I was never a video game player, but I have always...

I was never a video game player, but I have always been curious about them. It was never something that I did when I was younger, and I figured that I’d missed my opportunity to play them. After all, I thought that they were something that kids did; not people my age. When I got to university I began to realize just how wrong I was, and how much I was missing out on.

Of course, it was slow going at the beginning, and even now I’m not nearly as fast as some of my friends. They blamed it on my lack of video game playing as a kid. That is what inspired my feature story about video games.

I did some research, and found a Jay Pratt, a professor of psychology from the University of Toronto. He has worked with some master students in the past doing some experiment on the effects of video games on reflexes and the brain’s visual searches.

It was found that playing video games can significantly decrease reactions times; meaning that people who play video games perform better when it comes to visual searches and reacting.

It took a while to get him for an interview, but he was very co-operative once I got him on phone. All in all, my feature story went smoothly, and I was surprised at how easy it was to get interviews with video game players.

I got two students, both in the same age bracket that Professor Pratt was working with in his studies, and they both gave me some really great clips. The main thing that I discovered from the interviews was that students can still play video games and still be very successful; so long as they manage their time properly and remember that proportion is important.