"The writing is on the wall - computer games rot the brain."

now, if you'll excuse me, i've got human flesh to feast on.

I think they're asking for a return to the good old days of the late 90s, where a random pattern of four dots on the wall in level 6 had to be remembered and keyed into a locked door in level 12. Those were the feats of memory that always screwed me.

See, this is one of the many things that playing video games and getting stoned have in common: you have all these thought processes going on that are totally invisible to anyone who's not also playing the game or stoned. It's as if you're watching a really thought-provoking show on an invisible television -- people walk by and go "OMG this kid is totally catatonic and rotting his brain!"

The "video games make you smarter" line might be a little overplayed these days, but I don't at all doubt that there are a few specific kinds of mental skills where they totally do -- in terms of spatial reasoning and figuring out logical systems / patterns, the things you do in a lot of video games aren't particularly different from the tasks in IQ tests.

PCs are inherently more educational anyway, due to a much more complicated input system, and a more complex operating system. The games on PCs do not lend themselves to simple fighting games, but rather to more complex ones such as Role Playing Games (RPGs) and Real-Time Strategies (RTSs). In RPGs one typically controls one character or a small group of characters, leads them in a long adventure (the one I'm playing now has 11 discs...) collecting goods and improving the characters along the way, and in an RTS one typically builds a nation or army from scratch and coordinates it to some large end (conquering the world, winning a battle, etc.). These two types of games principally encourage two different skills, but are both very useful and sophisticated. RPGs encourage problem-solving, and RTSs encourage strategy and logistics: massive coordination of resources and timing. Both of them encourage quick thinking, retention and swift recollection of large amounts of information, calculation and coordination.

LOL Shoot-em-upist.

Speaking as someone who realised last week that she could freakily recall every single tag/oyster/horseshoe (not photos though) location in SA without using a guide, I say bullshit.

...A senior Army Air Corps source said: "There is no reason why someone has to have gone to university to fly an Apache.

"The skill in flying the aircraft is to absorb large amounts of information from different sources without becoming flustered. The new generation of computer-game playing young sters glued to their PlayStations, Xboxes and Game Boys already have some of those skills."