A SkillCraft project has been launched using 3,500 StarCraft II replay files to determine how humans respond to several dynamic problems and variables simultaneously. RTS games like StarCraft II can seriously tax a players cogitative functions, with high level players performing 5 to 6 actions per second.
“I can’t think of a cognitive process that’s not involved in StarCraft,” said Mark Blair, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University and project lead. “It’s working memory. It’s decision making. It involves very precise motor skills. Everything is important and everything needs to work together.”
“From the perspective of the cognitive motor system, StarCraft is the most interesting thing you could do online,” Blair said. “What we’ve got is a satellite view of expertise that no one was able to get before. We have hundreds of players at the basic levels, then hundreds more at level slightly better, and so on, in 8 different categories of players.”
Source: Scientific American
