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Game On!
HUT. The ball is snapped; the quarterback has it. He fakes the hand-off and drops back as
the running back goes to meet a linebacker between the tackles. The receiver to his right streaks
down the field in a go pattern while the one to his left cuts off and stops ten yards down past the
first down marker. The running back whiffs, and the pocket begins to collapse. He only has a
couple seconds before a two hundred pound man clobbers him. His first instinct is to bomb it,
duck, and take the hit, but instead, he looks down the field toward the end zone and sees his
receiver in double coverage. He scans over and sees the other receiver with a three yard gap.
Wham! He is going down, but the ball is off. It is caught for a first down, and the crowd roars.
The chains are moving, and he has another chance to put six on the scoreboard. How was he able
to make the right decision in such a small window? Was it good training? Maybe. Was it luck?
Possibly. Some experts believe the advent of video games have become a major factor for quick
decision making.
Different types of video games can have different effects. Shooter games improve
decision speed because you have to see, decide, aim, and shoot before the other player shoots.
Strategy games improve the quality of decisions by requiring an educated and informed decision
to further their cause. The advances of sports simulation games have put realistic games at your
fingertips. You can play and learn a teams defense or a players nuances just by sitting on the
couch. You learn the rules, positions, and plays of different sports. Video games positively
affect athletes hand-eye coordination and their ability to make a good decision faster. On
top of that, kids grow up playing simulations of their favorite sports, learning the game,
and improving their sports IQ.

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Madden, NCAA football, Fifa, 2K, and games like these are becoming an integral
part of a childs upbringing. Kids grow up playing sports without ever stepping on the field.
Chris Suellentrop, a sports reporter for Wired Magazine has said, Todays football players have
an edge that no athletes before them have possessed: Theyve played more football than any
cohort in history (Suellentrop). Full contact practice time has actually gone down throughout
history because of a coachs fear of injuring his players (Suellentrop). These simulation video
games allow people of all ages to extend their practice time off the field without fear of injury
(Suellentrop). The rules can be learned, plays studied, sports IQ increased, and all from the
comfort of a couch. Even professional athletes are astounded by the realism of these games. Dan
Treadway of The Players Tribune made a short documentary about two professional athletes:
Patrick Peterson, an NBA player for the Raptors and Michael Bradly, a soccer player for Toronto
FC and Team U.S.A. (Treadway). The two athletes sit down to play Fifa, a soccer simulation
game (Treadway). During the game, Michael Bradly comments that the game designers got the
rain correct (Treadway). What he means is that, for soccer, playing in the sun is not always the
best weather. In the rain, the ball slides better; whereas, in the sun, the field may be dry. Bradly
says that they got the sliding of the ball and how the players would move are very close to what
would happen in a real game (Treadway). The realism of these games is off the charts. The
graphics are now so sophisticated in projecting a player to look real, creating the different
conditions for weather, programing different styles of play for an individual or team, and even
matching the play-calling of a simulated team to the real-life one.

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Simulation games have come so far that professional and collegiate athletes are using
them to scout opponents. In an interview with professional soccer player Connor Chinn, Joe
Brescia of New York Times asked him his reasoning for sitting in his hotel room playing games
instead of going out and practicing (Brescia). To which Chinn replied, Each virtual player
mimics the way a player moves, the way they shoot, the way they pass the ball in real life. You
really get to see and experience the players style of play, he said. After I face a guy on the
field, you can see how very similar the movements and actions are in the video game (Brescia).
The coders for these games spend hundreds of hours watching film of players, studying their
tendencies and style to replicate it into a virtual world. Rob Schremp, an NHL player for the New
York Islanders, says that everything about his game character is perfect down from how he wears
his gear, to how he shoots, and how fast he skates (Brescia). Even Nascar is getting into the
game. A new rule allows drivers only a certain amount of laps to test the track, but they are still
finding a way to run it over two-hundred times. How? They use simulations. These simulations

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have become so realistic that some folks have become ill after sliding behind the wheel
(Bruce). Drivers can test how they want to run the turns, where they need to be, how fast on the
straight-aways, and the general nuances of the course. Skirting the rules with simulations does
not stop with Nascar either. Formula 1 racers love to memorize the track through simulations.
Justin Wilson, a Formula 1 racer, says the racing simulators are accurate enough to give him an
edge (Wilson). You can learn where the optimal line is, or just get to know the track, so you
can come out of the gates fast instead of having to learn the track on the fly (Wilson).
Anyone can see that simulators have come far enough to give athletes at the top an
unprecedented edge. Videogames can be used to scout another team or player, learn a track, or
just get you in a sports mindset for the day. Its been seen that simulation games can help out
pros, but what about people not at the professional or collegiate level? There are no games with
high school or middle school opponents on them. Can they even still help? The answer is yes.
Just because the game cannot be used to scout out an opponent, it can still be helpful in learning
the game. A Pop Warner linebacker can learn that a cover two defense means he has to cover the
flats to his side of the offensive line. A ten year old basketball player can learn how to flick his
wrist at the last moment of his free throw from watching Michael Jordon do it. An aspiring
soccer player can learn some footwork tricks by watching Lional Messi in Fifa. Well, what
makes video games better than watching a contest on TV? Its the control. When a young athlete
simply watches the game, there is no learning. They need to be in control to learn. The best way
to learn a sport is by doing - by telling Tom Brady to pass the ball to Julian Edelman when the
pass that the real Tom would have made would be to Gronkowski. One learns by making
mistakes. the most effective education is not realized by watching others make the right choices

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because they never see why a different choice was wrong. Plus, what better way to make
mistakes than when there is nothing to lose?
Sports games are great, and a huge part of the gaming market. They are generally
included in any gamers arsenal, but what about other games? What about Call of Duty, and
Battlefield, and Borderlands, and Destiny? Action games, role playing games, and strategy
games are a huge part of the gaming world, most would say even bigger than sports games.
According to Statista, an online statistics portal with over eighteen-thousand sources, in 2013,
sports games were the third most popular genre, at around thirteen percent, behind both action
and shooter games at twenty and thirty-two percent respectively (Statista).
How do these action games help athletes when rules cannot be learned, players cannot be
scouted, and a sport is not even in the game? Decision making. These games increase the speed
and quality of decisions athletes make on the fly. A quarterback in a collapsing pocket only has a
couple seconds to throw the ball, a running back to make the cut, a lacrosse goalie to stop a onehundred mile-per-hour shot, a batter to hit a ninety mile-per-hour fast ball, or a Formula 1 racer
to shift gears and make the turn at two-hundred kilometers-per-hour. In a study by students at the
University of Rochester, a group of volunteers played fast paced action-shooter games, such as
Call of Duty, while another group played city-building games, such as Sims 2 (Rochester News).
Each group was then asked to analyze something and make a decision on what that something
was doing (Rochester News). The group that played the action video game made the decision
twenty-five percent faster than the others (Rochester News). The researchers came to the
conclusion that, Action video game players' brains are more efficient collectors of visual and
auditory information, and therefore arrive at the necessary threshold of information they need to
make a decision much faster than non gamers (Rochester News).

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Making a decision is all well and good, but it is counterproductive if it is the wrong
decision. One running back could make a decision in one second to run left, straight into a
linebacker while another running back could decide to go right in three seconds and get the first
down. An athletes ability to make a decision quickly is nothing if he cannot make the correct
decision. A coach would rather have a player that makes the right decision slower than one who
makes the wrong decision faster. Why not have both? Video games can help with decision
quality as well. According to C. Shawn Green, Alexandre Pouget, Daphne Bavelier in Improved
Probabilistic Inference as a General Learning Mechanism with Action Video Games, video game
players made more efficient use of sensory evidence than non-video game players (Green,
Pouget, Bavelier). Gamers are able to take the same amount of data or evidence and produce a
better decision than non-gamers.
Last but not least, what is something all athletes, no matter the sport, need in order to be
successful? They need coordination. Athletes need to be able to see and hear and make the right
decision fast in order to be great, but what is that worth if they cannot carry out the task their
videogame enhanced mind set them toward? The answer is nothing. Knowing everything about a
game is great, but the physical ability to make it happen is incredibly important. Videogames can
help with the hand-eye coordination paramount to success. A football receiver needs to be able to
see the ball in the air, calculate where it is going to land and where he needs to be, and then be
able to move his hands into the right position to catch the rock. He is a pretty bad receiver if he
can only do the first part of his job. Videogames have been shown to increase hand-eye
coordination because a gamer needs to be able to process the sensory input from the screen,
make a decision, and then press all the right buttons quickly. If the gamer playing Call of Duty
presses the wrong button or does it too slowly, his opponent will win.

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One-hundred-fifty children were required to play varying amounts of videogames in a

study done by the IMAGEN consortium in 2014(DiSalvo). Those adolescents who spent the
most time playing videogames showed increased amounts of brain matter in both the left
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the left frontal eye field (FEF) (DiSalvo). The
DLPFC is the brains command and control center where a higher order thinking takes place
(DiSalvo). The FEF is the brain area central to how we process visual-motor information and
make judgments about how to handle external stimuli (DiSalvo). Both of these areas of the
brain are crucial to hand-eye coordination. These two areas are the centers for how people
process and react to what is going on around them. An increase in brain matter here increases
ones ability to react to a stimulus whether that is shooting an animated opponent or catching a
hundred mile-per-hour fastball.
Speed and skill are the two most important attributes of a great athlete in any sport. Sure
physical speed and skill are important. It is great to have a running back that can run a four-two
forty, or a basketball player who can drop threes from anywhere on the court, but the most
important speed and skill aspect is a mental one. The greatest athletes around the world are those
who can make the right decision the fastest, and then have the physical ability to carry it out, but
it all starts with making the decision. The competition in athletics is getting fiercer every year as
better and better athletes take the stage. To be successful, they need every edge they can get.
Videogames can provide that edge. They are like weightlifting for the brain. Gaming trains an
athletes mind to work better, faster, and stronger. Gamers can process external stimuli faster and
make a decision. They allow them to make a more educated decision because of their increased
ability to see and react to change. It does not even stop with the mind. Every athlete has to be
physically gifted too, and videogames give them an edge in that department as well. A Formula 1

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driver sees a turn. His brain processes the situation and makes the decision to turn sharply, then
gives the signal to his hands to turn the wheel. All done seamlessly at over two-hundred
kilometers-per-hour. The brain made the right decision, and the hands did not make a mess of it.
Athletes everywhere are getting bigger bodies, faster legs, and stronger arms, but what about a
better mind? When the solution is so simple, many doubt that it could actually work, but it does.
Gaming is something so many people do, and without realizing it, become better. All athletes
should jump on board and start playing videogames if they want to be the best they can be
because gamer athletes are just more athletic than non-gamers. Game on, my friends!

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Works Cited
Suellentrop, Chris. "GAME CHANGERS: HOW VIDEOGAMES TRAINED A GENERATION
OF ATHLETES." Wired Magazine. Wired Magazine, 25 Jan. 2010. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.
Brescia, Joe. "For Pro Athletes, Practice Thats All in the Thumbs." The New York Times. The
New York Times, 02 Apr. 2010. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.
"Athletes on Couches Playing Video Games." The Players Tribune. Ed. Dan Treadway. The
Players Tribune, n.d. Web. 7 Mar. 2015.
Bruce, Kenny. "Race Simulator Helps Drivers Prep for Season | NASCAR.com." Nascar.
Nascar, 4 Feb. 2015. Web. 4 Mar. 2015.
Wilson, Justin. "See What the Professionals Are Saying." Iracing. Iracing, n.d. Web. 8 Mar.
2015.
"Genre Breakdown of U.S. Video Game Sales 2013 | Statistic." Statista. Statista, n.d. Web. 09
Mar. 2015.
"Video Games Lead to Faster Decisions That Are No Less Accurate." Rochester News.
University of Rochester, 13 Sept. 2010. Web. 03 Mar. 2015.
Green, C. Shawn, Alexandre Pouget, and Daphne Bavelier. "Improved Probabilistic
Inference as a General Learning Mechanism with Action Video Games." Current
Biology. Current Biology, 14 Sept. 2010. Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
DiSalvo, David. "The Surprising Connection Between Playing Video Games And A Thicker
Brain." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 4 June 2014. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.