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As a planet we currently spend three billion hours a week playing video games, with more than half a billion people worldwide playing for at least an hour a day.
Since its 2004 release, World of Warcraft gamers have collectively spent the equivalent of 5.93 million years solving the complex problems posed by this virtual environment which, to put it in perspective, is nearly double the amount of time from when our primitive human ancestors Australopithecus afarensis first decided to walk upright, and now.
In 2010 Americans spent US$24.7 billion on video games, just down from 2009’s $25.3 billion, and already by 2003 the average youth in a country with a strong gaming culture will have gamed for a total of 10,000 hours by the time they turn 21 – about the same number of hours spent by a high school student with perfect attendance through years five to 12.
The gaming industry commands a lot of our time and a lot of our money and in return fosters an enormous collective skill set. With this in mind, researchers are now set on expanding the reach of video games to outside the realm of the living room.
But this venture isn’t as sinister as it sounds, because according to these same researchers, gaming has the potential to turn us into better people.
“We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games… [when gaming] we are more inspired to collaborate and cooperate, and when we’re in game-worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves - the most likely to help at a moment’s notice, the most likely to stick with a problem for as long as it takes, to get up after failure and try again,” said games researcher and designer, Jane McGonigal, from the University of California at Berkeley at the February 2010 TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) conference in California.
“It turns out that by spending all this time playing games, we’re actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. We’re evolving to be a more collaborative and hardy species,” she said.
Previous research into the positive influence of games claims that they can do everything from enhancing cancer treatments to making children kinder and more altruistic.
In a 2008 paper published by the journal Pediatrics, scientists at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, showed that 375 teens and young adults with cancer in the U.S., Australia and Canada, benefited from playing the video game, Re-Mission, which was developed specifically with key behavioural and psychological factors associated with successful cancer treatment in mind.
After having piloted a nanobot through the bodies of fictional cancer patients, blasting cancer cells away and combating the side-effects of cancer and cancer treatments in a virtual setting, the participants were proven to maintain higher levels of chemotherapy in their blood, took their antibiotics more regularly and acquired cancer-related knowledge faster than the control group.
