Jason Moyer on 14/12/2012 at 17:19

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The ZR1 is pretty comparable to an F458. The Zonda is a pig, and that laptime has a lot to do with its top speed down the start/finish straight being 20mph higher than either of those cars (and even with that massive advantage, it's 15 seconds slower than a ZR1).

ZylonBane on 14/12/2012 at 18:06

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http://www.deedsofyore.com/imagres/herc.png

Kuuso on 14/12/2012 at 23:17

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This is a topic I am quite fond of.

History: I've found that usually games with historic components do a great job of placing right artefacts and creating them in the right way. For example war games tend to have their tank types in order and functioning akin to their real world counterparts. However, when it comes to events and chain of events, games have a tendency to warp history. This happens usually to serve the story or just because a game is a medium that is not very good at portraying much else than actions. Considering history, I would say games give you a lot of information, but the context this information is in is often incomplete. Due to this, I think games can be more of a spark of interest towards history than any sort of reliable tool of learning it.

Languages: As Henke said, the benefits in this sector are quite obvious for non-english speakers. I can honestly say that for me gaming from really early on and a lot made English in school so easy that I never had to do anything to get A's. This can easily be seen especially in breadth of a person's vocabulary, irregular verb use and structuring of sentences. As an example: There was very rare irregular verb I had to hammer into my head, because most of them were in my backbone already. To not overstate the gaming aspect, I also started participating in English messageboards/forums from really early on, which has had a HUGE effect on my English. Weirdly enough, I have not noticed any glaring errors with my English. What I mean is that the quality of English in games is astoundingly high (or is just the fact that I've gamed so much that such errors have been weeded out due to repetition).

When it comes to pronounciation and speaking English, I am a bit better than average, but not amazing. I also noticed a drop in my spoken English after quitting WoW, since I spoke English daily for 2-6 hours when playing it basically.

Coordination: I think it's obvious that games are great with hand/eye coordination and using their eyes to parse useful information quicker than their counterparts. Reflexes go here as well.

Logical thinking: I think this is a really understated thing. I wager that gamers tend to have a good sense of problem solving. Every game functions logically and can be broken into steps that the player needs to take to win. Of course, there's a huge difference between Team Fortress and Civilization. In general, I would say that gamers are good at breaking down a problem and solving it efficiently, because it is what games are about most often than not.

edit: The amount of typos in my post are due to 3:50 AM, not my inability to use English :D

Kuuso on 15/12/2012 at 01:56

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I would say that a gamer has the potential to solve a real world problem (be it how petty as arranging your refridgerator to bigger stuff like planning your finances) with more detachment (from irrelevant things considering the problem) and more refined on-the-go plan. Games tend to hurry people to make decision, which could train fast decision making. It is obvious that moving armies in a RTS is not directly applicable to real life, but I would say that some of the underlying mechanics could transfer.

I am not, of course, saying that the effects are profound. Just saying that it is a possibility.

Yakoob on 15/12/2012 at 15:54

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I posted on this before, but (http://koobazaur.com/using-games-to-change-yourself/) my short little article dwells on the topic if you want to have a look; whats there that hasnt been mentioned here, tho, is the potential to "teach" people to overcome certain psychological issues (arachnophobia, fear of heights, etc.) and applying gaming concepts to real life to facilitate learning (gamification).

Now that I shamelessly plugged my site (again) - echoing the whole FPS thing




Haha, straight on, this is what it was like first time I played paintball. I was getting mauled until I put myself in the "if this was counterstrike what would I do?" mindset and holy crap, I actually started doing damn good.

Reiterating what others said about factual information (Civ -> History, WW2 shooters -> History, etc.) Also language - my own skills were undoubtedly improved a lot by playing english games (aside from web browsing and movie-watching) when I was growing up. I remember going to my dad a few times playing FF7 asking him what some more complex* sentences meant; I probably learned quite a bit from it.

Something that hasn't been mentioned is the social-learning potential of multiplayer games. Or rather, how ironically untapped it seems. I've seen numerous of my friends who were super-awkward / aspergers in real life, but in their MMO or their online forum they were the most perfectly adjusted and highly sociable individuals. While it's obvious why those skills don't immediately translate to real life, I think that they really, really could, if those people tried to apply them.

* FF7 and "complex sentences" in the same sentence, har har!