In front of a large screen TV surrounded by day old pizza and empty mountain dew two litter bottle hardly seems like the environment to find a world class athlete in. Yet, with all jokes aside, this is were many call the training grounds in the world of professional video games. As with any sport, gamers have all the luxuries, training practices, and fames and fortunes as other world class athletes, the only difference is that gamers rely not on physical ability or brute force, but their finely tuned reaction times and critical thinking skills to dominate.
In the world of professional baseball or football we see players going to preseason training or summer camp to help improve their skills before the season starts. Almost every sport has this sort of mentality, you can’t be a top tier competitor in your sport without working for it, professional video game players are no exception. With live streaming performance pulling in more than 32 million viewers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Legends_World_Championship)
across the world and sold out shows at popular sports venues its no surprise that the competition is fierce between players to make it to the top. In the world of professional gaming there is no preseason or summer camp to practice and fine tune the skills needed to win, no, there is something better, the worlds top players live together in gaming houses and practice for upwards of fourteen hours a day. Now thats commitment. While some would say sitting in front of a computer screen is hardly training like an athlete, studies have shown theres more than meets the eyes for video game playing.
The immersive nature of video games leads the players to have to process information much fast than would be necessary in normal situations. “Playing action video games—contemporary examples include God of War, Halo, Unreal Tournament,Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty—requires rapid processing of sensory information and prompt action, forcing players to makes decisions and execute responses at a far greater pace than is typical in everyday life”. This study done by the National institute of health states that video game players are able to process information about the game and their spacial surrounding at a much fast rate than non video game players are while still maintaining the same level of accuracy (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871325/)
The studies finding are incredible in the fact that the correlation between video game usage and reaction times and information processing are remarkably strong. To play a video game well, especially at the level of the pros requires a professional level of skill. Major league gamers have trained their mental abilities and fine tuned their reaction times to those comparable to fighter pilots in the United States Navy. It must be noted that this is only the beginning of research into this field and “Thus, unlike what has been reported in the majority of the literature on the training of speeded responses, the learning that occurs during action-video-game experience generalizes well beyond the act of playing games itself.”
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