Will playing games create a two-tier society?

Scientists say gamers are more visually intelligent. But what does that mean for the future of the net?

Playing the GameBoyHe's got it: have you? Photograph: Getty Images

In Discovery magazine, author, entrepreneur and sometime Guardian contributor Steven Johnson has an article called "Your Brain On Video Games", exploring the scientific discoveries being made about the effects of playing games.

A lot of it is a reworking of his excellent book Everything Bad Is Good For You, which takes a step-by-step journey through the arguments about games and other aspects of pop culture. But if you haven't read Everything Bad... you might enjoy dipping in.

For example, he takes the sorts of skills you can master in simulated environments - reasoning, puzzle solving, forward thinking - and asks whether they can really translate into real life.

The answer comes from a slew of recent studies, one of which began when then cognitive sciences research assistant and ardent gamer Shawn Green worked with University of Rochester cognitive sciences professor Daphne Bavelier on a project investigating visual perception in video game players.

On standard tests that measure attention span and information-processing time, Green found that gamers consistently outperformed nongamers. When Green tweaked the tests to make them challenging enough so the gamers wouldn't have perfect scores, the nongamers sometimes performed so poorly that their answers might as well have been random guesses.

The researchers addressed an admitted weakness of the study--that visually intelligent people were more likely to be attracted to video games in the first place--by immersing a group of nonplayers for a week in the World War II game Medal of Honor. They found that the group's skills on the standard visual tests improved as well.

Given the increasing interest in virtual worlds and near-game environments, it's not hard to imagine that some people will adapt much more quickly to a futurenet based around 3D - the kind of thing imagined by William Gibson's Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash.

But given the research mentioned, will we end up with a divided society? Imagine a future internet where games players have a massive advantage over ordinary users. Will we see a divide between the visually literate and those who just don't (or can't) get it?