Researcher Connects Playing Shooters With Better Aim

[Rigs83]

True story the gun safety instructor told me i should put a sign on my house saying beware of owner after seeing me shoot for the first time and the only experience I had was beating Halo on legendary.

 

[Orange12345]

Where the people who played resident evil better at shooting or were they just more likely to be actively trying to get head shots

 

[RaNDM G]

I've been a target shooter for about ten years now. I can honestly say that games haven't done much to help with my accuracy. If anything, I get stressed and become a worse shot.

Also, I want to know just how close the target range was. Anyone can hit a target in the head at ten feet, but ten yards is a different story.

 

[Lancer873]

The statistics sound made up (really? 99 percent and 33 percent? That's way too rounded off and way too extreme a difference. You do not get two times better just because you're practicing a similar target, which you're not since RE4 isn't just a "stand still and shoot zombies" game) the results don't make sense (If anything, those who played Resident Evil would be less inclined to aim precisely at the head since they "practiced" on something that actually had a body), the researcher has already made plenty of BS claims, and wait... Super Mario Galaxy has a shooting minigame? ... so anyways, I'm going to go with "no" until we see research with a larger variety of samples from a more trustable source. Though I wouldn't be surprised to hear that people who had played with a lightgun were generally more accurate, people playing different games being /twice/ as accurate to the head is a tad bit bullshit. I'd also appreciate a bit more data here. How many shots were fired, what is the precise number of hits, and what was the precise ratio of body-to-head hits. For all we know the RE4 people could've just fired twice as many shots.

 

[Bernzz]

So he means to tell me that holding a gun and firing at targets makes one better at holding a gun and firing at targets?

Glad to see that degree he has is being put to good use. Wouldn't want to waste it, would we?

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

He's right all that time spent on Time Crisis 2 in the arcade has made me a deadly shot. I can shoot the eyelashes off a nut from 2 miles away. /scarcasm

Simple logic calls bs on this. If you went to a shooting gallery and an instructor offered you some assistance and you decline because you have plenty of firearm experience from playing Duck Hunt; he will likely not very politely tell you to GTFO.

Also by the same liogc would we not have hundreds of hendrix like guitar players because of guitar hero's controllers look a bit like real guitars?

 

[MetalGenocide]

So using a "wee" to play a cooking game will increase my ability to make delicious pasta?

Sounds legit. *goes off to buy a wii*

At least this guy has a some sort of Ph.D.

 

[Deadyawn]

Who uses light guns nowadays anyway? I sure as hell don't. And the kind of people who play super mario galaxy and wii play are typically not the kind of people who play CoD and Halo. The whole thing seems a little dumb from where I'm standing.

 

[Lono Shrugged]

If it wasn't for years of my sitting on the couch playing Operation Wolf I would have never become a navy seal operator and killed Bin Laden

THANKS GAMES!!!

 

[Twilight_guy]

I like to see a result from more people then 151 'college' students. Also be interesting to see people with a varying degree of gun familiarity in the study. I'd like to see if there i any real correlation as it raises interesting questions about how basic mechanics of games can inform real life practices. I'm sure that could be extremely useful for teaching people something.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Wait, really?

*gasps*

They'll be using flight simulators to help train pilots next. /sarcasm

 

[BrotherRool]

This annoys me, as giving sombody time to use a replica gun will obviously improve their ability to use a real gun. How many of these participants already knew how to take the safety off first though, i wonder?

Most everything i learned on guns and weaponry in general, before even firing a shot, was through television media. How many movies make it a plot point that "the Rookie" hasn't taken the safety off or loaded the round into the chamber?

You watch enough television, and you'll know how to shoot, never mind using a faux gun in a videogame.

[/mild ranty thing]

Really? I thought the things about shooting guns were adapting for range, dealing with recoil, holding it properly, sighting properly. I wouldn't have expected it to help much at all.



99% is huge, I'm really interested in this and the legitimacy of this, because if so it's got some big implications. I mean he's suggesting, I don't know, if someone were to do 20 minutes on a shooter before going out they'd become twice as accurate. If you went out hunting you'd hit twice as many birds.

 

[Aur0ra145]

http://www.livescience.com/19984-violent-video-games-improves-real-shooting-accuracy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Livesciencecom+(LiveScience.com+Science+Headline+Feed)

Here's a link with a bit more information about the study. They do claim to have asked about previous gun use. Although I might have prefered higher sample sizes (151 people split in 5 groups) bigger the sample the better but ohwell. The gun game players made on average 7 headshots out of 16 with an airsoft gun (other groups dropped down to 2). I'd be curious how these results rank against other things like watching movies etc.

That study is very likely to be worthless for a number of reasons. His sample among students isn't random, and that sinks the entire experiment.

For a start because psychology as a whole is a 'soft science'. Even it's rock-solid conclusions are prone to change and revision because they turn out to be inacurate.

And to sink the study:
What about students who have experience with actual guns? It was done in the US after all. He asked about firearms training, but what about other sources of knowledge like military service, knowledge transfered from relatives or self-practise. Because I'd 'speculate' that shooting guns makes you better at shooting guns.
And other things that train eye-hand coordination, he didn't control for that. Archery for instance. Different weapon, basically the same activity.
And what about people being customary to other forms of violence? Did he for instance check for ring experience in fighting sports? No.

So he used an extremely unreliable sample consisting of one socio-economic group, same education level, only one country, likely extremely biased in ethnic background even. No matter what else you work on after that, from a sample group that biased, no conclusions can possibly be drawn.

His method is also flawed. He used a gun-shaped controller. Wait, hold it a moment there; So he didn't use the normal input device for a game, but instead he used a gun analogy? That means the increase in accuracy could be caused by using something shaped as a firearm, and not by it being a game.

Also it says he let students fire actual guns. Wouldn't the increase in willingness to aim at human shaped objects be caused by handling actual firearms? It's pretty common knowledge that weapons in such a context incite violence by themselves, so again he's gotten himself an interfering variable that sends his research down the drain.

Unless he's done some serious maths to rule out those interfering variables (something which he pretty much can't because of there being several other variables and the weakness of his test), then all his conclusions already sunk.

To make it even worse, he put a live-sized human target at 6 metres distance. Let me tell you, even if you had Parkinson's disease, you could make headshot on a stationary target at only 6 metres. It's basically point blank range at which nobody can miss, and accuracy results count for nothing at all.

Then he made yet another mistake in the number of shots. Six shots. But wait, he's counting missed or hit. That means he's conducting a new test, a binominal chance experiment. Hit or miss. With only 6 shots, it's impossible to draw any conclusions. The absolute lowest limit to draw conclusions in binominal chance experiments is 30, so the study's conclusions are invalidated because the outcome can be explained by randomness.


Basically this 'professor' wrote a setup that is so crappy that if you used it for a bachelor thesis, your tutor would come down on you like a ton of bricks and give it a heavily insufficient mark.

So okay, professor does test, proves that randomness exists. Good for him. When is his university going to sack him for disgracing them?

The statistics sound made up (really? 99 percent and 33 percent? That's way too rounded off and way too extreme a difference

He only let them take 6 shots, meaning two shots difference is already a 33% gap. If one non-gamer hits twice and a gamer doesn't miss (which is quite bloody hard at such a tiny range) he can already write in a sensationalist style 'gamers make three times as many headshots', and his conclusions reek of such unsound assumptions.

But you're right. If he lets them take 3 shots, he must have been making up the data, because a hit percentage of 99% is an impossible fraction of the numbers, because people can only shoot 1 full bullet, and not 0,05 bullet.

Unless there's a different explanation, that professor had committed fraud.

Also, eye sight. Eye sight is a huge thing when shooting handguns.

 

[Truniron]

I have been a member of a shooting club for 9 years, and I can clearly say that playing a shooter game does not makes you better at shooting.

First off all: A controller is no way near as heavy as a gun.

Second: A gun produces recoil when you pull the trigger, a controller just vibrates when you click a button. Big difference.

An Third: I have seen persons on training who joined because they thought they were star shooter, just because they have played CoD, BF etc. Turned out, they where all horrible shooters.

Playing games does not makes you a better shooter. It bothers me that some people, thinks like this. Before I became a member of the shooting club, I thought it was easy. At least that is what the video games and movies made it look like. But when I tried using an actual gun, I was horrible. I had problem shooting the target, had problem reloading properly and the recoil surprised me. After some years of training, I became better and learned both how to use a gun and weapon safety. But some gamers who has spent nine years playing a video game would have no chance Sure he could have beginners luck, but he/she would not gave had the required training to properly use a gun right.

So people who writes stuff likes this in the newspaper, annoys me, the bother me. I can understand that they believe there is a connection, but in reality, there is none or extremely few.

 

[Bobic]

Is this even really an anti game study? I've played plenty of games and I've fired a gun. You wanna know what I fired it at? Clay pigeons. Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you're gonna use it in a violent way. I'm pretty sure that more guns are fired at targets than at people (not taking wars and the like into account), and that's a perfectly legitimate way to pass time, I actually found clay pigeon shooting to be quite relaxing and un-murderous.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Sooo...playing lightgun shooters makes you more accurate?

Ummmmm........No shit, Sherlock?

That seems kinda obvious, no? Also, it still has no bearing on the whole "games turn you into psychos" argument. I LOVE lightgun shooters, and I'm about as far from psycho as you can get.

 

[Baresark]

snip.

Well put. Though, you did forget one vital part of the information. At no point would a sample of 151 people be large enough to indicate a single thing. The anecdotal "rule of small numbers" dictates that you are far more likely to get an extreme sampling of data from such a small group. This study should have been conducted with thousands of participants in much more controlled settings (as you so eloquently outlined for everyone).