CogBlog – A Cognitive Psychology Blog

What comes to mind when you hear the word “gamer”? For non-gamers this term is often accompanied with a negative stigma. For some people, you might envision an average person, someone who studies hard in school or works a nine to five job while enjoying video games in their down time. But for others, many will associate this word with someone who lives in their parent’s basement, lacks social skills, has a diet consisting of Doritos and coke, and hardly sees the light of day. Some people may even think back to the time they saw that YouTube video of a “gamer” freaking out and breaking their TV or keyboard via a rage infused “gronk” spike. If you don’t know what a gronk spike is, click here.

In the modern age, because of how large of an influence technology plays in our daily lives, this negative stigma seems to be fading as more and more people are playing video games. However, spending hours a day playing is still often viewed as unproductive and wasted time. But what if I were to tell you that playing video games, specifically first person shooter games (FPS), could increase a person’s attentional capacity- the amount of information that a person can attend to at any given moment, the processing of peripheral information, and ability to multitask? To start, I’d bet there would be a lot of kids rushing to their parents defending their hours of play video games in hopes of being allowed to spend more time playing. I can envision the conversation now: Read more…

There are 1.23 billion people worldwide who spend an hour a day, on average, playing video games, reported by Time.com. I used to be one of those game players when I was in elementary school. However, my parents enforced me to quit playing games by setting up strict time limits, and even locked the computer with a password that I have never successfully cracked. My parents are not the only ones who are of the belief that playing video games is not beneficial at all, but a waste of time. Searching “video game playing” on Google, the top 10 search results are on how to quit playing video games and why video games can ruin one’s life. On the contrary, recent bestseller books and psychology studies argued against this common belief that playing video games is in fact not a total waste of time. When people play games, they are “wholeheartedly engaged in creative challenges,” said Jane McGonigal, a game designer and bestseller author, cited in Time.com.

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