Study: High-School Video Gamers Match Physicians at Robotic-Surgery
Simulation
SOURCE: SLATE, By Torie Bosch, posted Posted Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2012, at 10:09 AM ET
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article below.
The applicability of video game skills to modern warfare—in the use of
drones, in particular—is well known. But a new study suggests, not
surprisingly, that gamers might
also have an edge in robotic surgery.
Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
tasked OB/GYN residents and 10th graders who regularly play video games to
perform tasks on a robotic-surgery simulation—like suturing. On average, the
high-school students, who played two hours of video games a day, performed just
as well as the residents—a few individual teenagers even did better. (Some have
reported that the study showed the teenagers did better than the
residents, but the difference in their performances is statistically
insignificant.)
UTMBG’s Sami Kilic, the lead author on the study, told me that the
high-school students who played virtual doctor were devotees of first-person
shooters (especially the Call of Duty franchise—“a
wild game,” Kilic says), as well as games featuring sports, strategy, and auto
racing. Those who devoted their time to shooting games and sports games did the
best at the robotic-surgery simulation—perhaps, he speculates, because the
unpredictability of the gameplay was similar to surgery.
The question, Kilic says, is whether spending two hours a day at a
game, as these high-schoolers did, might hinder other areas of their
development, especially social skills. He hopes to explore that issue soon,
with the help of behavioralists.
In the mean time, he told me, “I’m not encouraging [teenagers] to
spend countless hours in front of the computer games, because our job is not to
create the best surgeon ever or the best soldier ever … in this age group. They
have to have the fundamental human being skills in their developing age.”
Of course, it’s not exactly surprising that “video games are
making us better at video games.” Robot surgery will be increasingly
common in the coming years—so it’s important for people to understand that
gaming skills may have real-world applications, or at least virtual
applications with real-world consequences.
As Kilic told me, it’s funny that a game like Call of Duty that
includes so much death (an infographic released last year by Activision said
that Black Ops
players alone had killed the world’s population nine times over)
could create skills to save a life. But what about using games to teach actual
medicine? In the early ‘90s,the video game Life & Death
made me briefly consider being a doctor. I became an expert at distinguishing
gas from kidney stones and performing virtual appendectomies. But that game’s
co-creator, Don Laabs, told me in an email that though they worked with a real
surgeon (“and his graphic surgery videos”) to make the game feel true to life,
it was never intended to be any sort of training ground or even necessarily to
inspire kids to want to be physicians. “That having been said,” he continued,
I recently had a chance to try out a real
surgical machine that allowed you to use tiny remote controlled instruments
while being able to view the surgical area with magnified 3D vision. The video
gamers among us proved quite adept at using the machine. We all agreed, though,
that the 3D view was absolutely essential to get the job done. Things have
certainly come a long way since Life & Death! With that type of tech
available, I'm sure surgery games and simulators will become more and more
applicable to real surgery training.
For
now, though, Kilic warns that parents with MD ambitions for their children
shouldn’t mandate two hours a day at the Xbox 360. Sorry, kids.
(Note to editors: A video illustrating this story is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1l23H_Rdfg&list=PLG0CWry7JAMDnYG0gL5lLJLoF-Wrd08nZ&index=1&feature=plcp)