VIDEO games have been blamed for the ills of the world. Parents worry that violent games make their children antisocial, violent, shallow, and obese, and are breeding a generation that cannot sustain their concentration. Screen time is routinely limited, much to the chagrin of their keyboard-pounding offspring.

Help is at hand in the form of a new study from cognitive scientists at the University of Rochester. As we report in this week's issue of The Economist, this suggests that video gamers make faster and more accurate decisions. The work is published in Current Biology. What was particularly interesting was that the faster reaction times of the video gamers could be acquired by non-video gamers in 50 hours of training over a few weeks. But for the benefits to accrue, they had to play a particular sort of game.