Wired has an article on “playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with“:
This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a “challenging visuospatial task” like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.
I wonder if this has anything to do with learning?
I like Strategy games. I get quite addicted quite easily and so I tend to keep wellll away form them. I recently got the itch again, like an ex-smoker and started to look into playing the old ones on my mac via VMWare.
The first thing I found was Master of Orion II, which I played for a night and realised that its actually quite a mundane game, but never the less you find yourself there for hours hitting the “Next turn” button to see if anything you have planned to build has finished, and how much cash you have. Its all virtual and the moment you step away your over it but once your in, your hooked.
I was thinking that this type of addiction would be very handy if you could apply it to more productive tasks like learning. So I’m trying to figure out what the key things are that make strategy games addictive.
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