Years (and years) ago, the usual crazies were running around making dire predictions about Rock and Roll and how it was going to destroy young people. It seems pretty ludicrous now but these people were serious and generally made pests (and fools) of themselves for many years.
Fast forward half a lifetime and another bunch of crazies were (or, perhaps, are) running around screaming that video games are going to be the death of our youth. Perfectly useless wastes of time. Maybe they should be outlawed. And, well, you know…
Now in an especially delicious piece of irony, CNN is reporting that researchers have been using a video game to diagnose early stage Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnoses, it turns out, are more accurate than the standard medical tests. You can follow the link for the details but the TL;DR is that an early sign of Alzheimer’s is a subtle deficiency in spatial awareness and navigation skills. The game, which involves navigating through a maze, can detect these deficits years before the memory problems that we associate with Alzheimer’s appear.
The CNN article has a link to a paper describing the research where you can read the abstract. Sadly, the paper itself is behind a paywall. This is a fine opportunity for a rant about Open Science—especially science that we’ve already paid for—but I’ll forbear.