Egol, Kenneth A., Ran Schwarzkopf, John Funge, Jeremy Gray, Christopher Chabris, Thomas E. Jerde, and Eric J. Strauss. 2017. “Can Video Game Dynamics Identify Orthopaedic Surgery Residents Who Will Succeed in Training?” International Journal of Medical Education 8 (January): 123–25. doi:10.5116/ijme.58e3.c236.
In “Can video game dynamics identify orthopaedic surgery residents who will succeed in training?,” the authors discuss the use of analysis of someone’s activity in a video game for predicting their success in orthopaedic surgery training. The article begins by explaining the need for a way to predict the successfulness of a resident before they are admitted into training, because the candidates who are most likely to succeed should be the ones admitted to the program. Currently, the process for screening applicants is mostly based on interviews and CV reviews, which are subjective, and can vary between institutions. Having a more consistent way to rank candidates would be extremely helpful in the decision-making process. This article proposes that video games could be the objective ranking mechanism that these post-graduate institutions are looking for.
The game this study used was Wasabi Waiter, and by analyzing different components of each candidate’s actions in the game, they were able to find correlations to psychological traits of those people. Being able to identify these traits can be helpful in two ways. First, it has been proposed that certain personality types are attracted to certain medical careers, and being able to identify someone’s personality type could predict whether they would be successful in a particular medical career. Second, psychological predispositions to burnout could also be identified before the resident started having problems, allowing for earlier intervention if problems started to arise.
This article proposes video games as an assessment tool in medical education, rather than an instructional one. This is not an approach I had considered, but makes a great deal of sense after reading the description given by the authors of this article. Video games, being computer applications, are easy to monitor for patterns in the user’s input, which makes them good for testing instinctual reactions. These sorts of reactions could make or break someone’s medical career, so being able to tell if someone has the correct reactions would be very helpful for ranking prospective candidates. This article was written primarily by people in the Orthopaedic surgery or psychology fields, but two of the authors are part of a corporation that produces aptitude-testing games, which may introduce a bias. However, this type of examination of games’ ability to examine residents’ future success would not be possible without professionals in the gaming field.
Medical Game Education 