Cognitive Consequences of Genre-Specific Video Game Playing

From the simplicity of the two-dimensional plane of the early Pong (1972) to the mind-bending vastness of three-dimensional marvels such as No Man’s Sky (2016) or the hyper-realism and heart-wrenching narratives exhibited by Detroit: Become Human (2018) or Cyberpunk: 2077 (2020), it’s no understatement to say that video games—and technology as a whole—have evolved tremendously over half a lifetime. However, despite their rather novel nature, and the lack of a concrete, black-and-white answer to, “Are video games bad?” people are still quick to attribute a simple “Yes” or “No” to such a question when the reality is riddled with ambiguity. The majority of current research contains many facets of either argument. It has already been well established that video games offer many benefits to one’s cognition, but their negative impacts are just as apparent. My research aims to explore the former and compare how different genres of video games can comparatively affect one’s reaction time. Over the course of my research, I conducted a survey to gather participants and establish informed consent. Additionally, participants were asked to complete 3 different cognitive tasks that measured reaction time as a pre-test, were then given the treatment of playing their assigned game for 3 hours a week over a 5-week period, and finally they completed a post-test that was identical to the pre-test. I ran 12 separate Paired t-tests comparing a metric from a task and a group, and the p-values gleaned that there was nothing statistically significant.