Greater dexterity
Play enough games and you could be a surgeon. It can’t be all that hard, right?
I had a lot of fun playing through Trauma Centre, a series of surgery sims on Wii and DS, but I never thought there would be any greater a link between surgery and games. Enter a study published in the Archives of Surgery journal, that showed laproscopic surgeons operating 24% faster and with 32% fewer errors after playing games for some time. Who said games were a waste of time?
Weight loss
You’ll look like a tool, but at least you’ll be thin.
With all this exer-gaming being brought in by the Kinect and Wii Fit, more and more people are using games as a method of exercise. Researchers from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center reported that kids ages 10 to 13 burned as many or more calories by exergaming on average than they did with sports or other forms of moderate exercise. There’s a fun fact for you.
Increased intelligence
Arguably the most well know of the brain trainers out there.
When it comes to raw IQ building, a game of Tetris will likely do you as much good as a Sudoku. Po Bronson is one particular journalist who sees this potential, writing a particular article on gaming as a learning resource. Though it is a limited case study, it shows how a child’s interest in Pokemon helps teach literacy, logic and arithmetic to young children in an engaging way. I’m pretty sure those abilities would translate to pretty much any RPG though. Lord knows how useless my maths would be if it weren’t for Final Fantasy becoming an obsession during my adolescence.
