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IN HOT PURSUIT of last week’s “big” “story,” I undertook one of my celebrated fact-finding missions, heading to New York’s Times Square to verify the results of a stunning new study that claimed that some violent videogames actually promoted visual acuity.
Stunning, indeed. Could action videogames like the larcenous “Grand Theft Auto 3,” the Nazi-killing “Medal of Honor” and the Gothic “Half-Life”—games which parent groups, legislative groups and even Nazi-killing groups have been telling us for years would bring about the end of civilization as we know it—actually have any mental health benefit?
And the answer is: Yes. According to research done at the University of Rochester, videogame players have better focus and are more aware of their surroundings, thanks to years of having to watch for every ax, every man-eating-frog and every half-decomposed zombie coming at them on their video screens.
“Although videogame playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing,” writes Rochester professor Daphne Bavelier.
Stunned that someone in such an esteemed profession as academia would seemingly be endorsing violence, I called Bavelier. First, to get me off her trail, she told me that her main line of research is actually “brain plasticity,” which is the kind of term that usually makes me hang up the phone, put on my pajamas and watch cartoons for the rest of the day.
But this was a big story, so I resisted my normal instincts and asked a blistering series of journalistic follow-up questions. Almost immediately, I got Bavelier to admit that, as a non-player of videogames, she never would’ve considered doing the study were it not for a sizeable grant from the National Institutes of Health. Plus, she was encouraged by a videogame-loving student who believed that his uncanny proficiency in visual testing was a result of spending hour upon hour in his dorm room with a joystick in his hands. (Clearly, college life hasn’t changed so much since I was an undergrad.)
Bavelier tested her student’s hypothesis with a series of experiments. Her work eventually proved—once and for all—that non-videogame players process visual information more slowly and can track 30 percent fewer objects than videogame players. Of course, she’s talking about male videogame players. There was only one woman on the entire University of Rochester campus who played videogames regularly enough to qualify for the study, and she wasn’t even included. What that actually means is there was only one woman who admitted that a good time for her is an afternoon of shooting down any man who comes into her field of vision (which again sounds like my college days).
Just as it’s not the heat, but the humidity, Bavelier stressed that it’s not the violence of the videogames that heightens mental skills, but the action. “It’s frustrating, because the media keeps reporting my findings as saying that violent videogames are good for you, but that’s not what the study says,” said Bavelier, who has been inundated with angry e-mail from parents. “The key to our findings is the speed of the games and that visual events could happen to you at any time. That’s what improves your skills.”
As someone who has watched in horror as my ability to process visual information and track objects has declined to the point where I have to be standing inside the refrigerator to find even a bottle of ketchup, that sounded like something I should try—which is how I found myself in the dark basement of a Times Square arcade last week.
I hadn’t been in such a place in nearly two decades—not since “Asteroids” and “Pac-Man” were the hot games. But not much has changed. Arcades are still loud, annoying places filled with 10-year-olds trying to hit you up for quarters, 20-year-olds thinking they can impress girls with a high score on Hydro Thunder and 30-year-olds who have pretty much given up on the notion of tender human contact. If videogames do indeed focus your attention, it’s only because your brain is trying to focus on anything but the people around you.
I immediately sidled up to a game called “House of the Dead II” because of all the body parts, blood and gore flying all over the place. And that was just the line of screaming kids trying to get their parents to let them play.
Thrashing a young urchin, I made my way to the machine gun console, inserted my six quarters—yes, it now takes $1.50 to play one of these fancy pinball machines—and got into firing position. The reason it’s so expensive? There’s more movie-making than game-playing in today’s arcades.
“House of the Dead II” opens with a pretentious mini-film that sets the scene (why are these things always in bat-filled castles?) and instructed me that I should not fire on Gary, my fellow agent, but that I should fire at will on zombies, who started coming at me from all directions. I emptied my pistol once, twice, three times, blowing away limbs, heads and arms in bloody heaps, but they just kept coming, the bastards! After less than a minute—half that time if you don’t count the mini-movie—my game was over. Of course, Gary was dead—although I swear he fired on me first (but, either way, you can chalk up this friendly fire incident to the fog of war). There it was: $1.50 for 30 seconds of pleasure—which, come to think of it, reminded me of the days when Times Square was filled with prostitutes.
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I was going to walk away from the machine, but I remembered something in Bavelier’s study about how important it is for non-videogame players to practice at least one hour a day in order to improve their visual skills. So I put in another six quarters, picked up my gun again, and made a quick note that I was going through my monthly expense budget faster than the time I took that “high-level source” out to lunch at Le Bernardin for some “background” on a “story.”
This time, I got past the first wave of zombies and into the corridor where I was set upon by devil frogs. Compared to zombies, who walk through the House of the Dead as if they’re extras in a 1950s horror movie, the frogs were harder to hit. I fell quickly (although I managed to avoid killing Gary this time). Another six quarters and I made it into a third corridor, before finally dying at the teeth of evil slugworms.
Despite Bavelier’s research, I didn’t feel as if my acuity had been heightened (although my attention was keenly focused on the fact that I had spent $4.50 of the magazine’s good money on 90 seconds of entertainment). So I headed upstairs to rejoin society. But just before exiting, I noticed that the arcade had a few old machines in a sealed-off corner. All of the greats were here: a “Pac-Man,” an “Asteroids” and even a “Mortal Kombat,” the original violent videogame that was supposed to bring down the demise of our civilization two decades ago.
Maybe Bavelier’s research was correct, because I immediately honed in on a game that had always been my favorite: a race-driving game called “Pole Position.” And perhaps something had gotten into me during my 90 seconds of intense, bloody action in “House of the Dead II,” but damned if I didn’t turn in a virtuoso performance on the classic game.
For just one quarter, I played for a good five minutes, rolling up a score of 29,710—which turned out to be the top score ever on this particular machine. I went back two days later and my “GER” tag was still on the main screen, a tribute to my heightened visual acuity.
OK, so maybe it’s not an accomplishment akin to writing the Great American Novel (or even, truth be told, reading it), but it meant something to me.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Off-Off-Broadway show, “Neo-Shtick Theater,” will be presented this weekend in New York City. For more information, go to gershkuntzman.homestead.com/neoshtick.html
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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Perspectives
