Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
Related to I Know Kung Fu, this is a situation in which a character acquired a needed skill, not by ever actually learning that skill, but by playing a video game which simulated that skill.
Just as much of a Hand Wave as I Know Kung Fu, but has the additional benefit of the "Hey, I could do that!" for the audience.
Moral Guardians often take this trope way too seriously, begetting the concept of Murder Simulators. However if it did work, you could learn medicine from Dr. Mario and cure people with nothing more than a high powered microscope and a bag of Skittles.
Of course, as far as controls, basic sense of tactics and (hopefully) physics are concerned, vehicles' simulators can supplement real and semi-real (more hardware-based) practice. After all, that's where simulators came from to begin with. Also note the difference between video games designed to be fun, and simulator machines designed to accurately emulate a cockpit and be used in training. And of course, even if vehicle in question doesn't give pilot hefty G-forces to wrestle with, difference is likely to make Falling Into The Cockpit unsafe, if for no other reason than specific reflexes are still required to use real controls fluently.
See also Ascended Fanboy, Taught By Television, Falling Into The Cockpit. When someone who knows what they're doing for real fails at a video game version then its I Dont Know Mortal Kombat.
Examples
Anime
- The premise of Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko. The titular Yohko is an avid video gamer who's apparently taken to the future to fight in space war games. She regains her memories of actually being from the future as a result.
- Taking it to its logical endpoint: during the Chapter Black arc of Yu Yu Hakusho, one of Sensui's aides, the Gamemaster (Amanuma), an elementary school student, has the power to alter his territory into a copy of whatever video game he desires. This grants him any skill he needs from that game (for example, the incredible driving skill of a racing game's AI). He can also take on the role of any of the game's characters. Unfortunately, he takes on the role of 'Goblin King', who is fated to die when the game is won by the protagonists (who have been cast as the "Seven Heroes"); Sensui never told him that what happens to the characters happens to him. The heroes win.
- Inverted and subverted in an episode of Patlabor: Noa is an ace at piloting giant robots, but she totally bombs playing a robot-themed video game.
- A similar joke happens in the beginning of the Fatal Fury movie, where we see that Terry Bogard isn't good at playing Fighting Games because he lives in one.
- In a similar gag that comprised one of about three worthwhile scenes in the Martian Successor Nadesico Movie, ace mecha pilot Ryoko gets her ass kicked at a video game by her former wingwoman Hikaru, who had been retired for about three years, writing Magical Girl manga. To be fair, it was a 2-D fighting game, just a mecha-themed one.
- Subverted in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, where Milia Fallyna discovers Maximillian Jenius' identity as the pilot who shot her down when she replays their last encounter on an arcade simulator using the exact same tactics.
- Gainer Sanga of Overman King Gainer takes this to its logical extreme. Already an Ascended Fanboy whose prowess at online games translates directly into proficiency at piloting the eponymous Humongous Mecha, one episode has him engaged in an online tournament and a real-life battle at the same time, having modified King Gainer to allow him to fight both battles simultaneously. When the dust clears and everybody realizes his impossible achievement, he is awarded the title of "King of the Dual Field".
- Konata from Lucky Star defeats a hulking Guile expy with moves straight from Street Fighter, complete with hovering life bars. She also wins footraces by visualizing herself as a sprite in a videogame. To be fair, though, she is described as being quite athletic.
- The World Only God Knows is centered around a student who possesses an incredible amount of skill at... dating simulators. Fortunate that the demons of the week hide in the hearts of females, and are released when the hearts are "captured", right?
- Well this happens in the manga version of Great Teacher Onizuka, where Kikuchi takes the Vice Principals car and Kunio asks him if he knows how to drive it. Kikuchi says that he aced Gran Turismo and should be fine. Turns out that he
damageswrecks the car and drives the car off a pier by accident.
- Spoofed in an episode of Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series in wich Kaiba, while piloting a helicopter says: "Thank God for Microsoft flight simulator"
- In one of the supplemental Code Geass sound episodes, Lelouch and Suzaku are attempting to leave Kururugi Jinja without Lelouch's guards. Suzaku's claims he can drive the car if Lelouch takes care of everything else. It is not until they are in the car that Lelouch discovers that Suzaku's "driving experience" comes from video games. Nevertheless, they succeed.
- Suzaku also learned how to pilot Knightmares only through a simulator, and still promptly kicked Lelouch's "useless terrorists'" asses in his first battle.
- It helped that he had a Knightmare with never-before-seen shields that was ten times better than the grunt frames they were using.
- In the manga version of Sailor Moon, Usagi gets better at the Sailor V video game as she gains experience as a Sailor Senshi. Artermis later reveals that he had been using the game to train the girls.
- Subverted in Pokemon, of all things. In the first season, the heroes come across a Pokemon Academy where the students simulate battles on machines with displays suspiciously reminiscent of the video game the anime is derived from. The student the heroes were speaking to ends up voicing his belief that a battle with Misty would be a waste of time, as his Pokemon always defeat Water-Types in the simulations. Misty ends up battling with him anyway, and instantly beats him with absolutely no effort.
- Inverted in Zoids when actual mecha pilots turn out to be fantastic at the video games that simulate the sport in which they participate.
- Zegapain features a video game based on the control of the title mecha, used to both recruit pilots and train them in their time off.
- Although not explicitly mentioned, unathletic gamer Yōsuke Kirie delivers the most awesome mecha-ass kicking we ever see in Bokurano, surpasing any other pilot's skill by several orders of magnitude.
- Used in G Gundam, when Domon Kasshu and Allenby Beardsley play an arcade game that simulates the mecha tournament they are competing in down to the motion sensing cockpit system. The fight ends in a draw because the game computer was unable to keep up with their speed and blew up.
Comic Books
- The Carmen Sandiego comics used the computer game to recruit detectives.
- The villain Taskmaster has use of photographic reflexes that allow him to copy and do anything he can physically do. Add that with a body with the strength of an Olympic athlete and you have a formidable foe.
- In a Doonesbury strip Jeff Redfern is undergoing CIA training in Afghanistan and accidentally launches a missile. However, it actually ends up demolishing an Al-Queda ammo dump. Jeff's superior wonders how this is possible, exclaiming "It's all those damn video games, isn't it?!"
- Subverted by Deadpool in issue #27. He's already a competent martial artist. The obvious Shout Out is just for laughs. "You smug little— Speaking of games. You ever play Street Fighter?
 ◊"
- Amulet: Navin convinces Emily to let him to pilot the Albatross due to his experience in playing flight simulation-type games. He turns out to be a pretty good pilot in general.
Film
- The Last Starfighter was based around this idea; aliens plant a spaceflight simulator disguised as an arcade game on Earth, and recruit the high-score winner to help them fight invaders.
- Spoofed in Clerks The Animated Series; Randall spends countless hours playing a game called Pharaoh in hopes that the above situation will occur to him — when it does, it turns out the games' makers are looking for slave laborers to build a pyramid.
- The plot for the first game in Sega's Virtual On series of fighters claimed that it was itself a testing method from the future, and that the arcade cabinet (or Saturn) was remotely linked to actual robots on the moon being controlled by the players as part of an experiment to find potential pilots.
- Spoofed again in the South Park episode "Best Friends Forever" with Angels replacing the aliens and a PSP game replacing the arcade game.
- Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind is at least in part a parody of The Last Starfighter, and a character alludes to the film at one point.
- Snakes On A Plane: Troy flew the plane based on his experience with a Playstation flight sim. Actually set up, because he's been playing on a PSP all flight (when not being set upon by ophidia in Œdipal relationships, at least). This is a particularly extreme example, in that he ignores the orders of flight controllers who actually do know how to fly a plane based on his Playstation experience. It works, of course.
- At least it's not a textbook landing. Now a flight simulator could be a significant help with landing a real plane, but no such simulators exist on the PSP (or anything but PC).
- Maybe not in America, but Jet de Go Pocket for PSP comes close (it only simulates take-off and landing, replacing everything in between with the loading screen for the landing part). It was only sold in Japan, though (produced in cooperation with Japan Airlines, and thus only features aircraft they have; of course, JAL having plenty of 747s in operation it is included). Of course, in keeping with the "flight" theme the majority of menu options are labeled in English as well as Japanese.
- The film based on Hey Arnold! has one of the characters driving a bus because he's such a good player at a bus-driving video game.
- In Galaxy Quest, Tommy Webber is able to learn how to fly a starship by watching old episodes of himself flying a fictional starship. Which just makes sense, because the starship was designed by aliens watching the same episodes. The amazing part is how quickly he became an expert, considering that in the original episodes he was just a kid flying a prop.
- Though it should be noted that he specifically says that, as a kid, he "had it all worked out", thus that when the script called for the ship to do something, his childlike devotion to his own imagination would call for him to do a specific thing on the controls. So him becoming an expert is no real surprise... the controls would be ridiculously intuitive.
- In Back To The Future III, Marty attributes his skill at a 19th century shooting range to hours spent playing the arcade Light Gun shooting game Wild Gunman. This makes a certain amount of sense, considering the former is essentially a game as well, albeit with a real gun. The scene is part of a series-long Running Gag involving Marty being a crack shot at such "baby's toys".
- Also, there was some justification involved: his first shot with a real gun with real recoil and real weight is really, really off-target (really). Then he adjusts and misses not a single shot.
- Not to mention the fact that his first shot is taken with the gun in his "off" hand - note that he switches hands and adjusts.
- Played with in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. In the beginning of This Island Earth, a plane suffers a control failure. During the first intermission, Mike describes how he would have handled the situation, claiming he qualifies as a pilot because he's "fully instrument rated for Microsoft Flight Simulator." The bots then challenge him to fly the Satellite of Love. Mike is reluctant, because the satellite handles nothing like a plane, but the robots make fun of him until he accepts. He manages less than 5 seconds of flight before plowing into the Hubble Telescope.
- A variant of this trope occurs in the 1965 movie The Flight of the Phoenix. After a plane crashes in the desert, one of the survivors says that he is an airplane designer and can design a functional plane they can construct from the wreckage. It turns out, however, that the airplanes he designs are model airplanes flown by hobbyists; he's never designed one large enough to carry a person before.
- An excellent example of the justified/unjustified spectrum of the trope. Model airplanes and real airplanes are designed with the same math and design principles. Likewise, full-scale computer simulations like Microsoft Flight Simulator are actually used to train nascent pilots. On the other end of the spectrum, "arcade-style" games (like any flight game on the Playstation, for example,) impart no practical knowledge. Both uses- from the played straight "hours on Microsoft Flight Simulator" enabling a survivable crash landing, and the more humorous "Hours on Playstation" enabling ludicrous skill, characterize the trope.
- Mercilessly parodied in Run Ronnie Run. The film's climax revolves around disgruntled reality stars holding the pudgy, unassuming son of local law enforcement hostage (don't ask). Said son spends his entire captivity playing Dead Or Alive, and then, as the hostage situation reaches a crisis point, proceeds to beat the crap out of his captors using over-the-top moves from the game. Meanwhile, the background music consists of a song (Ass Kickin' Fat Kid) whose lyrics begin with "Fat Kid Learned From A Video Game!"
- The scene also begins with said Fat Kid announcing "Like father, like son!" before going on his rampage. That makes it an example of Lamarck Was Right as well.
- The titular character in xXx attributes his ability with a gun to having broken his leg and having spent an entire summer playing First-Person Shooter videogames. (Though the whole movie is rather over-the-top, so this might just be an example of the logic that works in the setting.) Later on, when a sniper has an incursion team pinned down and the character notices another weapon nearby, he announces in annoyance, "Dude, you've got a missile launcher! Stop thinking Prague Police and start thinking Playstation! Blow shit up!"
- The common subversion applies: As soon as the protagonist uses a regular assault rifle, he wonders why it doesn't fire until his partner tells him to turn the safety off. His custom-made James-Bond-gadget revolver obviously didn't have one.
- Used exactly as in Doctor Who in the movie Fool's Gold: when asked how he learned to fly the biplane they are riding in, Matthew McConaughey's character simply answers "Playstation!".
- This trope is one of the subplots of Mars Attacks! Throughout the movie, the two young boys of one family are seen playing video games at every single opportunity. Towards the end, they scavenge some Martian weapons and proceed to clean house with an efficacy that Earth's militaries only wish they had.
- Parodied in A Dog's Breakfast, when the main character attempts to pummel his sister's fiancé using skills he learned from a video game. He fails.
- This trope is a central plot point in the Robin Williams movie Toys. General Zevo realizes that children who play arcade games have remarkable hand-eye coordination and reflexes. To that end, he repurposes his brother's toy company into a military contractor, building unmanned planes and mini-tanks that can be controlled by children at a video console. Children who still think they're playing videogames.
- Subverted and Actualized in Shaun Of The Dead: Shaun is actually quite a poor shot with the rifle at the Winchester, although the Zombies bursting through the windows follow the same pattern as the earlier video game.
- Ichi, from Ichi The Killer is crazed shut-in who murders people using the skills he learned from playing fighting games all day.
- Spoofed in the second Men In Black movie, in which the only way to control the Cool Car manually while in flight is with a Playstation gamepad.
- Tron would count because Flynn is an expert at all the games he programmed and played when he gets teleported into the computer world. Justified by the fact that he's basically a god when he's in the computer world.
- In My Schoolmate The Barbarian, Stone helps Edward defeat Mantis by telling him the button combos from a fighting game so he know what type of attack to use. It works quite well since Edward already knew how to fight but needed Stone's mentorship so he can use the right moves against Mantis
- In the movie D.A.R.Y.L., the titular character is an expert at all electronic games. This is partially because he has lightning fast reflexes, but partially because he is also a cyborg that can hack directly into the video games. Eventually he uses these abilities to hijack an SR-71 Blackbird.
- Battlefield Earth has a group of tribal primitives learning to fly Harrier Jump Jets by spending a few hours in a simulator.
- The Last Mimzy has the boy able to drive a truck because of gaming experience (ignoring alien influence).
Literature
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who, "Age of Steel": When asked how he knows how to fly a zeppelin, Mickey answers "Playstation".
- Subverted in an episode of Cobra. A young man with no Real Life driving experience is confident he can handle the protagonist's car because it's the same model as the virtual car he uses in his favorite Driving Game; it turns out to be rather more complicated in real life.
- In one edition of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson drove an Acura NSX around Laguna Seca, a track he had done hundreds of times on the PlayStation, and found it considerably more difficult in real life. Partly because he couldn't take the same risks when failure would mean time in hospital instead of restarting, of course.
- In Life On Mars, when asked if he can fire a gun with accuracy, Sam Tyler responds, "You should see my Playstation scores."
- Didn't exactly work in an episode of Drake And Josh when the two are stranded in a helicopter without the pilot:
Drake: I’m gonna fly this helicopter! You’ve seen me play Helicopter Rescue!
Josh: What?! That’s a videogame!
Drake: So? If I can land a military helicopter on the Empire State Building, rescue the princess, while a giant lobster is shooting rockets at me, I think I can land this thing on a freeway, alright?
- Needless to say, it didn't end well.
- This is how Chuck handles Falling Into The Cockpit in "Chuck vs. the Helicopter": according to Sarah, the helicopter controls in a video game that Chuck has played were based on the real thing.
- This is pretty much Monica's power on Heroes: she can do anything she's seen on TV or in real life.
- On Arrested Development, Buster is (barely) able to operate a real crane after obsessively playing a crane game.
- The episode of Seinfeld where George tries to get a Frogger arcade cabinet across a busy street. (Complete with overhead camera and sound effects). But he fails to consider that unlike a frog, the cabinet can't jump, and so the curb at the other end of the street seals the cabinet's fate.
- The whole reason Eli Wallae was hired in Stargate Universe. He's that good at Mortal Kombat (or, the Stargate MMO anyway).
- Rodney McKay has a pessimistic view on this (as he always does): when asked to help with asteroid-shooting duty, he asks if this is like Asteroids, when he's told yes, he replies that he's terrible at Asteroids, and scored a zero once.
- The Pretender's main protagonist has been known to do this several times. In fact, nearly every profession he learns is from something only slightly related.
Video Games
- Subverted in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation; Ryusei is able to pilot a Humongous Mecha the first time he gets in the cockpit, due to being the tournament champion at a video game based on the mecha, but it's only because that specific mecha was altered to use the video game's controls. When he's finally put behind the controls of an actual mecha, his initial performances are less than stellar.
- It's also worth noting the game and the tournament both were the result of a military project.
- Ryusei's rival, Tenzan Nakajima, played the same simulators as him, and once he gets to pilot a mecha for real, he still treats everything like one big game (the heroes in Kyosuke's route of the first SRW: OG call him out on this during their first battle with him).
- One of the members of the Terrible Trio in the obscure Square Action RPG Threads Of Fate has the ability to perfectly imitate the abilities of characters he reads about. Taken to ridiculous lengths when he fights you while imitating a star.
- Wait, what? A star as in "big ball of flaming gas with planets circling it"?
- No. He...well...you're really just gonna have to see for yourself. It starts at about 3:45.
- The game Wing Commander starts out with your character playing a video game of shooting enemy starships that's located in the lounge of the mothership.
- The entire plot of the first Virtual On game, in an even more Meta sense: The first half of the game is the test, while the second half is supposed to be the player (yes, YOU) controlling a Humongous Mecha on the moon hundreds of years into the future from the comfort of the arcade machine.
- In the fluff for the first Command And Conquer, both GDI and NOD have been monitoring online strategy games for command talent, and picked you. You're supposed to be sitting at a computer remotely guiding your forces.
Web Comics
- Most of Largo's talents in Megatokyo are based on skills he picked up from computer games and his blurring of lines between the real world and game worlds.
- In fact, he is the holder of a "Mortal Combat Visa", which allowed him to enter the country by defeating a Ninja in Mortal Kombat.
- Parodied in this strip of Penny Arcade.
- Parodied in this strip of Sluggy Freelance.
- A variation in DMFA, where we learn that part of Dan's speed and agility comes from DDR.
- this Irregular Webcomic strip (surprisingly without a link to this page in the News Post, which usually draws attention to his use of listed tropes).
- He did it earlier, with one of the Sci-fi theme's characters protesting he knows he can fire two guns with no loss of accuracy thanks to Nintendo and Playstation.
- In Antihero For Hire, Shadehawk claims his martial arts prowess comes from watching lots of kung-fu movies. Baron Diamond responds by saying he prefers game shows, and tells Dechs he's won a car...by throwing it at him.
- Lampshaded in Full Frontal Nerdity where the characters theorize that, as tabletop gamers, they have a mastery of strategical thinking and that real world military leaders could learn from their knowledge. Cut to an army general monitoring them and doing just that.
- Pete from Tao of Geek is a variation of this. his Coffee Ninja abilities came from getting fed a one-up token in a VR version of a videogame still in beta.
- Lampshaded in the Insecticomics, where Dreadmoon is a genius at strategy games but would be an awful tactician (hence the need for Thrust).
Web Original
Western Animation
- Parodied in Futurama, where Fry is recruited to fight the invaders from the video game planet, Nintendu 64.
- Unfortunately, that was one of the "Anthology of Interest" episodes, so just a part of the characters' imaginations, and not a "real" episode. Fry wanted to see a scenario of "What if life was just like a video game?"
- One of the punchlines being that even though the world is warped to suit his strengths, he still fails. Although, apparently he was better than anyone else in the year 3000.
- The Planet Express crew got Genre Savvy on this, using a video game interface for the Planet Express Ship's weapons for Fry to use.
- Also the second episode, where Amy is able to pilot Fry, Leela and Bender to safety thanks to too much time spent retrieving the ship's keys from the crane game.
- It's stated in Megas XLR that the reason Coop is such a good mech pilot is because he plays so many video games. This is slightly more plausible than the others, as he apparently remapped Megas's controls to match his video game experience — a joystick and what appears to be an old NES controller being among the items on the control panel.
- This is subverted/averted in an episode, where Coop is forced to use a Dance Dance Revolution pad to control Megas. Unfortunately, Coop isn't exactly your regular DDR player, so the fight is a bit... awkward. There's also the fact that Coop is horribly out of shape and is exhausted after only about a minute.
- The show actually came about by the creators talking about this trope.
- In the Danny Phantom movie "Reality Trip", Danny pilots the Space Shuttle to a safe landing using his experience playing a Shuttle flight sim game.
- Slightly more plausible than it sounds, he wants to grow up to be an astronaut so he might have actually been learning from simulators.
- Gaz of Invader Zim is able to defeat the titular character twice, once in a mech and once in a ship, due to her extensive videogame skills, and she thought the former actually was a videogame as the mech was remote controlled. A mild subversion however, as Zim wavers somewhere between Genius Ditz and Too Dumb To Live.
- Class of the Titans. Hephaestus modeled a jet engine and set the controls precisely as a video game he and Odie played.
- "Flies exactly the same as the game, except it's real. Game over means game over."
- In an episode of Doug, Judy fails her driving test and then practices for the re-test on a car-race arcade game.
- An episode of The Simpsons involves a scene where Homer needs to pack his family and their luggage into a car that won't fit all of it. Bart laments the lack of space, but Homer just gives a reassuring calm smile, and explains that "That's what all those hours of playing Tetris were for." And proceeds on a sequence where he imagines the cargo and passengers as ''Tetris'' blocks.
Real Life
- One NASCAR driver actually credited a win to practicing on a NASCAR video game.
- It's common for some drivers practice on NASCAR based video games to get an idea of the track more so for drivers who have never been on that track before in their career.
- Also, several Formula One racers are reported or have admitted to using racing simulators prior to races in order to get a feel for the timing of turns and hills on their courses.
- This is perhaps coming true with iRacing, created by Dave Kaemmer's former Papyrus Design Group with the intention of being realistic enough to allow real-life racers to practice and for gamers to get good enough to maybe try the real thing - albeit at a fairly amateur level, hence the entry level cars being a road going coupe (Pontiac Solstice) and a Legends mini-stock car. The sim limits the 'proper' stock cars and Formula Mazda cars to experienced players. Sure enough since it's launch the real Dale Earnhardt Jr, Jacques Villeneuve, AJ Allmendinger and Justin Wilson have all signed up. Just the sheer amount of tiny bumps that ripple through the force feedback is enough to impress. The surest sign of all of the sim's authenticity is that with a few weeks practice the player can get within about four or five seconds of an acceptable real-life lap, but then gets stuck since the real skill is in finding those last few seconds. Then once that's done you can think about trying to be quick. Another fun thing is that moves you may have seen the pros do on TV really work in a race - braking early to deliberately let someone past then cutting back underneath them as they miss their braking point and sail wide is an especially satisfying trick.
- Herb Lacey was accepted into naval flight training in 1998 and graduated near the top of his class despite having no prior flight experience except on Microsoft Flight Simulator. The US Air Force and Navy now promote the game and provide add-ons simulating training aircraft, with students who use the software scoring on average higher in real flight training than students who don't.
- Another one: The US Army has tested using networked first person shooters for infantry training. No, they aren't training to blow up demons and mutants but getting soldiers used to the idea of communicating with each other while on the move and in combat.
- Wired magazine ran a piece on US Marines being trained in this way on a special map for Doom. The map was later sold commercially, and the creators became game developers.
- The video game Full Spectrum Warrior was commissioned by the U.S. Army for exactly this purpose. (The version that the Army uses exists in the retail version as an unlockable bonus; the version you buy in stores has changes to make it more entertaining.)
- Similarly, the US Army commissioned and released Americas Army as a free download to the public. It's at least as much aimed at training people realistic combat(i.e., team-killing is murder, not comedy) as actual skills, but it probably qualifies.
- Paxton Galvanek used what he learned in Americas Army to help save the life of someone in a car crash. Healing people in the game is a matter of pushing the left mouse button, but qualifying as a medic requires sitting through and passing 3 tests on first aid.
- At the height of the early-1980s arcade craze, Joystik magazine reported with a straight face that the Air Force used Defender arcade machines in pilot training.
- And the US Army definitely commissioned Atari to make them a full 3-D version of Battlezone for tank practice, in probably the earliest example of this.
- It's been suggested that one reason the US Army has adopted relatively easily to fairly radical changes in operation due to technology is because most soldiers over the last few decades have been exposed to videogames and using technological enhancement is second nature.
- During the Falkland Island war, the Argentines used mass wave tactics that overloaded the computer-based targeting systems of British anti-air defenses. Apparently, however, because the operators of the systems, young men versed in the video games of that day and age such as Space Invaders, they were able to manually target and destroy the incoming Argentine attacks.
- Supposedly, the Army has the Force XXI Corp, trained using cutting-edge simulators. It's mentioned in MGS2, which is usually pretty good about military research.
- Look at the soldier to the far left of this picture◊ depicting the gear for the Future Force Warrior project. See what he's holding?
- Allegedly, some of the 9/11 hijackers learned to handle large aircraft by playing Microsoft Flight Simulator.
- An episode of The Gadget Show carried out an experiment to see if it was possible to learn to fly a plane using Microsoft Flight Simulator. The individual concerned succeeded, but then again he had been using thousands of pounds worth of peripherals.
- Anyone that thinks video games can train you to use guns in real life clearly has either never played a video game, operated a gun in real life, or both. Reflexes can be trained this way, though.
- Studies have shown that gamers are faster at detecting movement in their peripheral vision and identifying the source, and better at multitasking sensory inputs (being able to hear something even when paying attention to something else they are looking at) than the average person.
- However, the more closely the simulation imitates real-life, the better it translates to actual skills (i.e. playing with a gun replica instead of point-and-click).
- Seeing the application of video game simulators in various military settings, it's not actually that hard to see why the Moral Guardians like Jack Thompson react the way they do. It doesn't make the more outlandish iterations of their claims true, it's just more understandable.
- Skewered by Dork Tower: "...and playing Tiger Woods turns kids into PGA golfers."
- The US Air Force has let youths, most of whom play video games, sit in the cockpit of the F-35 Joint-Strike-Fighter simulator. Within minutes, and without any instruction, the gamers are able to figure out how to operate the plane and weapons systems. Kids have even suggested changes that would make the cockpit easier to understand.
- That said, "know how the plane would be flown" and "know how to fly the plane" are two completely different things.
- There have been studies showing that surgeons who play video games perform better in surgery. A more recent study said the Nintendo Wii helps improve their coordination, and the touchpad controls of the DS would likely have a similar effect. This is especially true of newer surgical techniques which have surgeons watching view screens of what they're doing, rather than directly into the body, and manipulating the instruments remotely rather than directly.
- Most of these studies were performed long before either of nintendo's consoles were around and in fact, applied to the PC mouse instead. The most recent articles are exactly the same with Nintendo's brand names scribbled over it.
- On the other hand, the motion-sensing Wii controller has been used for physical therapy by a number of hospitals and rehabilitation centers, so it's not all recycled research.
- In order to save up its budget, the Royal Air Force decide to fire its ace pilots and replace them with gamers who will only be trained for 30 hours before being asked to control drones that are armed. [http://kotaku.com/5164562/royal-air-force-prefers-gamers-to-pilots]
[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1158084/RAF-jettisons-Top-Guns-Drones-fly-sensitive-missions-Afghanistan.html]Achievement expected include "heavy civilian casualties".
- Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman lives after his military career on the study of how video games can train people to kill.
- Vaguely subverted by the Guitar Hero series where the people who have learned to play an actual instruments-including the people who performed the songs used in the game-reveal that they truly suck at the rhythm matching of the game.
- Example: Gene Simons and two other band members challenged Gene’s son Nick and two of his friends to playing one of KISS’s songs...and Gene and Co. Lost horribly.
- Subverted by Rock Band and Guitar Hero: World Tour: while the guitar game is similarly superficial with previous Guitar Hero games, playing the drums is actually pretty close to playing an electronic drum set. And the singer? He/she has to actually sing, and gets the best score by staying on pitch. It's not hard to imagine these skills translating to Real Life.
- Although it might be too early to tell, Guitar Rising might be able to really teach players how to play electric guitar, since it actually require an electric guitar to play.
- At least one of Guitar Hero and Rock Band's mid-90s predecessors was a bit of a commercial disappointment because it tried too hard to justify this trope, though the fact that an actual electric guitar with amp and a play-it-in-a-week guide could be had for only slightly more money didn't help.
- Season 4 of Battlebots featured a 12-year-old driver who made it to the lightweight quarterfinals because his video game experience allowed him to be one of the best drivers at the event.
- Tetsuya Sakai. After practicing intensely with airsoft, he came over to the US and, after exactly two days of live-fire familiarization with a .45 automatic, won the 2004 Steel Challenge, smoking legendary shooters like Rob Leatham ("The Great One").
- The US army had trouble teaching its soldiers to move the robots, so they got the controls for the robots in the shape of playstation controls, and the soldiers mastered it easily. This has been adopted by many armies all over the world.
- During a botched invasion of her home in India by terrorist Abu Osama, 18 year-old Rukhsana Kauser hit him with an axe, took his AK-47 and shot him with it before driving his accomplices out of the home. Her explanation as to how she could operate an automatic rifle with zero prior experience? "I had never touched a rifle before this, let alone fired one - but I had seen heroes firing in films and I tried the same way."
|
|
