The commenter may have a bias, but most prior research shows us the opposite of the study.
I also saw the poor experimental design and had a similar thoughts. Basically, this research looks poorly done and like an effort to prop up the gaming industry (and / or validate the authors pre-suppositions).
I personally believe in huge gains from gaming, based on personal experience (so obviously n = 1, read further accordingly).
Platformers train hand-eye coordination and pattern recognition, strategies teach resource management, RPGs about optimization and adopting growth mindset, racing games require long-time concentration, puzzlers and adventure games test your logic.
In general, games require you to: - learn a set of tools - master them - conquer objective
while also prevailing in face of adversity.
I never regretted the hours I spent gaming and I feel they contributed very much to my softeng career (not directly though).
Even within the same game genre that barely translates. People good at Starcraft I struggled with Starcraft II, people great at Warcraft made little headway in Starcraft II (e.g. WCIII players like Grubby or Happy).
Given that, claiming that things even further removed than those other games, which closely resemble one another, requires quite a bit of proof. It does not look like the skills transfer well even between similar games.
> while also prevailing in face of adversity.
I don't think we agree on what "adversity" is. You are just playing a game, and your brain knows it. If someone has the same brain reaction to the game avatar being in virtual "danger" to his actual body being in mortal danger than I'd like to see that, and I think most people would think that is not normal or healthy.
You don't need to defend yourself, if you had fun playing than that's more than enough. I don't understand why you want to drive yourself to seeing more in it than that.
That might be true if you're comparing the top 0.1%, but someone who played a lot of Starcraft would be miles ahead of any newcomer in both Starcraft II and Warcraft III.
Your example is like saying that a world-class sprinter would struggle to be a world-class cyclist. Yes, that's true, but the aspects that do carry over - cardio and muscle development - would immediately put them in the top 5% of the field even if they never win the Tour de France.
Even being good at Starcraft I in 1998 wouldn't make you good at Starcraft I in 2003. People uncover certain optimizations and strategies over times that are quickly adopted by everyone, to the extent that playing the same a good player in 1998 would get you dubbed a "noob" in 2003.
WC3 => Sc2 is a much greater leap than sc1 -> sc2 but still there was decent carryover. Grubby was still a GM or high masters player, even if he was no longer elite.
Sure - and joining the high school football team teaches teamwork, self-discipline, dealing with adversity, appearing before crowds, nutrition, fitness, etc etc
So what?
I think you meant good faith. They didn't use it as an example though, it was just rhetorical.
Most people aren't going to program 10 hours a day. But they might program 8 hours a day and then do 2 hours of entertainment. Maybe those 2 hours of watching TV were better spent gaming in terms of contributing to other aspects in life. Maybe those 2 hours of gaming could've been 2 hours of drawing instead.
If we're talking about incrementality, we'd better question why almost every software company is still treating their employees like idiot savants when games show us how quickly people can learn drastically different concepts, as long as presented correctly.
