Real Time Strategy games train your brain: research

Researchers have found evidence indicating that playing real time strategy games may help train your brain to be more flexible.

According to the research, published in PloS One, previous work in the field focussing on action games found that novices who were exposed to these games experienced several benefits including, ‘higher contrast sensitivity, faster visual information processing, expanded useful field of view, and logical comprehension.’

This led the researchers to wonder if playing real time strategy games could effect higher level cognition – in other words, could playing Starcraft make you think faster?

Because men play games at much higher rates than women, the researchers went with all female test groups.

The researchers then split their subjects into three groups. Two of these groups, SC 1 and SC 2  played Starcraft, while a control group that played The Sims.

Those in SC 1 played with a half map against one opponent and had one base, whereas SC 2 played against two opponents and had two bases.

To measure what this did to the gamers’ cognitive abilities; they performed a series of tests before and after playing the games.

“Forty hours of training within an RTS game that stresses rapid and simultaneous maintenance, assessment, and coordination between multiple information and action sources was sufficient to affect change.

“As a result of RTS game experience, an underlying dimension of cognitive flexibility emerged and characterised individual differences in performance on a variety of laboratory tasks,” the researchers wrote.

"By recording real-time gaming data, we were able to compare the two StarCraft groups in terms of the number of significant features attended during game play. This has revealed that in fact the SC-2 gaming setup led to more attended features overall than SC-1," the researchers wrote.