1-Upsmanship in the OR

Surgeons looking to hone your hand/eye skills playing video
games, choose your poison and grab the joystick.
Fastest finger first

By Peter Woodford

Perhaps you read about the Beth Israel Medical Center's recent study which links playing video games to making 37% fewer mistakes in surgery. Perhaps you were intrigued by the study's revelation that gaming surgeons work 27% faster than their colleagues who eschew the console. Maybe you're even ready to give your thumbs a workout. But if you're a novice, you're going to need some guidance. NRM's vid kid guru is at your service.

HIPPOCRATIC BLUES ? WHAT TO AVOID
The first thing a budding gaming doc will be confronted with is the abundance of violent video games. As a doctor you'll want to avoid games where killing and maiming are the order of the day. This is not as easy as one might think. Sure you could safely guess True Crime: Streets of LA or Manhunt are no-go's, but what about Xtreme Beach Volleyball ? a game where volleyball is a mere sideshow to bloody catfights.

A blanket no-no must be given to role-playing games (RPGs), the digital heirs to those many-sided dice games like Dungeons and Dragons that your buddies who never finished med school used to play. RPGs are nearly useless for honing one's cutting skills as they stress strategy over speed. What's worse, they tend to take hours to play. The popular Final Fantasy series of games typify the RPG genre. Avoid at all costs.

TH REAL MCCOY
Microsurgeon, a little known 1982 offering by a small company called Imagic, is once again available for PC and Mac as part of a bundle of games called "Intellivision Rocks." It really stands alone in being a game where you actually perform surgery.

While graphically primitive, Microsurgeon is still a great choice for gaming docs. You control a robot probe travelling through the body of a patient, destroying tumours, clearing blood clots, and my personal favourite, blasting tar from a smoker's nasty lungs. It combines realism (the villains of the game are misguided white blood cells) and fantasy (instead of points you earn a "doctor's bill" which easily adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars). The game is not usually found in stores but can be ordered at http://www.intellivisionlives.com/retrotopia/

SPORTS GAMES
The better baseball games are ideal hand/eye testers. The late Ted "Splendid Splinter" Williams once said, "Hitting a baseball is the single most difficult thing to do in sport" to which I'd retort: "Try hitting and controlling the base runners at the same time, as we video game ball players do every time we pick up the joystick, Splendid one." There are scores of decent baseball games for all major consoles and PCs but MVP Baseball by EA Sports is a standout. Mac users are limited to the fun-but-goofy Backyard Baseball by Humongous Entertainment.

Hockey games tend to boil down to callus-making contests requiring less coordination but great button pressing speed. Sega's ESPN NHL Hockey and EA Sports' NHL 2004 are both very good and available for multiple systems.

SHOOT 'EM UPS AND FLIGHT SIMULATORS
While technically violent, games in the shoot 'em up genre are great eye/hand reflex workouts for surgeons. They usually involve flying a spaceship while avoiding mines, debris, and fire from enemy ships. The venerable shoot 'em up has roots in earliest days of videogames with the quartet of Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender and Xevious defining the genre. Shoot 'em ups haven't really evolved much since 1985, so just about any title will do the trick.

Flight simulators, on the other hand, are a more sober and complicated affair. These games are only good training for a surgeon if you misuse them by flying like a maniac as close to the ground as possible. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 is one of the better games in this idiom.

SCROLLING MAZE AND PLATFORM ADVENTURES
The scrolling maze/platform game was arguably invented by Coleco with Smurfs but in the mid-1980s Nintendo's smash hit Super Mario Brothers redefined the genre. These games are ideal for surgery practice, as they require speed and precise movement jumping from platform to platform. Sega's Super Monkey Ball 2 is a very well-made recent addition to the field.

Additional reporting by Brent Woodford