Interesting article in SA this morning titled [url=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-video-games-change-brain&page=1]How Video Games Change the Brain.[/url] Researchers showed that violent shooters provided unexpected benefits that other games do not. They even showed that part of the gap in spatial reasoning skills between men and women may be due to the large percentage of males that play these games. Positive consequences: Increased spatial attention levels Faster reaction to visual and audio input Better three-dimensional spatial reasoning Correction of lazy eye Improved hand eye coordination Increased perception of contrast Negative consequences: Addiction Increased aggression All these studies showed that the 3D shooters contributed to skills useful to scientific thinking in way other games do not. They are now searching to answer why, and try to find a way to trigger these benefits without the side-effects. Personally, I'd be interested to see these tests run with Portal if it is the violence that everyone objects to. Anyway, there is one point I'd like to add that I think they are missing. I think the main reason first person shooters contribute to scientific reasoning is because they force you to experiment. When you bring home a new game and pop it in your machine, you are loading up a new world that may or may not act like our own. The first person perspective immerses you in that world as if you were there. The competition for survival motivates you to learn new ways to exploit the environment you are in. In a way, 3D shooters are simulation of human existence. You suddenly find yourself aware of the world around you, and have to start learning about it to survive, starting with it's most fundamental rules, up to the complex interactions of those rules. Just like a small child, the first thing you do is start experimenting with this new world, to figure out what it is. You see what objects you can interact with them and how. You test the physics and mechanics of the world and look for repeatable results. Whether you know it or not, you perform some of the purest science there is. Basically, each game you are doing what science has attempted to do since it was invented. Testing the nature of the physical world we are presented with, and exploiting that knowledge to advance ourselves. All these preliminary and pilot studies, to me, show the obvious. Gamers are scientists, whether they know it or not. I think further studies on this may show video games to be much more beneficial than most people thought.