I am on the old side of the generation that grew up with video games as a ubiquitous presence in their life. I clearly recall the world's worst Atari port of one of the greatest game of all time—Pac Man—and I even remember playing what is widely considered to be the worst game of all time, the Atari 2600's E.T. (I still clearly recall how hard it was). Today, video games focus less on forcing you to pump more and more quarters into an arcade machine punishing difficulty and more on telling a story and making the experience a bit gentler on the novice gamer.
Prior cognitive, psychological, and neurological studies have shown that expert video game players are capable of outperforming novices in measures of attention and perception. They also have demonstrated that, when novices train on video games for 20-plus hours, they experienced no measurable increase in cognitive ability. These two pieces of information would seem to point to an innate difference between expert and novices gamers, instead of suggesting that gaming is a skill that can be learned.
ars technica
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I am pretty good at video games, given the chance to spend countless hours with them. Oddly enough, some of the older games, such as Donkey Kong or Ms. Pac Man, I cant seem to master, no matter how long I practice.
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