It’s good timing for everyone to be excited about Call of Duty: Black Ops II, it seems. New research finds that playing the game, and others like it, can actively change your brain for the better.
Free-to-play games are all the rage here in 2012. With MMOs, social games and mobile games leading the way, some analysts see the model as the inevitable wave of the future across genres. And given how very well freemium games seem to be doing, they might just be right.
Studies in the past have found that winning competitions can make you mean, and we’ve all seen the stereotype of the angry gamer yelling at his console. But the latest research on the psychological effects of video games finds that, contrary to popular opinion, what really makes gamers tick is their ability to cooperate and work together — and that every study linking video games with real-world violence may be wrong.
Researchers have looked at mainstream video games for years, trying to determine the effects games have on players’ brains. Maybe they make us faster decision-makers, better thinkers or more aggressive. Studies come out nearly weekly and often seem to contradict each other’s findings.
A number of recent research studies conducted on games and gamers have found a generally positive trend in the effect that gaming has on players’ brains, the Wall Street Journal Reports. Not only is World of Warcraft good for senior citizens brain function, it’s good for a lot of other groups as well.
Apparently, being a gracious victor in a competitive situation really is hard to do.
Everyone can remember a primary school teacher cautioning kids against being either sore losers or bad winners. A new study out of Ohio State University finds that perhaps there are reasons being a bad winner is so common. Researchers found that after a competition had concluded, winners were likely to become significantly more aggressive toward their beaten competitors.
It’s been close to 30 years since video games began their great leap from arcades to living rooms, and for all of those years parents and pediatricians have been counseling that kids spend too much time sitting on the sofa, controllers glued to their hands.
The Wall Street Journal has news of yet another gaming study, but this one’s pretty darn interesting: Rather than judge video games’ effect on violent behaviour or socialisation, the study looks at whether games can help people escape nightmares.
By now, you’ve heard about the new study from Nottingham Trent University that found that playing lots of video games can result in “Game Transfer Phenomena”: the real world and the video-game world start to blend together, and gamers begin to see conversation menus during real-life interactions and going for button-prompts to perform real-world actions.
