How gamers will save the world? Is it interesting? The article below first appeared last year in issue 172 of PC Gamer UK magazine. The website of rockpapershotgun released the full article about gamers' lives in games. Read it and if you have an opinion on the subject, feel free to leave a comment. 

Read Full Article: rockpapershotgun

Games aren't a waste of time. Don't let their fun facade fool you: they're changing us, enabling to defeat with complex problems and navigate strange spaces. They're improving and educating the people who play them, transmitting radical political ideas, hard-wiring untested neural connections. In Japan games are being sold as anti-ageing devices, while in Europe and America scientists are just beginning to realise that games can be used as training simulators that have no precedent in human history. Videogames are going to be used by teachers to make the next generation of schoolchildren pay more attention in class and get smarter faster. They're already creating a generation whose visual skills and information-processing talents far exceed those of their parents. The military want gamers to pilot their helicopters and fighter jets, but for many gamers their encounter with games has led in entirely different directions. We're becoming skilled surgeons who learn with gamepads, we're becoming motivated politicians who fight inequality with digital worlds, and we're becoming human computers nodes in a future of brain-powered processing we could barely have imagined just a few years ago.

Gamers will save the world, and that process is only getting started. Don't believe us? Read on.

SUPERHUMANITY
There is a very strong reason to spend time at your PC: it's making you into a better, faster human being. Videogames are a new and important part of a rounded regime of brain exercise. You might think of them as athletics for the nervous system. What they do to the brain is unprecedented in nature: forcing us into spatially weird situations, and dumping abstract puzzles on us in a relentless and thrilling fashion. Reading, talking, and watching movies all exercise different areas of the brain, and videogames likewise provide us with unique stimuli, pushing the brain to become stronger and more flexible.

Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York have been looking at exactly how continued videogame-use influences our visual processing. The Rochester researchers intended to see whether habitual game-playing improved the visual skills of gamers, and they came up with a number of tests to measure this against nongamers. They reported that "videogame players were found to outperform non-videogame players on the localisation of an eccentric target among distractors, on the number of visual items they could apprehend at once, and on the fast temporal processing of visual information." Or, in common-speak: gamers are better at using their eyes, and better at understanding what they see and doing something about it, than non-gamers.

The Federation of American Scientists has been doing similar work, and they think that games can improve our general idea handling and planning. Their 2006 report on the medium concluded that "videogame developers have instinctively implemented many of the common axioms of learning scientists. They have used these approaches to help game players exercise a skill set closely matching the thinking, planning, learning, and technical skills increasingly demanded by employers in a wide range of industries." Translating again: games teach us techniques for problem solving that are very close to the scientific method of coming up with a hypothesis and then testing it.