The Work World & Serious Games – What MyScienceWork Has to Say on the Subject
MyScienceWork is an interesting website (www.mysciencework.com) chock-full of fascinating research, news and reporting an all manner of scientific studies and findings – ranging from agriculture, archaeology & astronomy to computer science, political science and psychology. We came across a very timely piece on their website not too long ago and thought we’d share a distillation of that article’s main points with our dedicated readers.
Titled Gaming and Working: When Two Worlds Collide, the sub-title of the article is what first clued us in to the accuracy and understanding that these guys (just a phrase here dear readers – we’re not implying that only men are writing for this site!) are imparting via online reporting. Video Games as Training Tools is that sub-title, and it sounds like the kind of blog post we’d routinely write for our blog. Yes, yet another online entity out there that really gets it about serious games, and boy do they have some affirming facts and statistics to pass along to their readers!
While the article starts out by pointing-out that children and video games can be a bad mix if overdone due to onscreen violence concerns, the writer quickly switches gears and explains that specialized professional skills such as surgical hand-eye coordination in adults can be enhanced with serious games, and from there the article really gets interesting.
As the article goes, “This raises the question of the evolution of teaching and training, not only during formal education, but also in a professional environment. Nowadays, there is a real market for games called serious games whose primary purpose is not pure entertainment, but training, advertising, simulation, or education. They took off in the mid-2000s, when small game companies needed to find a new way to survive, as they couldn’t compete with their big competitors on the pure entertainment market. Several companies, public administrations and the defense department use these kinds of games.”
Some of the highly affirmative and exciting information in the article on serious games includes these details:
- In 2003, C. S. Green and D. Bavelier showed that playing action video games was able to radically alter visual attention processing. Since then, gamers have proven to have better reflexes, spatial attention and hand-eye coordination.
- On February 27, 2013, G. Patrizi, D. Giannotti, G. Di Rocco, A.R. Vestri and C.P. Semproni showed that a Nintendo® Wii™ training program had a positive impact on laparoscopic surgical skills. The doctors who regularly played three Wii™ games requiring visual concentration and hand-eye coordination for one month performed surgery more successfully.
- Scientists at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, led by lead author Dr. Sam Kilic, reported that teen gamers are “better at virtual surgery than medical residents.”
As the quoted Dr. Kilic observed furthermore in the article, “As we see students with enhanced visual-spatial experience and hand-eye coordination that are a result of the technologically-savvy world they are immersed in, we should rethink how best to teach this generation.”
At Designing Digitally, Inc., we couldn’t agree more, which is why we’ve invested a great deal of technology and staff hiring in the direction of serious games development, which we feel is the next wave of employee training and empowerment for the technical and digital age we find ourselves living within today. Give us a call or contact us using our form fields and get your company or business started in serious games for training and education. We can help you to understand their value and efficiencies for the 21st century workplace.
Read the full MyScienceWork article on serious games here.