games = Education...

agnes said:
i remember reading a sruvey (not a pansi fake one) that poeple who play computer games have a 25% or something like that memory increase advantage and are able to learn stuff a lot faster. this was due to us having to learn maps and naturally teaching our brains to programme new areas in without thinking about it, and making sure out minds got used to the sights we saw only a few times.
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The funny thing is I'm really slow at learning new maps in games, and I also suck at finding my way around new places IRL. So for example if I go to a new town and wander round a few streets I easily get lost and can't find my way back to my hotel without a map. I think this is largely due to me being partially sighted and not taking in many landmarks etc but also I reckon this has developed into a mental issue where I'm really bad at storing navigational data in my head.

Just to give an example, often I find my way around in quite a 'linear' fashion. By which I mean that I only know 1 or 2 ways to go to a certain place. I.e. I can find my way from point A to point B, and I know which way to go from point C to get to point D (all within the same town). But I struggle to link these together and may not know which way to go to get from A/B to C/D. Or maybe I will go A->B->C->D because that is a route I'm familiar with, when it would be much faster to go A->D if I could figure out how to do it.

The same applies in gaming. I learn little areas of maps reasonably quickly (e.g. I know that if I turn left at a given junction, there's a powerup just round the corner). But if I'm somewhere else in the map, I don't know how to find my way to that junction.
 
Psyk said:
GTA taught me how to murder prostitutes. It's easy, you just go up to them and press circle.
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with any normal girl, if you go up to them and press the circles, you get a slap, so i suppose that's believable :D

-in reply to the post about games making you be able to learn this easier; i dont think that games do that to you, but the people who do play games regulary are good at them, therefore good at learning things quickly

repepetive gaming may well improve your reaction time tho (if the game you always play require fast reactions)
 
Well if you take it literally, just being awake is education, you'll always learn SOMETHING just by looking around you. As far as gaming goes though, while it does teach you some unusual stuff that you wouldn't otherwise learn, you would learn a whole lot more watching the history channel or national geographic for the afternoon than you would gaming for the same length of time.

Besides, a lot of the time what games teach you is just plain wrong. You know there are thousands of US troops in iraq that keep asking where the respawn points are? :p
 
Strange thing is, after a long session on BF2 I find myself eyeing up all the decent sniper positions around where I live.
 
bledd. said:
-in reply to the post about games making you be able to learn this easier; i dont think that games do that to you, but the people who do play games regulary are good at them, therefore good at learning things quickly
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They were right, playing some kinds of games (mainy strategy types) causes you to think a lot more than if you just sit watching the TV.
It's a form of brain exercise not dis-similar to doing a puzzle book.
We are always being told these days that mental exercise increases things like memory etc.
 
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