A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.

People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study.

Interestingly, violent games seem to provide the most consistent positive learning effect. Perhaps this is because that violence may provide the greatest stimulation and reward to the brain. Within games, the violence reward is the easiest to provide. It would be much harder to provide a sex or food reward. It would be interesting to see a game that had the explicit goal of trying to educate through violence. The game Company of Heroes is a game I’ve played which uses historical WWII units in the game that educates you about their inherent strengths and weaknesses. I had fun seeing the displays of violence within the game, but I also learned about the weapons and tactics of WWII:

Even so, researchers have yet to create educational software as engaging as most action games. Without such intense involvement, neural circuits won’t change, they believe. “It happens that all the games that have the good learning effect happen to be violent. We don’t know whether the violence is important or not,” said Dr. Bavelier. “We hope not.”

via When Gaming Is Good for You – WSJ.com.