FIRST POST! (Well, entered on TypePad anyway)
A new study has been released showing that playing "action games" improves peoples decision-making skills. I'm not going to read the study, I'm going to go purely off this CS Monitor story.
By "action games" they seem to refer to first person shooters, and by "smarter" they mean able to make "judgments faster than the 12 non-gamers without sacrificing accuracy". So I'd like to clarify a few things here, since they go on to say that strategy and role-playing games don't have the same effect.
In this case the skill being measured is the ability to recognise the movements of dots on a screen, and extrapolated out to recognising the movements of other things in our field of vision and extrapolating on what they're going to do and whether we need to take any action. It's a cerebral activity, but not the normal definition of smart as associated with problem solving.
While strategy games aren't likely to hone your reflexes, I reckon they're likely to hone decision making skills in complex situations with multiple people, taking into account the behaviour of opponents, the various possibilities the game can take and the laws of probability. Role-playing games, if done properly, should help with imagination and empathy.
So the logical conclustion to take away from all of this is to play more games. Now you have scientific backing when someone complains about it...
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