There are all sorts of reports about the psychological effects of video gaming on children and young adults -- and some not so young. Most of them point out the antisocial behavior that is developed, the creation of unhealthy children because of the sedentary time in front of a screen, and so on. But now a study project reported in the February issue of Archives of Surgery develops a new line of thinking.
Drs Rosser, Lynch, Cudding, Gentile, Klonsky and Merrell from prestigious medical institutions like Beth Israel, NY University Medical School, Montefiore Medical Center, Brookdale University Hospital, Iowa State University and the Virginia Commonwealth University spent three months in 2002 studying various surgeons (33 residents and attending physicians) in their performance in laparoscopic surgery -- that's where tools are inserted through tubes, and the like, and the surgeon uses a video monitor as his/her guide to what is happening at the business end of the apparatus.
Rather than being a plain time-and-motion study to compare performances in both errors and completion times -- as if to award bonuses -- this was a serious study undertaken under the premise that surgeons who also played video games would be better performers. The premise appears to have been correct, although the sample size is small. Comparing performance against video game experience, those who had played (or currently were playing) three hours of video games a week were 33% better (fewer errors and faster completion) than those that didn't play. Surgeons who played more than four hours a week had a 42% lead.
The report suggests that video game training might well be a beneficial constituent of a surgeon's practical training, but that certainly should not be taken in the general sense that Junior is OK with video gaming for twenty hours a week. Indeed, a word of warning appears in the good doctors' report, in the conclusions, that "indiscriminate video game play is not a panacea."
Mind you, it can also be patriotic to play video games…
The US Army, as a recruitment tool, created a video game called America's Army which is free for the download. Six million users are registered and the game can be played with a dozen other people at the same time. At the Serious Games Summit at the end of October 2006, in Washington DC, the Army showed off a new use for the game: training soldiers for combat.
To keep up with present-day Iraq, the Army has even produced a later version, Convoy Skills Engagement Trainer, to teach you how to defend your convoy; it does not appear to deal with IEDs, and lack of armor.
The very latest version of the software is America's Army: Special Forces Coalition V2.8 that you can either download on line (2560 Mbyte!) or you can go to your friendly Army Recruitment office and they will be generous enough to give it to you on a CD. (Suggestion: give them a mate's name, not your own.)
To say that the software training has not appeared to have produced the expected results on the ground in Baghdad is probably understated. But that's really not surprising, after my own experiences with flight simulation software.
Simulators, built based on a real airplane flight deck, have proved to be extremely accurate in their realization of the real results in an actual plane -- and when accidents have occurred in real life and the known series of events have been plugged into the simulators, the simulators have also gone down in similar fashion. But that is not the case with flight simulation software.
Some years ago, at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu, I was manning a booth at a dealer's trade show. The only element missing was customers, so the vendors had two days to mostly sit on our hands. One of the other vendors present was a very high end video effects company with average box prices of $50,000 that did what you can now do with something like Photoshop. He had brought a full flight simulation program with him as well, and on one of the afternoons I sat down with a joystick and flew maybe a half dozen airplanes that I had been rated on at some time in my life. They ranged from my pupil days in a Cessna 150A (tail G-ARRF) to a Boeing 720B -- a shortened version of the 707 -- which was my employer's aircraft in Nigeria. Many 720s ended up, after service with the likes of United and American, as royal or VIP craft. Often having to fly the three seat cockpit (two pilots plus engineer) single-headed was a wonderfully elevating experience. Landing at Murtala Muhammed Airport (LOS) at 6 AM, unable to raise the tower (probably asleep) was not.
My problem with the flight simulator program? I crashed every single plane on landing. Every single one.
Bugs in the software, right?
