FIRST PERSON SHOOTERS CAUSE BRAIN DAMAGE ACCORDING TO NEW STUDY

[Misanthrope]

I bet this scientists can also suddenly refute climate change using similar "testing"

[NumLock21]

The only cause for brain damage is that, fucking stupid article. Playing fps increases awareness and neuro surgeons playing fps, performs better than those who don't. This increases the patient's survival rate, in case during operation, where a part of the brain begins to bleed, surgeons that play fps, have a quicker response and reaction time, cause they see those bleeding spots as targets, and will try to stem the bleeding, before it gets worse. 

[SansVarnic]

"conducted on 100 people"

I am I missing something here? Seriously any real study done needs a much larger sampling to accomplish the necessary results needed to make such a claim and was the sampling/group randomly selected or targeted? lastly did they have a control group for this study/experiment?  come on I find this "study" to be lacking in many areas.

 

Quote

If you increase the sample size to 100 people, your margin of error falls to 10%. Now if 60% of the participants reported a fear of heights, there would be a 95% probability that between 50 and 70% of the total population have a fear of heights. Now you're getting somewhere. If you want to narrow the margin of error to ±5%, you have to survey 500 randomly-selected participants. The bottom line is, you need to survey a lot of people before you can start having any confidence in your results.

 

[Brooksie359]

Call of duty caused brain damage? Who would have guessed. It's just basic common sense that the brain degrades if you don't use it. Can confirm most don't use their brain much playing COD but to say all fps games play like COD is just plain bs.

[Crosseyed Sniper]

Yeh right. wat a dumm as story. I has bean palying frist purson shiters sence 1998 ans I'm am purfcikly fine. Ifs this story was tru, I wuld has bran damag by now. I tolity nut bying this crap. They jist tryning to skare us. 

 

Now ifs you wil excuse me, i gonna go play call of dookie for 10 mor ours.

[Suika]

12 hours ago, Vode said:

Hmm...

 

What about competetive FPS multiplayer that requires coordination, communication and teamwork?

That does make me curious since they did mention a sort of auto-pilot mode in titles I could 100% believe could be auto piloted. Thinking in terms of Overwatch, at least playing at higher elos, I have to critically think about how to approach the fight and what I should go in expecting, and how I should respond to specific situations all within the walk time from spawn to the fight. I'd imagine CS:GO would be similar having to worry about economy, positioning, and numbers advantage.

 

The article may have some merit, but it's likely not applicable over all titles.

[LAwLz]

Reading this thread makes me very sad...

No wonder "fake news" are so common and widely believed when people don't understand how to read scientific papers or even such a simple thing as what is and isn't qualified as statistically significant sample size.

"Too small sample size", and "not peer reviewed" seems to have gone from legitimate terms to just something people shout out whenever science doesn't agree with their opinions.

 

25 minutes ago, Suika said:

The article may have some merit, but it's likely not applicable over all titles.

That's actually exactly what the study says, and it even says that with some minor tweaks games could be used for the opposite effect. For example by making players rely on landmarks instead of clearly marked paths the player can just "auto pilot" and follow to get to the goal.

It even gives examples of games where the saw an increase in gray matter in the hippocampus. It even tested how different people playing the same game, but with different strategies will have different results.

Here is the conclusion from one of the tests (out of three) from the study:

Quote

These results show that video games can be beneficial or detrimental to the hippocampal system depending on the navigation strategy that a person employs and the genre of the game.

 

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, SansVarnic said:

"conducted on 100 people"

I am I missing something here? Seriously any real study done needs a much larger sampling to accomplish the necessary results needed to make such a claim and was the sampling/group randomly selected or targeted? lastly did they have a control group for this study/experiment?  come on I find this "study" to be lacking in many areas.

 

 

If you read the research article, those questions are answered.  100 people is not sufficient for determining a pre-existing social attribute, but for determining a measurable cause and effect it is. 

[RagnarokDel]

That title is misleading as fuck.

[vanished]

What if brain damage causes people to play first person shooters? ?

[ZackBarletto]

I think it has to do with how good you are at the game too. If you suck and zombie out and don't really have a train of thought as to what you are doing then of course.

 

But if you have a passion for winning and you come out on top of most of your games because of critical thinking, problem solving and predicting the enemy and adapting after each loss or bad situation. That what is the difference between solving a puzzle and figuring out and predicting what your enemy is going to do next and smashing that toon into oblivion using precise aim and timing.

 

Yeah its just squeezing the trigger..... But if you do that you might just die and loose. You aim up for that head shot all day every day, you will destroy everyone.

 

Needs a better study. lol

[mr moose]

27 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Reading this thread makes me very sad...

No wonder "fake news" are so common and widely believed when people don't understand how to read scientific papers or even such a simple thing as what is and isn't

 

 

It's really is annoying how people dismiss science when they don't like the results but claim to be all for it and praise science when they are researching something cool, like robotic limbs or new drugs that might cure aids/cancer.

 

It's like they don't know it's the same method and review process. .

 

7 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

What if brain damage causes people to play first person shooters? ?

 

What if being being susceptible to drowning makes you breath in liquids. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

10 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

What if brain damage causes people to play first person shooters? ?

That would be the problem with using survey data. The advantages of doing an RTC is that you can establish causality due to the randomization

 

[ZackBarletto]

57 minutes ago, Suika said:

That does make me curious since they did mention a sort of auto-pilot mode in titles I could 100% believe could be auto piloted. Thinking in terms of Overwatch, at least playing at higher elos, I have to critically think about how to approach the fight and what I should go in expecting, and how I should respond to specific situations all within the walk time from spawn to the fight. I'd imagine CS:GO would be similar having to worry about economy, positioning, and numbers advantage.

 

The article may have some merit, but it's likely not applicable over all titles.

That was my question....

 

Exactly how good are these test subjects at their "First Person Shooters".

 

Are they Winners? Pros? Positive win rate? Positive KDR?

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, ZackBarletto said:

That was my question....

 

Exactly how good are these test subjects at their "First Person Shooters".

 

Are they Winners? Pros? Positive win rate? Positive KDR?

They are randomly selected, there will be some pros, and some noobs, some casuals etc.   

 

Again the research paper explains all this, it even explains how they test each subject to ensure they have spent adequate time in a game to validate any results they observe.

[ZackBarletto]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

They are randomly selected, there will be some pros, and some noobs, some casuals etc.   

 

Again the research paper explains all this, it even explains how they test each subject to ensure they have spent adequate time in a game to validate any results they observe.

Yeah sorry, i was just blindly defending video games because i like them and they like me:/

 

Guess I should actually read. lol

 

*new study, video games make kids not want to read* lol

[mr moose]

10 minutes ago, ZackBarletto said:

Yeah sorry, i was just blindly defending video games because i like them and they like me:/

 

Guess I should actually read. lol

 

*new study, video games make kids not want to read* lol

 

You'll be pleased to know then that the study doesn't actually condemn video games for causing brain damage, but in fact just confirms a previously observed phenomena where by carrying out certain tasks can either reduce grey matter or increase it.  They just used video games this time instead of music or some other sufficiently repetitive task.

[Brooksie359]

53 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

What if brain damage causes people to play first person shooters? ?

Or continue playing call of duty after mw2.....

[DutchTexan]

Video games are an individualistic thing, everyone plays for different reasons, different sessions and different games in different ways. I think definitive 'studies' can really only be achieved with older games, because they are simpler, there are less variables.

 

I think saying all video games are always good for every person is like defending chemically engineered fast food. I don't think anyone can really say an 8 year-old playing GTA V 12+ hours/day for a whole summer is a good thing. Then, with a game like Starcraft it's completely different. 

 

Regardless, I'm gonna buy McFlurry's and smoke cigars while I log 100's of hours into whatever I want.

[QuantumBit]

Cant wait for schools and parents to use this against video games  

[WMGroomAK]

Spent 5-minutes on Science Daily and found several other studies that don't appear to concur with this...

 

Playing Action Video Games can boost learning: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141110161036.htm

Violent video games found not to affect empathy: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170308081057.htm

Video games can change your brain: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170622103824.htm

 

I think the take away is that there is not enough data on any of this to form any kind of solid conclusion...

[LAwLz]

OK, so a disturbing number of people are just dismissing the study without actually looking into what it says.

I haven't read the full study (while I don't have much of a life, I do have better things to do on a Friday night than read studies to argue on the Internet) but here is what I gathered.

 

 

 

TLDR: The study is well made and the conclusion seems founded in science, not "we want games to look bad".

The study actually says that some type of games (in the test, a very specific type of FPS games, not just any FPS game) do not stimulate a certain part of the brain and as a result its mass decreases (just like how your leg muscles would become weaker if you stopped walking). They also found the opposite to be true, that games which requires you to use that part of the brain resulted in an increase of mass in that region of the brain (just like if you went to the gym and started training your legs with weights).

 

 

 

 

1) The headline is very misleading and does not reflect what the actual study concluded. It does not say FPS games causes brain damage.

 

 

2) This is a serious study published in a very serious journal. It's not just some random article looking for clicks. It was reviewed and edited before being published to meet quality standards.

 

 

3)  The sample of ~100 people is statistically significant. You do NOT need to have thousands of people for every experiment you do.

 

 

4) The reason why this study even came about was to test the findings of a similar study done in 2015 which came to the same conclusion. So this is at least the second time a scientific study proves that there is a correlation.

 

 

5) This was not some study of short term effects. It was conducted over several months (one study involved 6 hours of COD a week, for 6 months) and they made sure to include different types of gamers/non-gamers, as well as exposed different groups to different types of games.

 

 

6) There were actually three studies conducted which tested different things.

Study 1 measured the hippocampal volume of two different groups. One which had been playing COD for the last 6 months, and one that had played other types of games for 6 months.

The result was that the COD playing group had a smaller hippocampus than the non-COD players.

 

Study 2 took the non-COD players and divided them up into other groups. One group would be playing COD, and one would play 3D platforming games like Mario 64.

These two groups where then divided into 2 subgroups (2 for COD, 2 for Mario). The subgroups would then play a VR maze game. One group had to complete the maze using things such as landmarks and other things to navigate, while the other group relied on things like directions to complete the maze.

The result of this test was that ONLY the group of people who played COD and used directions to complete the maze ended up with a decreased hippocampus volume. COD and Mario players who used landmarks for navigation ended up with an increased hippocampus volume, and the Mario players who used directions showed no change in the hippocampus (but changes in other areas such as the entorhinal cortex which is important for navigation).

 

Study 3 wanted to test the results of study 2 in a different way.

They collected a new group of people who identified themselves as not playing FPS games. These people were then taught how to play games like Borderlands 2, which is a very large world but it has a GPS like navigation system. Once again the group of people who used landmarks and such for navigation saw an increase in hippocampus volume, while the group who used directions saw an overall decrease.

 

 

7) While the group of subjects was "small", they ran t-tests to determine what would be a statistical significant. The differences were big and consistent enough to say that the findings were statistically significant.

To put it in more simple terms, if you run a benchmark 5 times you might determine (through mathematical models) that the margin of error is 5%. If you were to run the same benchmark 15 times then the margin of error might only be 2%.

But, if you run the benchmark 5 times and all results are within 5% of each other, then that might be a big enough sample size to draw a conclusion.

More subjects is always better, but at the end of the day more subjects only helps even out any inconsistencies and possible outliers. If you have a fairly decent size of subjects and none of them show any signs of inconsistencies our being outliers then it is safe to say that your results are accurate, without having to get thousands of people to do the same (complicated) test.

 

 

8) The study suggests that games can have an effect on the deterioration and growth of the hippocampus. Games which does a lot of hand-holding which requires little thought from the player appears to be having a negative impact, while games which forces the player to put thought into navigation helps the growth of it.

The authors of the article also gives suggestions on how to change games to help the growth, by for example relying more on things like landmarks rather than arrows to make the player navigate.

 

 

9) This study is about the hippocampus. It makes perfect sense to me that the part of the brain which is responsible for spatial memory would become stronger if you needed to use it more, and weaker if players were handed navigational information on a silver platter.

Being surprised by these findings is like being surprised that jogging to work will make your legs stronger than driving to work would.

It is also worth adding that the hippocampus is one of the very few areas in the brain which can create new neurons. That means that this study most likely does not apply to other regions of the brain.

 

 

10) People really need to learn to actually look at science with an open mind. Don't just assume something is wrong because you don't like it. Also, don't make up excuses for why a study is flawed if you haven't even read it or looked into if your excuses are actually valid.

It's great that people are skeptical of things they read online, but dismissing facts because you don't like them is just as bad as believing facts because you want something to be true.

 

 

I should probably add that when I wrote COD and Mario, I wrote those because those were two of the games I remember the study using. There were more games involved but you get the point.

[Kamina]

I think the autopilot portion says a lot. That's a lot of inactivity going on. 

You aren't really stimulating the brain.

 

It explains why dudebros are so dumb. They love watching TV shows that requires no thinking, games that require no thinking, and work that requires no thinking. Not hating though, I love doing that too when I'm mentally exhausted. 

[Trik'Stari]

14 hours ago, JAKEBAB said:

Id have to disagree, id say battlefield is just as much of a reaction test as the others. Something like Squad and possibly Arma require far more planning and strategic thinking imo.

Perhaps, but Battlefield (not 3 and 4, those were not very good IMHO), mainly Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 1, require fast paced tactical thinking. You have to know what to do to support your team mates, what vehicle to jump into, what position to attack, how to attack each position based on what is already there, etc.

 

I am talking about Rush and Conquest modes, not Team or squad death match by the way.

[MadyTehWolfie]

Woooohooooo another BS psychology