Following the Rules

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the ideas of being used to read instructions more closely when being a vested computer game player.

Most computer games provide players with specific goals and challenges. The goals are communicated in a clear and precise way. Hence, players exactly know what they have to do to overcome a challenge or to solve a quest. While working on the solution of the game goals, computer games provide immediate feedback to inform players that they are performing the correct actions.

For instance, a computer game can provide a quest that requires the player to collect 10 red apples: „Collect 10 red apples in Mrs Smith’s garden.“ In this way, players exactly know how they can complete this quest. A player still has to read the quest information carefully as the apples not only have to be red, but also found on Mrs Smith’s garden.

Thus, by providing players with these clear rules, they practice to read instructions carefully. Also, they learn how to quickly understand an assignment’s goals. The gameplay can include some time constraints that put the player under pressure to make decisions quickly. This constraint makes it important to analyze a task as quickly as possible.

Carefully reading instructions also is a common requirement in our daily life. For instance, it can be an assignment from an educational course or a request sent by someone’s supervisor. Only when the instructions are understood properly, the task can successfully be solved. Just skimming through the information might result in a task not completely solved. This can result in bad consequences like getting a bad grade in an exam.

Based on this theoretical analysis, it might be possible that computer game players can analyze and understand tasks better than non-players. Their gameplay experience might lead to a training of their analytical abilities to quickly and correctly understand a given task. In this way, computer game players might be able to work more efficiently.

In conclusion, playing computer games might also result in an improved ability to analyze any given situation as well as to successfully identify and to carry out the correct next steps.