09-14-2010, 02:05 PM
I Hate Science Reporting, episode 4819208451.
Yet the article is titled "Why World of Warcraft is good for you." Was "Why Unreal Tournament is good for you" too unsexy? Did this research actually say a single damn thing about WoW?
Apparently, action gamers are better at identifying moving dots and picking patterns out of white noise. (Amazing!) They then somewhat arbitrarily extrapolate that to a mechanism, and then riff about how that mechanism would work in other situations. By the time we're done, we're nowhere near what was actually demonstrated by the research, and might as well be guessing randomly.
Did they even have a control group? I don't have access to the full article until it's a year old, so I can't check, but it sounds like their two group were "exciting" and "boring" games.
-Jester
Quote:Only those who played fast-moving action video games such as "Call of Duty 2" and "Unreal Tournament" saw an improvement in their decision-making skills.
Yet the article is titled "Why World of Warcraft is good for you." Was "Why Unreal Tournament is good for you" too unsexy? Did this research actually say a single damn thing about WoW?
Apparently, action gamers are better at identifying moving dots and picking patterns out of white noise. (Amazing!) They then somewhat arbitrarily extrapolate that to a mechanism, and then riff about how that mechanism would work in other situations. By the time we're done, we're nowhere near what was actually demonstrated by the research, and might as well be guessing randomly.
Did they even have a control group? I don't have access to the full article until it's a year old, so I can't check, but it sounds like their two group were "exciting" and "boring" games.
-Jester