SoylentNews

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

We all know that practice makes us better at things, but scientists are still trying to understand what kinds of practice work best. A research team led by a Brown University computer scientist has found insights about how people improve their skills in a rather unlikely place: online video games.

In a pair of studies reported in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science, researchers looked at data generated from thousands of online matches of two video games, the first-person shooter game Halo: Reach and the strategy game StarCraft 2. The Halo study revealed how different patterns of play resulted in different rates of skill development in players. The StarCraft study showed how elite players have unique and consistent rituals that appear to contribute to their success.

"The great thing about game data is that it's naturalistic, there's a ton of it, and it's really well measured," said Jeff Huang, a computer science professor at Brown and the study's lead author. "It gives us the opportunity to measure patterns for a long period of time over a lot of people in a way that you can't really do in a lab."

Halo: Reach is a science fiction war game in which players battle with rifles, grenades and other weapons (part of a wildly popular series of Halo games). One of the most popular ways to play is known as Team Slayer, where online players from[sic] are placed together on teams for 10- to 15-minute matches to see which team can score the most kills against an opposing team. In order to arrange matches in which players have roughly similar skill levels, the game rates players using a metric called TrueSkill. TrueSkill ratings are constantly updated as players play more matches and their skill level changes, so they offered Huang and his colleagues the opportunity to see what kinds of playing habits influence a player's skill acquisition.

Huang and his colleagues looked at data generated by seven months of Halo matches -- every online match played by the 3.2 million people who started playing the week the game was released in 2010.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the research showed that people who played the most matches per week (more than 64) had the largest increase in skill over time. But playing lots of games wasn't the most efficient way to improve skill. Looking at the data another way -- in terms of which groups showed the most improvement per match rather an over time -- showed markedly different results. That analysis showed that, over their first 200 matches, those who played four to eight matches[sic] week gained the most skill per match, followed by those who played eight to 16 matches.

"What this suggests is that if you want to improve the most efficiently, it's not about playing the most matches per week," Huang said. "You actually want to space out your activity a little bit and not play so intensively."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission