Iowa State study links gaming to -- over there, check it out!

Yes it is! You play OCD online?? played Arkham asylum ?? if you have the cure is not to play good games anymore! I have compleatly been spoiled buy epic games and nothing else compares at times. I have this problem anyway.

Uncharted 2 should help with that - I played 7 hours straight yesterday, got the majority of the way through the campaign and a few MP matches in, and I enjoyed every second of it.

@Jivebunny

I didnt know there was a way to play OCD online do you clean the other persons home and make sure everything is neat and clean?

@ zefur

how do you think Microsoft had those high stats from people changing their avatars?

OCD online, aka World of Warcraft

@Ghen

You're thinking of PCP Online.

The exact same thing has been happening to me, but Arkhum Asylum has really got me hooked, the last game that did that was also Fallout 3 for me.

A lot of studies show that anything active will reduce attention levels. What this means is, it's easier to focus after walking through the woods than it is if you took that same walk down a street.

The reason being distractions. Things like ads, noisy cars, people shouting, etc. It's more to do with multiple things all vying for our attention than it is to do with gaming itself I'd say.

It just so happens that when you're playing a game you're usually watching multiple things, like health, ammo, distance to nearest town, where your team is, etc. These competing factors can lead to decreased focus.

What's wrong with it?

It must be serious to need scientific study.

You're obviously not playing the right games. I'd suggest Excel. That should slow you down and keep you focused.

Yeah the world needs more shoot-outs, explosions and continual police car chases on the interstate...

...then good luck in this week's new job for you.

I think it's much more likely that people with ADD are attracted to video games than video games cause ADD. Were the test subjects selected from a pool of existing gamers, or was it a group of random people who just played games that much for the study?

I can't imagine NON gamers with ADD being able to pay attention to a game for 4+ hours a day.

This is COORELATION, not CAUSATION. Silly scientists.

True. I am also ADD, as are most of my friends. The only thing we all seem to be able to do is sit down and play video games - or smoke some ganja. Anything else, and we'll forget what we're doing before we even begin.

Sorry guys, that isn't ADD, you are just part of a generation of slackers who are f'ing lazy.

Can't do more then a few math problems without stopping? Suck it up and do more, or don't. No one wants to do homework, that is why it is called work. You can sit and watch tv and play video games though....of course....

The only reason we have ADD today in most people is because our sympathetic retarded society condones the behavior, and gives it a nice scientific name.

There are people out there with real ADD, stemming from real psychological disorders.

@Freedom Town

Then I guess the doctors were milking the insurance when they prescribed Ritalin for me, which, I should add, did the job quite nicely. Once before school, once mid-way through, and once again after school if I needed to concentrate on homework at home.

I unofficially stopped taking it during high school, didn't like the way it made me feel. Soon after the doctors said they wanted to take me off and see how I did without it anyways.

I almost never did any homework, and even during class had trouble focusing at times, but I was a much happier person overall. I still can't believe I passed Algebra II by acing all the tests and doing good on the final. Considering I did maybe 3 homework assignments out of the 100+ we must've had.

>>I am also ADD, as are most of my friends.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I think you just don't have patience and you have been conditioned by media. This study supports in part what I've been thinking for a long time. Games are not the only contributors to this rise in people being unable to focus for what used to be normal periods of time. Quick cuts in movies/shows/commercials/news programs are all there to keep our interest level up because it does not give your brain time to think or adapt.

A good example of this is watching a few of the original James Bonds and then watch the last 3 (The Brosnan ones in particular) and tell me if you can see a difference in how they film it. I suspect that most of today's tweens/teenagers will find the original ones boring and too slow for them even because they are used to having things flash and move quickly - Anything else is "boring".

While I don't think this is true ADD, I do believe it is a type of psyche conditioning to make people expect things to move fast. It's the reason why Twitter and Facebook are so popular with the younger crowd. It's short, quick and things change rapidly which is something they like.

I'm not saying that we should go back to the "old" way of doing things. Multi-tasking has it's uses in the workplace for sure (where else can you have a meeting, text your friends, read work emails and write up designs for your new piece of code at the same time?) but I wonder how productive will these people be in the long term? Are they just keeping busy or are they actually accomplishing anything? Based on what I know of History, it has been the people who can focus intensely on one sole task that are the true innovators.

My unscientific 2 cents...

Sonicspike:

Not to put you down in any way, but Ritalin would makes it easier for anyone to concentrate. There's a reason that Ritalin/Adderrall/Dexedrine are some of the most abused drugs on college campuses (it lets you study for 8 hours straight without running out of steam, something the human brain isn't meant to do). Same reason that meth has a strangely high level of use in middle-class 30-something businessmen: allows them to get all their work for the week done in one night and then spend the rest of the week with their families. Therefore, it's dangerous to use positive response to stimulants as a confirmation of an ADD diagnosis, because most people would fit into this category (except for people with interfering psychological disorders).

Now, with regards to FreedomTown's point, I was under the impression that true ADD kids weren't even able to sit through a movie without wandering off. I think some of the negative reaction people have to the prevalence of ADD is that a lot of patients seem to be able to concentrate on entertainment but not on work, which is suspicious indeed. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of so-called ADD patients have in fact simply adapted as children to the high speed/frequency of information input that our society currently has, and their brains get conditioned to operate at "high speed", potentially causing the brain to get "bored" with low speed input. This would correlate strongly with the fact that the biggest problems with ADD show up in schools, a medium whose methods haven't really changed much in the last 100 years, while most everything else has (i.e. old movies are much slower and a lot of young people don't like that, old commercials are much more laid back and not as in your face, etc.).

@sonicspike41 that is exactly in line with what I've heard over the years about people with ADD, screens seem to be able to catch their/your attention.
I wonder how many of their test subjects were ADD to begin with?

@aristokrat

I certainly agree that drugs meant to relax people and increase their focus and attention will do just that. I'm not sure exactly if Ritalin can be used to treat anyone though.

Take something like an allergy medicine. I found out (through personal, not so scientific tests) that I sneezed more while taking things like Nasonex than I did without them. This while I had doctors recommending I take them.

Not all doctors are right all the time. I know I've heard several times that ADD is one of the most mis-diagnosed problems in kids today. It's usually hard to tell the difference between a kid who is just hyperactive and a kid who has a genuine medical condition preventing him from focusing.

I still believe I have ADD though. I mean even while typing on the computer I usually can't keep still, I'm listening to music, and I often times will start a rant and get lost half way through it on some wild thought. (Note to self: hurry this up!)

At night while lying in bed my thoughts tend to go something like this:
Days events, my hand, robot hand, Gundam, and finally I realize I got sidetracked (like 10 minutes later) and try to trace my thoughts back so I can remember the original problem.

When doing math work for school, even staring at the ceiling seemed to take more time. I was using an old Win95 machine with no internet at the time (was waiting for a new one), and sometimes even boring things could steal my attention away.

I've been narrating this entire rant in my head, with mental images to match as I type... if it ain't ADD, it's something more than just games, since I had this before I started gaming.

It's kind of hard to just sit down and do math problems, when you can't keep all the concepts you are applying to the problems, along with any variables involved, in your working memory for more than 15 seconds. Its like trying to put a puzzle together with someone rearranging and stealing the pieces. Further compounding the issue, for those like me with the predominantly inattentive subtype ,is the lethargy. As you sit there trying to suck it up and just do the problems the lack of processable input starts to take a toll on you. Slowly but surely your arousal level drops. There are two options from this point, sit their in a trance till you get to the point where you probably wouldn't even get up if someone offered you a steak dinner, or go find the nearest source of steady understandable input. Obviously since you don't want to be a dysthymic meat-sack at all hours of the day you go play video games.

Video games allow you to be stimulated sensually and mentally at whatever pace you can handle. In most cases they aren't the cause of the inattention. I think 4 hours of anything every day will eventually wear you down.

And scientists like fruit by the foot.

Especially when the fruit by the foot Has other shapes built in! But for some reason only kids could create that genious technology while the humble scientists scratch their heads in amazement.

Watch out with those things. Scientists once did a study and they found that people who like butterlies showed a higher chance of becoming folk singers later in life.

And apparently Country is the genre of music most likely to cause someone to commit suicide. The more you know...

Don't touch the Butterfly, or it will effect something in someway. I can't remember what it's called, but I do know that Touching Butterflies = Apocolyptic Future

Uh, Wallace? The name of the effect you're looking for is the rather self-evident "Butterfly Effect."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Thanks Michael T but I got distracted half way between copy-pasting that link to my browser.. could you summarize it for me? Use short simple sentences please.

Mangafox seriously I only use that one if I reeeeaaaaaaaaally have to

And I usually have tabs open for

Hotmail, Facebook, Onemanga, Onemanga forums, Mangahelpers, Bakaupdates, Jcafe24, Joystiq, Sidereel, Icefilms, Cracked, Bmfleak, Hotnewhiphop

atleast I'm probably forgetting some cos I'm at work at the moment

I'm playing Left 4 Dead as I type this...

OH SHIT, gotta go. TANK!

onemanga FTW

I usually do that, I surf on the internet or play solitaire or minesweeper while I read manga or watch anime. Or watch tv while I study or read.

I'm sure it's normal, right?

Haha that happens to me too. After a certain number of hours of game time... I'll close my eyes and just see the game replaying itself in my head. Especially with puzzle games.

Onced I played meteos for 3 hrs on a plane and when I tried to sleep for the rest of the flight, there was no darkness only zuel.. Errrr.. I mean only meteos blocks rocketing towards an alien planet.

I on the other hand would prefer a good book over ANY game but since the second installment of the Kingkiller Chronicles (Name of the wind is the first book) aint out yet I guess I'll still be gaming for a while

O I forgot to say I'm prepared to be downvoted for saying a good book is better then any game on a gaming website

Actually, I'm a scientist who studies video games, and I'm a gamer. And a lot of my colleagues are gamers as well.

And yes it's a generalization, but it's still information and on average there is a relationship. It won't hold true for everyone, and without reading the study I myself have questions about the directionality of the relationship, but at the very least the results should encourage you to think about your own game playing habits and whether it is having an effect on your cognitive abilities (or other aspects of your behavior). It's very easy to just discount it all as hooey, but perhaps if you looked at your own behavior more actively you might notice that games are having an effect. They might not, but then again, you never know if you never actively look into it.

As for games training our abilities (as some have brought up here and elsewhere) there is very limited evidence that games (including games specifically marketed as "brain training") have any benefits on developing faster reaction time, better mental processes, etc. The effect only seems to occur for people who have deficits in those areas, rather than improving the abilities of average people. So one study found that the elderly, who often show declines in spatial abilities, can improve their spatial abilities by playing tetris. When the average person plays tetris, they get better at tetris, but not much else.

And one thing to keep in mind is that most scientist don't want to ban video games. Most scientist don't want to ban anything. Rather, they want to provide information that the public can use to make decisions about their own behavior. Yes, there are some scientists who have a personal mission, but most don't. I don't. I study video games and swearing, and most of my research shows that they are generally bad for people, but that doesn't lead me to lobby congress to ban people from swearing or playing video games. Rather, I use that information to change my own behavior, and I advise others to do the same. It's more the Jack Thompsons of the world who are trying to restrict your ability to do the things you love than scientists.