Paging Dr. Mario

I've always believed that allowing my children to play video games didn't automatically qualify me for Bad Mother of the Year honors, although some would disagree. Fortunately, Nintendo's Wii has made it more difficult for the holier-than-thous to cast aspersions on my parenting skills. If you've ever seen kids play Wii, you know that many of the games are physically somewhat rigorous. In addition, the development of hand-eye coordination, even entire body coordination, from video gaming is pretty astounding. My kids seem to have an intuitive connection to virtual reality that I certainly don't have.

Eric has a theory that the Department of Defense is keeping a close eye on young gamers for future recruitment into military service. Technology has enabled military operations -- from dogfighting to tank-dozing to missile launching -- to be performed using controls and video monitors, not hands and eyes. The real world has been reduced to a game! Becoming proficient at the game won't be enough in a high-stakes situation. Only expert gamers will possess the true intuition necessary to obliterate the enemy, and move to the next level.

Now I find that there is another benefit to playing the Wii -- the honing of surgical skills. My ex-husband, the surgeon, will be thrilled to know that all the time our children spend not studying may actually make them fine physicians one day!

With many of the Wii games, success is based on subtle movements of the wrist and hand. Similarly, endoscopic surgical procedures are performed, not by making a large incision and playing around in the goo, but by inserting into the body a narrow instrument with fiber optics and performing the surgery watching a video screen.

In a recent experiment with surgical residents, half the group played Wii Marble Mania and the full complement of Wii Play games for an hour; the other half did not. The gamers were then pitted against their less-fortunate colleagues in a computer-simulated laparoscopic procedure, and managed to attain 48% higher scores, on average, than the non-gamers.

The researchers behind the experiment are developing Wii software that will simulate surgical procedures. A training platform based on the virtual console could be used to train surgeons in developing countries instead of traditional virtual training tools that are usually more expensive.


Once again, my mother's intuition has served my children well. Goody-two-shoes mommies, I await my tiara.




------