Video games get a bad rap. They are often portrayed as violent, addictive, and a mindless waste of hours that encourage laziness and make us fat.
But that's not the full story.
Most virtual games can be designed to have educational and physical benefits for players. Games that use repetitive actions, such as the swinging of a bat or targeting a moving object, train the brain and muscles to perform better in real-life activities.
Video game brain training has the same effect as reading a book or riding a bike — when the brain is learning, thousands of new connections are being formed. The addition of a reward system motivates players to continuously improve their skills.
That's good news, since computer gaming is a big business. The global gaming industry was worth $67 billion (£43 billion) in 2013 and is projected to grow to $82 billion (£52 billion) by 2017.
Now check out some ways video games make you smarter.
People who play action-based games make accurate decisions 25% faster.
Fast-paced games require quick thinking and fast reactions so you don't get killed. In real-life situations, active gamers have a better sense of what is going around them and are able to make decisions faster, according to scientists from the University of Rochester.
In one study, participants aged 18 to 25 were split into two groups. One group played 50 hours of first-person shooter games "Call of Duty 2" and "Unreal Tournament." The other group played 50 hours of the simulator game "The Sims 2." The action game players made decisions 25% faster in a task unrelated to playing video games, without sacrificing accuracy.
"Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference," study researcher Daphne Bavelier said in a statement.
People who play video games have more control over their dreams.
Video games give people more control over their dreams and decrease nightmares, according to psychological research out of Grant MacEwan University in Canada, described in LiveScience.
A few studies have shown that gamers are much more likely to be lucid dreamers, which means they can consciously control what's happening in their dreams.
Psychologists think that this may be related to the "practice" that gamers have in inhabiting an alternate reality.
Additionally, this seems to also to provide some protection from and even control over dreams that would qualify as nightmares, especially for men.
Video games can make us better people.
Slow-moving strategy games can change our thinking behavior so that we can learn to make wiser, more ethical decisions in real-life scenarios.
That's the idea behind Quandary, a game that places human colonists on the Planet Braxos and requires the player, or captain, to help work out dilemmas among the settlers.
Scot Osterweil, creative director at MIT’s Education Arcade explained on Boston.com: "We don’t believe that playing the game will automatically help players take better perspectives in their own lives, but we think the game represents a playful way of introducing ideas that can be further developed through reflective conversation with others, and through additional activities provided on the website.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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