I got my paper back.

So, as you can tell by the title, I got my paper back. This is the paper I posted a while ago: An Essay on Attention in Video Games. Yeah, that thing.

So it seems that my professor agrees with me about the findings and found the piece pretty solid overall. In case you don't want to read that whole thing, the point was that people who play video games develop attentional resources quick and to a further extent than non-video game players.

WoW was actually the source of the idea for me, because, when I'm raiding, there are many things that I have to attend to. Primarily, is my threat. I don't have to attend on just one target, but in some situations up to forty. Although the Onyxia whelps aren't that dangerous. Anyways, I have to pay attention to my health, the targets health, positioning, mana, the healers mana, the number of healers up and where they are, as well as all of the cool downs on all of my abilities.

If I was raid leading I would also have to pay attention to where everyone else is and who is still alive. Additionally I would have to coordinate special abilities, AoD, Heroism etc....

Healers have to keep track of everyone's health, and often they are tasked to watch the debuffs as well. They are additionally concerned with their mana, and their position relative to the DPS, tanks and the other healers.

What this brings me to is that simplifying these tasks is beneficial to our immediate gameplay, but does make us a 'weaker' person. I will admit that I am one of those 'weaker' types. I use addons to simplify everything. I have DBM and Omen to help me with positioning and threat and I use IceHUD and SpartanUI to centralize the important information about me and my target. I additionally use grid to keep track of the raids current composition and overall wellbeing.

The next time you consider downloading an addon, consider the above, and consider if you want to be a mutant, superior to the majority of the rest of your race.