According to the American Psychological Association, playing video games, including shooter games, can boost learning, health and social skills. Gaming may strengthen a range of cognitive skills such as spatial navigation, reasoning, memory and perception. And, there’s more in the study: it was found that playing FPS games improved a player's capacity to think about objects in three dimensions just as well as academic courses designed to enhance these same skills
Way, way back in the day, the only way you’d meet new people from different parts of the country or world was to become pen pals with them. You’d send letters back and forth and talk about your personal lives, your city or town, that sort of thing. It’s only half-creepy (and just as slow) as it sounds. Gaming lets you converse with anyone you wouldn’t—or sometimes wouldn’t want to—normally talk to, whether that’s a friend or someone you’re playing against. Despite criticism that gaming isolates players, it’s the exact opposite. But you already knew that.
Communicate with friends

Again, gaming is super social. You ever pull an all-nighter? (We’re guessing yes). You were probably communicating with friends (whether that was for strategy or some trash-talking). Discord lets you talk and text via VoIP in a chat channel in the middle of action or when you’re planning your next move. Meanwhile, co-op gaming (also written as “cooperative gameplay,” probably by the same people who do research on gaming) lets you and your friends pass weapons, provide cover and cooperate (hence co-op in the name) during a game, either via text or via headphones with a mic by Antlion. In other words, you and your friends could be in the same room but you’re not. Who says that’s not communication?
Exercise your strategy skills

To those that don’t game, it might look like a bunch of running around, no rhyme or reason, lots of shooting, with an eventual score. You know, like soccer. Your gaming experience says otherwise. Gaming takes skill, coordination, and strategy to succeed. You’re always using your big brain to develop ways to outsmart and outwit friends. This could be during planning (again on your mic) but many times, it’s on the fly. It’s like a board game but your opponents are coming at you way quicker, in real-time, and they want to destroy you. Good thing you’ve managed to hone those skills for kills.

Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams, LiveScience has learned.

That ability to shape the alternate reality of dream worlds might not match mind-bending Hollywood films such as "The Matrix," but it could provide an edge when fighting nightmares or even mental trauma.

Dreams and video games both represent alternate realities, according to Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. But she pointed out that dreams arise biologically from the human mind, while video games are technologically driven by computers and gaming consoles.

"If you're spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it's practice," said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. "Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams."

Gackenbach first became interested in video games in the 1990s, when she watched her son repeatedly kiss a new Nintendo gaming console on the way home from a Toys "R" Us. She had previously focused on studying lucid dreams, in which people have awareness of being in a dream.

The last decade of game-related research has since yielded several surprises, although the findings represent suggestive associations rather than definitive proof, Gackenbach cautioned. She is scheduled to discuss her work as a featured speaker at the Sixth Annual Games for Health Conference in Boston this week.

What dreams may come

Several intriguing parallels between lucid dreams and video games first emerged when Gackenbach examined past research on games. Both lucid dreamers and gamers seemed to have better spatial skills and were less prone to motion sickness.

The two groups have also demonstrated a high level of focus or concentration, whether honed through lucidity-training activities, such as meditation, or through hours spent fighting virtual enemies to reach the next level in a game.

That encouraged Gackenbach to survey the dreams of both non-gamers and hardcore gamers, beginning with two studies published in 2006. She had prepared by conducting larger surveys in-class and online to get a sense of where to focus questions.

The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.

A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.

The gamers also frequently flipped between a first person view from within the body and a third person view of themselves from outside, except never with the calm detachment of a distant witness.

"The first time we simply asked people how often they had lucid dreams, looking back over their life and making judgment calls," Gackenbach told LiveScience. "That's open to all kinds of bias, [such as] certain memory biases, self-reported biases."

Gackenbach eventually replicated her findings about lucid dreaming and video games several times with college students as subjects, and refined her methods by controlling for factors such as frequency of recalling dreams.


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