Esports Workout Regimen

Eating right, sleeping right, exercising, cleaning up for sponsors — these ideas have undergirded traditional sports for generations. In e-sports, they are regarded as almost radical. “They don’t look at themselves as physical human beings,” said Hvidt, who won the European handball championship with Denmark in 2008. “It’s common sense, in a way. But with them it was not.” Rfrsh has a validating narrative under its belt. The company’s other team, Astralis, which competes in...

 Video Game Violence is Not Violence

In the 1960s, as Bandura conducted his media effects research, the British folklorists lona and Peter Opie spent years observing and studying children's outdoor play. They watched children play games—many of them made up—with names like Underground Tig and Witches in the Gluepots and concluded, "A true game is one that frees the spirit. It allows no cares but those fictitious ones engendered by the game itself." When children commit to the games, they opt out of the ordinary world and "th...

 Gaming Produces a Meditative State

Your brain, in other words, may not consent to be trained. But t will improve a few of these key skills if you let it enjoy a few hours of the first-person shooter BioShock. Recent research, the 2012 re noted, has revealed action games' positive effects, not just on attentional control and emotional regulation, but also on decision making, "mental rotation" (the ability to create a mental image of m object and manipulate it in three dimensions), and the ability to switch rapidly between compe...

 How Metroid Forces Players to Remember the Whole World

Whenever a Metroid player aquires a new power-up, her mind races back in time in a way not unlike what happens at a turning point in a movie. When a secret is revealed we are forced back through the story to mentally review everything we've seen so far, sometimes changing the interpretation of entire scenes. [...] Since the player never completely leaves an area behind and forgets about it, the game world constantly expands in the mind of the player. By never completely exhausting an area b...

 Starcraft and Neuroplasticity

Prior experimental investigation of the cognitive consequences of video gaming provides evidence that cognitive and perceptual changes occur in those who transition from non-gamers to gamers. Specifically, training on action games (e.g., first-person, fast paced, kill-or-be-killed situations) has been linked to enhanced core perceptual processing [10], [11]. Action video game novices assigned to action video game training experience a number of benefits, including higher contrast sensitivity ...