Practice

I've just spent a very distracting few minutes on the tube watching someone play a game where two pill things race along two pairs of parallel tracks avoiding squares and collecting circles. As I haven't played a computer game for a number of years, this strikes me a startlingly basic. However, I do understand its place in a very popular new genre of mobile games; I also understand the promoted attraction of such games. You see people playing them all the time on public transport: barely branded minichrome* games that are supposedly designed to train your brain. In the case of the example I just witnessed, the key skill appears to be a kind of high speed multitasking, because you have to guide the two little pill things simultaneously. I have no doubt whatsoever that the game in question was very good at improving one's ability to guide two fast moving sprites (now there's a word you don't hear any more**) simultaneously along two tracks of obstacles/rewards, but I am not sure when this particular skill will come in handy in the real world. I'm not sure anyone will ever need to drive two cars simultaneously. I don't know, maybe it helps with piano playing. 

Generally with these 'brain training' games I struggle understand the higher purpose of what they're training your brain to do. Hand-eye coordination is a skill that is often supposed to be improved by such games, but how much hand-eye coordinaton do we need beyond the not dropping things on the floor by missing the table or stabbing ourselves in the eye with a spoon that most of us learn by the age of three? Surely high functioning hand-eye coordinaton is useful for one thing: playing more computer games. 

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, people are only too willing to spend time and money on any old crap if they are told that it is good for them: look at the amount of nutritionally redundant chia seed that is now flogged to the 'health' food obsessed. Sure if you think it tastes nice, then buy it, but if you're buying it because you think it's good for you, I strongly encourage you to find any scientific evidence that it is in any way beneficial for you. There is plenty of evidence that chia seeds contain all sorts of nutrients and proteins, but there is none that shows that humans can ingest any of them. Equally with computer games: by all means play computer games, just don't pretend they turning you into some sort of superhuman. They are not, if you're lucky they're turning you into someone who is better at computer games. 

*i.e. of limited palette 

**it's possible that you never heard/read it if you weren't into computer games in the 80s