Bad at video games? Your brain structure may be at fault

[nsane.forums]

I am on the old side of the generation that grew up with videogames as a ubiquitous presence in their life. I clearly recall theworld's worst Atari port of one of the greatest game of alltime—PacMan—and I even remember playing what is widely considered to bethe worst game of all time, the Atari 2600's E.T. (I still clearly recall how hard it was).Today, video games focus less on forcing you to pump more and more quarters into an arcade machine punishing difficulty and more on tellinga story and making the experience a bit gentler on the novicegamer.

Prior cognitive, psychological, and neurological studies haveshown that expert video game players are capable of outperformingnovices in measures of attention and perception. They also havedemonstrated that, when novices train on video games for 20-plus hours, they experienced no measurable increase in cognitive ability. These two pieces ofinformation would seem to point to an innate difference between expertand novices gamers, instead of suggesting that gaming is a skill that can be learned.

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