee’s epiphany led him to the forefront of a wave of research into how video games affect cognition. Bolstered by the results of laboratory experiments, Gee and other researchers dared to suggest that gaming might be mentally enriching. These scholars are the first to admit that games can be addictive, and indeed part of their research explores how games connect to the reward circuits of the human brain. But they now recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging.
All of this, of course, flies in the face of the classic stereotype of gamers as attention deficit–crazed stimulus junkies, easily distracted by flashy graphics and on-screen carnage. Instead, successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think.
The video game Tetris, among the earliest games to launch the industry, involves falling tile-like tetraminoes that a player must quickly maneuver so they fit into space at the bottom of the screen. In the early 1990s, Richard Haier, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine, tracked cerebral glucose metabolic rates in the brains of Tetris players using positron-emission tomography (PET) scanners. The glucose rates show how much energy the brain is consuming, and thus serve as a rough estimate of how much work the brain is doing. Haier determined the glucose levels of novice Tetris players as their brains labored to usher the falling blocks into correct locations. Then he took their levels again after a month of regular play. Even though the test subjects had improved their game performance by a factor of seven, Haier found that their glucose levels had decreased. It appeared that the escalating difficulty of the game trained the test subjects to manipulate the Tetris blocks mentally with such skill that they barely broke a cognitive sweat completing levels that would have utterly confounded them a month earlier.
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