iHooligan

How does small fry Stoke City prepare for their second year in the Premier League? Apparently they socialize and develop a tactical bond by playing Call of Duty and Gears of War according to the Guardian.

And before you laugh too hard consider that Stoke, having only been promoted to top flight football in 2008, currently sit at fifth position on the Premier League table. It’s no secret that the Army also uses tactical squad based video games to get its recruits bonding and working together. Not that any of this would replace slogging through the mud or being on the pitch. No one at Stoke is going to level cap a mage in World of Warcraft and then proceed to pocket the most Premier League goals for this season.

However, it does make one wonder about the effect of online bonding and how the player’s mirror neurons affect their performance when they are on the pitch. Since the exact same neurons fire whether we are navigating real space or simulated 3-D space and that the mirror neurons themselves are supposed to be responsible for empathy the team could be benefiting a great deal from their online interactions. Then again the studies are so new that Stoke’s gaming nights might simply enable them to perform better by keeping them out of the pubs.

For every study promoting the cognitive benefits of video games there are probably 50 articles that decry them as evil. The former at least has its basis in science and the later always in morality and almost always someone else’s morality; an outsider’s morality delivering the same vindictive condemnation that is usually found between competing religious fanatics.

For more on mirror neurons check out this Nova segment on them.

And Stoke City can be found playing against Chelsea this Saturday but without their grenades and plasma weapons and such.

Category: Culture, Science

Tags: english premier league, mirror neurons, Stoke City, video games