Better Health Through Play explains how, while games have been used for teaching and training for years, now it’s health care’s turn:
Rosser, who heads the Advanced Medical Technology Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, knows how he’d like to see games used. Since 2001, he’s worked with games like Super Monkey Ball, for Nintendo’s GameCube console, to train doctors in laparoscopic surgery. What Rosser found was that students who had played video games for more than three hours in one week — even once — had 37 percent fewer errors during the procedure, and got the operation done 27 percent more quickly.‘If you played in the past, or are currently playing, you’re significantly better than the non-players,’ Rosser said. ‘Video games were the determining factor — more than years of experience, gender, dominant/non-dominant hand, all of that.’
It’s only natural, really, that games would help doctors with laparoscopies — that’s when surgeons use a tiny camera and joystick-controlled tools to cut and sew. It’s about as close to gaming as surgery gets.
Super Monkey Ball saves lives.