Washington: According to a recent study, motion-controlled video games, such as those played on the Wii, may help boost skills when players compete in the real world.
Participants in a study who played 18 rounds of a video golf game that used a motion controller to simulate putting did significantly better at real-world putting than a group that played a video-game with a push-button controller and better than participants who had no video game training, said Penn State’s Edward Downs.
Motion controllers require players to use their own bodies to control the movements of the video game’s avatar.
Downs noted that the putting motion in the game maps onto a real putting behavior closely enough that people who had 18 holes of practice putting with the motion controllers actually putt better than the group that spent 45 minutes or so, using the push-button controller to make putts.
The researchers suggest that motion-controlled video games, as well as future virtual reality devices, such as Oculus Rift, are turning video games into simulations.
“It seems to us that we’ve crossed an evolutionary line in game history where video games are no longer just video games any more, they’ve become simulators,” said Downs.
Researcher Mary Beth Oliver said that the research could be extended into other fields, such as music and art.
The study appears in the Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations. (ANI)