How Games Help: Cognition

May 17, 2019, Marguerite Dibble

What are the cognitive benefits that games have been scientifically proven to provide?

One of the easiest assertions to make about video-games is they make you “smarter”, or more specifically: ”better at doing things with your brain”. The former is of course a hyperbolic generalization, but there has been scientifically verified testing that shows playing games can help with certain mental tasks. There are two typical methods for testing how video-games can improve the way a person processes certain tasks…

Method one is to measure how well people who reportedly play video games regularly perform on cognitive tasks, then that is compared to people who don’t play games. While tests such as this have shown that those who play games perform better, it doesn’t prove that games actually are responsible for that improvement. After all, people who are better that those tasks may just enjoy games more since it is an outlet for that particular skill.

Method two is more scientifically sound. In this method, people who don’t play games are tested, then introduced to games, and after various intervals, tested again. These tests have also shown improvements in cognitive tasks and therefore provide a much stronger grounds for the thesis playing games can improve cognitive functioning.

Executive Functioning

Imagine you’re standing in front of a classic cop procedural styled evidence web. It’s filled with pictures and snippets and stories. Your job is to not just find a specific piece of data, but to understanding how finding each piece, in the best order, and contextualizing it within the right story, will bring clarity to the chaos. This is a particular cognitive function that games can help quite a bit with.

For the first step in this task, we can see from the data that playing games improves an individual’s ability to sort a bunch of visual information coming at them quickly. Games put multiple factors in front of you, some far more than others, and then a game will give you stakes to sorting those factors in a meaningful way. This has resulted in studies that have shown playing games can help significantly in treating dyslexia and amblyopia (also referred to as “lazy eye”).

The ability to visually sort is a key part of executive functioning, but really shines when sorting precedes informed action. Games help people build the ability to analyze risk, make choices, and act on them towards objectives. Some psychologists have theorized that games are triggering our natural need for “Risky Play”, a form of play that helps us know our limits, and more importantly learn how to get up and move forward once we hit them, both emotionally, and physically.  

Persistence

Which leads us to our final key cognitive benefit, the ability to simply keep trying. Think back on a time in your life when you accomplished something difficult, something that took you multiple tries, maybe even months or years of skill building in order to master. Think about how you felt when you looked back on what you had accomplished, and contrast that to how you felt every time you had to summon the energy to keep trying.

Games provide us with clean and clear containers within which to build skills, and reward us with increasing our capacity for persistence. We can find tools to build this skill in the real world, but often those spaces are far more elusive. When playing a game, the feeling of progress is solidified and the sense of achievement made crisp and clear. Nearly every game is based on the idea that doing something better over time, learning, growing, and improving at a specific task feels satisfying. When you are able to do that in a controlled space that rewards that persistence, your ability to dedicate yourself towards challenges in real life can improve as well.