Cognitive Labs

In this case, a study population played the game Rise of Nations. After a while, they showed improvement on cognitive tests. This tells us what we already know - that complex tasks involving repetition and especially multi-tasking which demands a recurrent loop of attentiveness load can extend the boundary of cognitive ability.

Unless the specific variables of the game play map to quantitatively measurable scales of assessment, and this assumes that a set of qualitative or social choices with a very large and tenuous possibility frontier and unknown internal verisimilitude can be expressed mathematically, it's difficult to take the conclusion beyond the initial mild statement. Nolan Bushnell could just as easily have said that Pong was brain-boosting, or the video-disc game dragon's lair (the first anime-style game [no sprites] that could be controlled from a console) boosted the brain while the gamer waited for her/his pizza to get ready.



However, this means that more rigorous and focused studies of populations that already have been published exhibit that much more potentiality and promise. Our exploratory work with professional gamers (2005) exhibited as much.

Labels: bushnell, dragons, kramer, lair, nations, rise, risk

Video games have just turned the big 4-0.

That is because 40 years ago was the date when some enterprising developers connected a Magnavox TV set to their experimental console and played a precursor of the future classic "pong".

One of the people who saw the demo was Nolan Bushnell. He improved on the concept and created the memorable name "Pong." It was later commercialized, with great fanfare by the start-up Atari and its head, who coincidentally also happened to be Nolan Bushnell.

Later, he would bring forth another wonder - Chuck E. Cheese, inevitably patronized at some point by those with kids, on the way to feverishly creating more than 20 companies, according to Wikipedia. (A worthy goal)

Read all the details at one-up.com.

Labels: Atari, bushnell, chuck e cheese, games turn 40, pong