I'm going to apply to be an air traffic controller in the spring, and I know that at some point an interviewer is going to ask me why I think I could be good at handling the stress and making the decisions necessary for the job. My answer: I play World of Warcraft, an online game in which you play with and against other people to win the tournament or kill the bad guy.
One character I play is a priest, one of several character types in WoW that can heal other players. When I go with four other players into an instance - an area with unusually hard monsters and several "bosses" that you have to beat - it's my job to keep everyone alive. If everyone starts taking damage, I have to prioritize who most needs healing and decide which skills to use on each person. At level 70, I have five spells I can use on everyone else, six I can use for myself, and one that affects the whole group. Each takes a different amount of time to cast and has a different effect. Total, that gives me 27 options that I have to choose between, and in the more difficult instances, I often have between one-fourth and one-half of a second to decide. If I'm lucky, I might even get a full second to think about it before I choose which button to click. If I decide incorrectly or hesitate too long, people start dying because I'm not doing my job.
I get that saving virtual characters is nothing like trying to control a dozen airplanes at once with real lives in my hands. If the group dies in WoW, we might have to start over, but if a plane crashes, hundreds of people could die. Still, the skills I'm building by playing WoW and other video games are exactly the type that the Federal Aviation Administration is searching for. To work air traffic control, you need to be able to make decisions quickly and accurately, day-in and day-out, and unlike many people, I've dedicated hundreds of hours to practicing it.
The problem with saying all this is that no interviewer will take me seriously. When you say "video game," most people who don't play probably think of well-known shooters like Halo or controversial games like Grand Theft Auto 4. What they probably don't think about is how much video games can build your attention span and improve decision-making, visual-spatial, and information-processing skills.
In an article called "This Is Your Brain on Video Games," Discover Magazine quoted the Federation of American Scientists, who endorsed video games as a means of improving "higher-ordered thinking skills, such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change." In "Video Games Can Improve Your Vision, and Your Future," Popular Science magazine used a study of gamers by Michigan State University to claim that "video games can essentially serve as pre-professional training for careers in math, science, technology, and engineering." According to a study by the Advanced Medical Technology Institute, even surgeons benefit from playing video games. They found that laparoscopic surgeons who play more than three hours per week make 37 percent fewer mistakes on average.
Unfortunately, most employers of all kinds just dismiss video games without thinking about how they can make their employees better at their jobs in addition to being a fun recreation. I can understand why; if I worked at a consulting firm and an interviewee told me he plays Grand Theft Auto 4, my first thought wouldn't be: "I bet that made you better at personal finance." The point of playing video games is just that - to play. If I fire up my Xbox 360, it's not so I can practice economics, and when I log into World of Warcraft, it's not to imagine all of the characters as weirdly-shaped airplanes that I'm helping. Whatever my intentions are, though, I'm helping myself build the skills I can use later in many different careers. With today's technology, maybe it's time for employers to get with the twenty-first century and consider adding "video games played" to their applications.
Alexander Lott is a fourth-year student in the College.
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