Portal2 released yesterday. The kids immediately downloaded it via Steam and went to work in co-operative problem solving mode. I watched for a bit a realized it’s an essentially non-violent (no shooting anyway) first-person perspective game based on puzzle-solving. But it might require the same kinds of visuo-spatial skills that get trained in the shooter games. Would practice improve general visuo-spatial skills? If the key cognitive process is maintaining an internal visual-spatial representation of a complex 3d space, I’d think the answer is yes. But it doesn’t require fast detection and responses to events in the periphery, so it’s not so clear if it would provide a training benefit.
I’d put it in the same category as the Flowers game by Jenova Chen — an interesting variant on FPS games with some potential to use in training (and avoiding the hyper violent games). To see roughly the idea, I found the trailer from the original Portal on youtube:
If the hotlink works, the following is from the funnies, Sherman’s Lagoon again, that I found amusing in the theme of “not all video games are good for training” and also “video games aimed at adults and teenagers might be different.”
