Should You Ever Mention Video Games?

[Law2Doc]

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I've always been interested in the cognitive effects of games, and wrote a bit on the effects of poker experience. Obviously not the same as video games, but two crucial elements are present in any competitive game: 1) imperfect information, meaning that players must make decisions based on both revealed and hidden information, and 2) opponent modeling, meaning the player must predict the enemy, requiring pattern recognition and theory of mind.

I wrote about four studied effects of poker play: (1) a reduction in estimation and decision biases, (2) a reduction in hindsight bias, which may reflect enhanced working memory capacity, (3) adoption of adaptive learning (adjusting learning method in response to change in demands), and (4) increased emotional regulation (less internal attribution for random events). Although you were mainly talking about mechanical reflexes, I believe that there are a lot of cognitive benefits to games that can be generalized to other tasks. I think more and more research is being done indicating both positive and negative effects of gaming, depending on what area you focus in (eg. pathological gaming is almost always negative).

A good way to spin game-playing is the potential for games to be used for brain training in the future. Little kids start playing on their iPads as soon as they figure out how to press the Home button. Games are incredible motivators and it would be stupid to not encourage their use in education and cognitive therapy.

Agreed, as I've been mentioning above if you can package it into a novel research bent it won't come off as a colossal waste of time.

And yes I am reiterating that otherwise to Adcoms it WILL in fact be viewed as a colossal waste of time. Yes Tenk, waste of time IS relative, but it's not the gamers frame of reference that matters here, it's the Adcoms.

Every generation has its wastes of time. As a teen my friends and I used to skateboard over to the local pizza joint to pump quarters into some of the games that are regarded as very "old school" these days. But we logged many hours and all got very good at it. (And fwiw the joysticks on those are much more similar to a lot of the medical device controllers than the controller Nintendo uses.) And in retrospect that was just a fun big waste of time. For resume purposes it didn't happen.

 

[Sardinia]

@Law2Doc Do you want to fight? You may punch with five digits, but mine are 8-bit.

 

[Chelsea FC]

wanted to piggy back on this thread instead of creating a new one. What would saying board games as a hobby?? Not like monopoly but deeper games like nexus ops, axis and allies and battle cry its social and wouldnt have the negative sigma as much as video games because I would suspect that would be the hobby of choice for time period of ADCOMS.

 

[Pagan FutureDoc]

Most people won't be able to shake the idea that you just sit around playing monopoly every day. It's a really hard hobby to explain to anyone let alone adcoms.

And I'm a guy with a couple of bookshelves full of board games.

 

[Chelsea FC]

I think I will bite the bullet with this one. I understand you have to put your best foot forward at interviews but I draw the line with my board games lol. I will just be honest and try my best to explain its much more than just monopoly and some games actually last several days. That and going to Broadway plays and playing soccer are 3 of my largest hobbies .. I dont think I can talk about anything else with passion.

 

[bearintraining]

I wouldn't mention this on an application, but I did mention this in my interviews when (or if) asked about what I like to do in my spare time. I like to play co-op games. I don't think it hurt me in any way.