[citation][nom]gnookergi[/nom]I call BS on this BS claim. I can say for myself that things like my situational awareness greatly increased when I started playing FPS games.[/citation]
Don't know if the FPS games are helping me - I don't play THAT many FPSs, but I cay say that they're not making anything worse for me!
Positive stuff I got from gaming:
1) Learned most of my English from games like GTA: SA where characters talk a lot
2) Many hours of gaming enjoyment which by far surpass any other "leisure" activity people are doing (FB, movies, Twitter and other BS)
3) If I wasn't a gamer, I probably wouldn't care and wouldn't know about PC hardware and software
Negative stuff:
1) Unhealthy hatred for consoles, tablets and similar "consumer" devices
2) Healthy hatred for Apple
3) Healthy hatred for pre-built bloated PCs from inferior manufacturers
4) Spamming quotes and analogies from various games makes non-gamers look at me like at some kind of fool, while quoting movies and books is for some reason widely accepted and encouraged xD
5) I keep forgetting that people IRL generally speak and write worse English than video game characters
I'd say that the positive outweighs the negative by far! Hence I don't care if the games improve cognition or not... haven't even heard about it before this article.