Computer shoot-up games set young minds firing

Playing violent computer games for up to eight hours a week has many benefits for young people.

Research by Unitec computing lecturer Paul Kearney suggests games such as Counter Strike and Medal of Honour - where the aim is to massacre other characters in wartime settings - can improve attention span, hand-eye co-ordination and the ability to multi-task.

Such games, known as "first-person shooters", are often criticised for their brutal content and blamed for violent behaviour in young people.

But Mr Kearney, who heads the country's first computer-game research lab, said his study showed the games could increase cognitive abilities by an average 2 1/2 times.

"I'm not condoning these games or even entering the argument over whether they make people more violent," he said.

"I just wanted to see whether certain abilities were more advanced among game-players than others."

Forty people, aged between 16 and 40-plus, took part in the research, which involved tests on a neuro-psychological assessment programme used in the training of US marines.

Scores were recorded and after playing Counter Strike for a specified length of time, the participants were tested again. Another group took the tests without playing the game.

On average, the players improved in all four tested areas - memory, mathematics, visual and auditory tasks - with one player improving his score by four times.

Although the control group also improved slightly, the gains were much smaller than they were for the players.

Neither gender nor age played a big part in the results.

Those who played the game for up to eight hours a week performed the best. But Mr Kearney warned that the research also showed a rapid drop-off in the abilities among people who played the game for any more than the eight hours.

First-person shooter games received a bad press, he said, but when you considered what players were doing, it was no surprise there were benefits.

"They are running, jumping, strategising, looking in different directions, aiming, shooting and avoiding being shot.

"It's a huge amount of multi-tasking and is it the game that is allowing them to do this?"

More than 100 million people play computer games in the United States alone and an estimated 48 million in China. Counter Strike is played by eight times more people than any other game.

Mr Kearney, who has presented aspects of the research in Vancouver, Montreal and the US, and is having part of it published in an Austrian-based book, said he hoped it would show that some computer games were more than "mindless entertainment".

He hoped the research could be used for "pedagogy by stealth" and also as a guide for game developers as to what should be in their products.

He thought the results could be used to develop a rating system to inform parents about which games had positive benefits.

He believed the cognitive enhancements could be used for people with learning difficulties, motor skills problems or for those needing rehabilitation after an accident or stroke.

"Like it or not, computer games are here to stay," he said.

"There are clearly possibilities and we should be using that for more than pure entertainment."

SHOOTING TO KILL

Game players improved in memory, mathematics, visual and auditory tasks.

One player improved his score by four times.

Those who played for up to eight hours a week performed the best.

But those who played more hours showed a rapid drop-off in the abilities.