As if you needed more reasons to play video games:

Video gamers appear to process more visual information faster:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130611161943.htm
Earlier research by others has found that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. When playing a game, especially one of the "first-person shooters," a gamer makes "probabilistic inferences" about what he's seeing -- good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right -- as rapidly as he can.

Appelbaum said that with time and experience, the gamer apparently gets better at doing this. "They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster."
Both groups experienced a rapid decay in memory of what the letters had been, but the gamers outperformed the non-gamers at every time interval.

The visual system sifts information out from what the eyes are seeing, and data that isn't used decays quite rapidly, Appelbaum said. Gamers discard the unused stuff just about as fast as everyone else, but they appear to be starting with more information to begin with.

Looking at these results, Applebaum said, it appears that prolonged memory retention isn't the reason. But the other two factors might both be in play -- it is possible that the gamers see more immediately, and they are better able make better correct decisions from the information they have available.


Video gamers have faster reaction times and hand eye coordination which may explain their better surgical skills:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070220012341.htm
"Training curricula that include video games may help thin the technical interface between surgeons and screen-mediated applications, such as laparoscopic surgery," the authors conclude. "Video games may be a practical teaching tool to help train surgeons."


Video games may improve your memory:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130418094751.htm
In a study published in the journal Psychological Research, Dr. Lorenza Colzato and her fellow researchers compared, on a task related to working memory, people who played at least five hours weekly with people who never played video games...The researchers found that gamers outperformed non-gamers. They suggest that video game experience trains your brain to become more flexible in the updating and monitoring of new information enhancing the memory capacity of the gamers.

Video games will make you immortal....oh wait, no sorry, they will make you slow mental decay. Which means, compared to your old coger friends, you will SEEM immortal...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130501192918.htm
elderly people who played just ten hours of a game priming their mental processing speed and skills delayed declines by as many as seven years in a range of cognitive skills.

Studies show loss of executive function occurs as people reach middle age; other studies say our cognitive decline begins as soon as 28 years of age. Either way, our mental capacities do diminish, and medical and public health experts are keen to understand why in an effort to stem the inexorable tide as much as possible.

The groups that played the game at least 10 hours, either at home or in a lab at the university, gained at least three years of cognitive improvement when tested after one year, according to a formula developed by the researchers. A group that got four additional hours of training with the game did even better, improving their cognitive abilities by four years, according to the study.
"We not only prevented the decline; we actually sped them up," Wolinsky says.

Mind you, the game they played seemed bat-shit boring:
a video game called "Road Tour." Briefly, the game revolves around identifying a type of vehicle (displayed fleetingly on a license plate) and then reidentifying the vehicle type and matching it with a road sign displayed from a circular array of possibilities, all but one of them false icons. The player must succeed at least three out of every four tries to advance to the next level, which speeds up the vehicle identification and adds more distractions, up to 47 in all.