- why video game skills? they improve visual skills, attention skills, multitasking, spatial cognition, creativity, decision-making, probabilistic inference
- 1/4 of variability in game performance predicted by volume of certain brain structures; game performance correlated with laparoscopic surgery skills (at least 6 hours of games a week); action video games train the brain to better process certain visual information
- project seeks to develop an easy coding procedure for video games and explore usefulness for science and industry
- study 1: student interns rated 24 skills on necessary-unecessary likert scale on a number of games; rated 79 games then clustered them by genre (defined via wikipedia entries, a type of crowd-sourcing)
- study 2: 6 items added to coding scheme; each student in class rated 5 games they were familiar with (some were gaming addicts, others couldn’t code), plus game forums and facebook events; 100 different games coded, 335 codings; motor coordination, verbal understanding, manage resources, observation-looking around, creativity and problem solving, human-human interaction, persistence
- looked at 6 specific games to do a skill profile: Assassin’s Creed (observation), Angry Birds (human-human, persistence), Mario Kart (coordination), Professor Layton (verbal, creativity, persistence), Dance Central (coordination; almost identical to Mario Kart), Final Fantasy (verbal, creativity)
- conclusions: can profile video games for necessary skills, can map aspects to game features
- future: look at more specific games and make generalizability; look at expert versus novice in each; lead to reviews and recommendations; map skills to genres and games within genres; what game should I give my kid for certain skills?
#hcil Assessing the Components of Skill Necessary for Playing Video Games (Kent Norman)
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