A few years ago, video games were regarded primarily as an entertainment tool. People purchase video games for the fun of it and nothing more. However, nowadays, video games make great surgeons without people knowing about them.

Video games have become a staple hobby in the U.S., and almost half of the entire population is gaming. Thankfully, gaming has some inherent benefits, such as making people better decision-makers.

Better Decision Makers

If you’ve played video games before, you know how much it affects your decision-making. One second too late in your decision can mean winning or losing a game. It can also mean the survival or death of your character. Realistically, video games don’t pose a significant risk to us, but their immersive experience is known to put us in the boots of our characters and make real-time decisions for them. This decision-making process makes people better surgeons.

A recent study has found that people who spend three hours every week playing video games make fewer mistakes in surgery than those who don’t. They can also do the surgery much faster than their colleagues who have no experience playing video games. This is crucial for a medical procedure like laparoscopic surgery, where every move and every second counts.

Every surgeon must decide on the fly because it can technically mean the life or death of their patient. So by making better decision-makers, video games are indirectly saving people’s lives. But this isn’t the only thing that video games are improving among surgeons.

Better Motor Skills

You need precise and articulate movement if you want to become a surgeon. One of the many things that surgeons have to practice is their eye-hand coordination. They also have to practice their fingers and avoid unnecessary twitches that might damage a patient’s organs. These have been known to improve among those who play video games.

Motor skills and eye-hand coordination are just some things that players are known to practice when playing their favorite video game. In addition, research has found that video games can improve sensorimotor skills among players, which is crucial for surgeons. The articulate movement of the fingers can also be practiced on a keyboard or a gamepad, both of which are platforms for gaming.

Simulative Experience

As stated earlier, video games can create simulative experiences among players. This is why there are so many simulative games out there. Some of these simulative games are now being utilized by medical professionals to teach surgeons.

You might have heard of the video game Surgeon Simulator. It’s nowhere near what surgeons do, but it’s a fun game to mess around and have fun with. This is not the kind of game they use to teach surgeons but more simulative medical experiences such as those sold by the Virtual Expo group.

Virtual Expo sells all sorts of VR learning materials to medical professionals to practice their profession without needing a live subject. One prevailing operation is a dental surgery that concerns a tooth implant or replacement. Students who enter this simulative experience have access to all sorts of dental tools such as saliva ejectors and a high-speed handpiece. This simulative experience is helping many medical professionals improve their skills without needing to leave their homes.

A Product of Learning

As the healthcare industry invests more into video games, more video games become a product of learning and not just entertainment. Medical training can now be held virtually and through gamification. This makes a difference and gives many young surgeons the needed experience in handling their patients.

However, a virtual experience can never be better than the actual experience. There are still many intricacies that video games cannot explore and many details that they can’t explain. Despite being a good product for learning, video games still have to improve a lot more before they truly replace actual on-site experience.

Too Much of a Good Thing is Bad

However, by the end of the day, too much of a good thing can be bad. Video games still have a dark side, and they can invoke aggression and violence among people. But this aggression and violence usually come for those who spend an unhealthy amount of time playing video games. We’re talking about people who spend twenty to forty hours of gaming every week.

Ultimately, spending too much time playing video games isn’t healthy. It stops people from doing their daily tasks, and it can even hinder them from studying, aside from the aggression and violence it invokes among people. So even if video games are helping train and create better surgeons, they shouldn’t be immortalized as the best way to make them. Graduating from medical school and specializing in a certain field of surgery will always be the best tool in making surgeons. Video games supplement their learning.