“Nurse, Hand Me That Clamp, Scalpel, Nintendo!”

by David Safier

If you walked into a hospital and saw your surgeon hunched over his Nintendo Wii, would you run out the door screaming and go on a frantic search for another doctor? You wouldn’t if you’ve read the recent research out of the Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix.

The physicians enrolled in this study who regularly played on the console scored 48 percent higher on surgical control than their peers who didn’t.

“The surgeons develop an increased efficiency, less errors, more fluid movement—basically they’re just better,” Mark Smith, director of the hospital’s Simulation Education and Training Center, told The Guardian. Smith and his colleagues are carrying a study on 16 surgical residents evenly split in two groups; one gaming regularly, the other not.

Don’t scoff at the potential benefits of video games as educational tools — and I’m talking about the commercial games, not ones created to be “educational.” Surgeons and pilots seem to benefit. Some researchers credit part of the recent rise in I.Q. (Yes, apparently there has been a rise) to video games. Remember, the games not only improve hand-eye coordination and reflexes. They often demand players make decisions based on a wide variety of information available to them, then give immediate feedback about whether they made the right choice. That’s serious mind work.

I read awhile ago that when they give people tests on their ability to multitask, the high scores go to people who speak more than one language and people who play video games frequently. The highest scores go to the multilingual gamers who combine both kinds of brain activities.

Please don’t ask me to back this stuff up, by the way. I’m pulling it out of my memory, but it’s all based on serious analysis. The point is, those of us in the pre-gamer generations tend to see the amount of time young folks spend glued to those joysticks and portable game machines, and we don’t appreciate the sophistication that went into the game designs or the skill involved in developing proficiency. No one should have a steady diet of the stuff, of course, but as a leisure activity, it beats hell out of watching TV.