Do Video Games Make You Smarter, Stronger, Faster? Hell Yeah!
by Mike Drummond
About a decade ago, the Israeli Air Force, among the world’s most fearsome aviation powers, took part in a secret training experiment.
Some 58 cadets would see whether a video game could improve their combat pilot skills. Their instructors didn’t know who among the recruits was using the game or what it was for.
Israel typically doesn’t play games when it comes to its air defense. It wiped out the Egyptian air force within three hours during the 1967 Six Day War. The IAF also holds world records for enemy warplanes shot down, air-combat performance and special and air-to-ground operations.
The state identifies potential pilots several years before they report for mandatory national military service at age 18. In addition to high scores in school, physical fitness and national loyalty, IAF cadets also have to demonstrate how well they work in groups and how they approach problem-solving and disaster-management situations.
This is where the video game came into play.
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (the “Israeli MIT”) developed a “cognitive simulation” program. Unlike flight simulators that use rolling hills, desert valleys and other realistic video scenarios, the technology was more visually abstract. It focused more on improving nimble decision-making and reacting better to unexpected conditions, rather than mechanical throttle control and the like.
“When you are engaged with hi-fi systems, your brain is wired to deal with specific scenarios,” Danny Dankner, the CEO of Israel-based Applied Cognitive Engineering, says of flight simulators. “If something happens that’s not in a certain context, you won’t respond like you should.”
The average flight score for cadets who “played” the game increased 30 percent. At the end of the two-year training program, the group that used the game had graduation rates 50 percent higher than the control group.
“That,” says Dankner,” was unheard of.” Indeed, 90 percent of all IAF candidates typically wash out.
Fast-forward to today. Video games have evolved beyond mere playthings for thumb jockeys and couch potatoes. Even as debate rages over the content and social viability of some games, including the violent smash hit Grand Theft Auto IV, innovative video games and new controllers increasingly are earning a reputation as agents for human good. Soldiers, surgeons, students, athletes and hospital patients are among those who are finding that the right video games, in the right context, can make you smarter, faster and even stronger.
Dankner’s company has developed Basketball IntelliGym, a commercial software product based on Technion’s combat fighter technology. As the name implies, the game is designed to help basketball players. You won’t find burly, 3D avatars driving through virtual lanes. No razzle-dazzle NBA Live 07 dunks going on here. IntelliGym depicts a simple, two-dimensional overhead view of a basketball court. Coin-like icons represent players. The idea is to improve decision-making skills.
Ed Schilling, the former assistant coach at the University of Memphis between 2003-05, is a true believer.
“It turned our school around,” he says, particularly for point guard Darius Washington Jr. “His shots and assists went up and his turnovers went down” after he started using IntelliGym.
Schilling, who now runs the basketball Champions Academy in Whitestown, Ind., admits he was skeptical. But the Memphis team went to the National Invitational Tournament the first year of using IntelliGym and to the Final 8 of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament the next. Although team officials say the squad didn’t use the game this year, Memphis was in the finals, losing to the University of Kansas – which also had used the IntelliGym in the past.
The IntelliGym, says Schilling, “is a workout room for the brain.”
Fitness Tool
Perhaps no consumer video game system has generated as much favorable press as the Nintendo Wii. Released in 2006, it has relatively crude graphics. But wireless controllers compel users to swing, punch and move depending on the game.
Mickey DeLorenzo of Philadelphia blogged about his six-week “Wii Sports experiment” early this year. He added 30 minutes of Wii game play to his usual daily routine. He claims he lost nine pounds. For the record, boxing produced the best workout for him.
Inspired by the feat, online fitness community Traineo.com in February launched a contest, awarding a Wii fitness package and other prizes to whoever submitted the best workout videos using the Wii.
This May, Nintendo unveiled its Wii Fit, an exercise step pad and suite of games for the Wii console.
This isn’t just all fun and video games. The University of South Florida in Tampa, along with XRKade Research lab in Denver, are conducting tests to see if video games hooked to exercise equipment can shrink child obesity.
Some studies have linked video games to the obesity problem. So-called exergaming could decouple the sour association video games have with sedentary lifestyles.
The XRKade lab uses Dance, Dance Revolution, Cateye bike titles, and Cybex Trazer games and technologies, among others, which force users to engage their minds and bodies.
“Video games are not going away,” Stephen Sanders, director of the USF School of Physical Education, Wellness and Sport Studies, told USF Magazine last year. “These games require that children must be physically active in order for the game to work. The faster a child pedals the game bike the faster the car will go on the video screen. Or, the more a child jumps while wearing the Cybex Trazer belt the more points he or she can score in the video game.
“The physical activity possibilities,” Sanders added, “are endless.”
The same is true in the realm of physical therapy.
Performance Health Technologies based in Trenton, N.J., is among a number of companies that mends the human body with video game technology. Its Core:Tx product is a combination hardware/software application that can operate on a home computer. Its primary piece of hardware is a small soap-bar-sized device that can be attached anywhere on a user’s body, depending on the area of therapeutic focus.
The wireless device sends feedback to a PC or laptop, which logs and measures the data, providing the user with a score at the end of each physical therapy session.
Medical service provider HealthSouth and other rehab hospitals are using or testing the technology.
Company CEO Robert Prunetti says among the more promising areas is home therapy for wounded veterans. Many live in rural areas far from treatment centers. Prunetti hopes to swing a deal with the Veterans Administration.
Although Prunetti has no medical research to support the efficacy of his product, he says he has plenty of anecdotal evidence. Famed LA Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser used a version of Core:Tx after rotator cuff surgery. “He liked the product so much,” Prunetti says, “he became an investor.”
Brain Food
If Dr. Maurice Ramirez, founding chairman of the American Board of Disaster Medicine, had his way, video games would replace textbooks.
Modern curricula teaches via repetition. It forces everyone to advance at the same pace, which is a boring way to learn, in Ramirez’s book. Students would learn more, have a higher degree of retention and graduate faster, he argues, if history and other courses unfolded in a first-person game.
“What if we made World War II games historically accurate?” he asks. “All soldiers could act within the parameters of physics at the time. Students would have to learn and master certain things in historical context before they could progress to the next level. They would have to attain a certain amount of information, like learn some French, to progress.
“So that child is learning history, and at least a level of French as spoken by returning soldiers,” he adds. “They would have some concept of history and some geography. They could pick out Belgium, France and Germany on a map.”
Ramirez says both his children were C students in Spanish. He required them to play My Spanish Coach, a game from Ubisoft, for 30 minutes a day. Now they’re A students.
Forcing his children to play a language video game “was to prove a point to my wife,” he says. “Sometimes these games can be useful.”
Researchers at Israel’s ALYN Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Center in Jerusalem are using Sony PlayStation games to help occupational therapy patients improve or regain motor skills. Researchers elsewhere are exploring ways in which video games can help Alzheimer patients.
Warning Flags
Pam Ragland, author of The 7 Why’s of Addiction, sees a darker side.
Exposing children to video games can stunt social development and lead to addictive behavior. The Orange County, Calif., resident calls video games the new entry drug, the “new marijuana.”
“Children gain their coping skills between the ages of 8 and 20,” Ragland says. “When they spend excess time on video games, they can actually become addicted. Video games become their coping mechanism, their way of avoiding past or present stressful or traumatic feelings.”
She recommends no more than two days a week and no more than 30 minutes at time – that’s a total of one hour of video games a week. The national average is closer to nine hours a week.
Cautionary notes are typical when it comes to video games. A team of surgeons from New York, Iowa and Virginia conducted an experiment several years ago to see if playing video games improved laparoscopic or abdomen surgical skills.
Spending more than an hour a day would not help a child’s chance of getting into medical school, was one of the conclusions.
However, the main findings showed that surgeons who had a history of playing video games for more than three hours a week were faster and more accurate in certain video-assisted surgery training tests than surgeons who had never played video games.
Thirty-three surgeons participated in the three-month experiment, code-named Top Gun, in 2002. They played Super Monkey Ball 2, Star Wars Racer Revenge and Silent Scope.
These doctors “made 37 percent fewer errors, were 27 percent faster, and scored 42 percent better overall than surgeons who never played video games,” researchers concluded.
Nancy Kirk, a mom from Omaha, Neb., has two grown children. Both are well-adjusted and have promising futures. However, she fretted when they got hooked on a Zelda video game years ago.
Then they invited her to grab a controller.
She asked about the rules. They said, “Mommmm, just play!”
The point of the game was to figure out the rules, Kirks says. She had an epiphany.
“My children will spend their adult lives being dropped into new worlds of technology, politics and human behavior with changes that come more and more quickly,” she says. “They will spend their lives figuring out the rules for these new worlds and how to navigate through new cultures.
“Video games,” Kirk adds, “are exactly the training they need.”
Nintendo started selling its innovative, wireless Wii game console on Nov. 19, 2006.
But it was in the works long before then.
Howerd Oakford, working for Visioneering International Inc. in Atlanta, filed for a patent for a “wireless remote control system” on April 13, 1993.
The patent reads in part:
“The remote control system includes a remote unit and a receiver unit, and may be utilized in connection with a video game system or other controllable system. The receiver unit includes a plurality of detectors for detecting a signal transmitted by a remote unit. An angle-limiting device is coupled to each detector for limiting the signal.”
The invention, “may be used in conjunction with the Nintendo Entertainment System,” the patent application adds.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark granted the patent on July 25, 1995.
