You’ve just been in an accident; you are rushed to the hospital by ambulance. When you arrive, you are taken immediately into the emergency room where the doctor decides that you need surgery right away.
The nurses roll the gurney into the room to prepare you for surgery. You are nervous and not really sure what’s going on, but you are also confident in the doctors, knowing that they are skilled professionals that will make everything okay.
You are drugged and are slowly drifting off to sleep. The doctor lines up his first incision when under his breath you hear him say, “Oh yeah, I’m leet”. Of course, you are sure you are hearing things. The WoW player you are tends to think of gaming a lot anyways. You think nothing of it. It’s the drugs.
Hours have past and your surgery has just finished. You wake up to hear the nurse and surgeon talking about how they have managed to ‘complete the quest’. The quest to make an incision into your stomach and fix something; the quest that would decide whether you lived or died. Of course, you assume its just the drugs the nurse had given you have just gone to your head and once again your gaming mind was thinking of WoW. So you move on.
A couple of days later you are finally get out of bed. You head to the bathroom where you take a shower and for the first time see the surgical scar that was left on your stomach. The scar is in the shape of a question mark. You think back to the other night when the doctors were discussing the quest they had just completed… on YOU. A question mark, huh? Maybe it was a quest? Now, you aren’t so confident with the doctors who held your life in their hands, are you?
Honestly, I am really not sure how confident I would be with a surgeon who is an avid gamer. I know that what a person does during their private life shouldn’t really have an affect on how well they do their job, but for me I think it does. Being a WoW player, I know what it takes to play this game. I understand that you usually have to put in a lot of time and effort in order to play the game to it’s max potential. That’s why it kinda scares me.
Not every person who plays WoW plays it a lot. I know there are plenty of casual WoW players out there who only play when they have free time. I also know that there are some people out there who put WoW before a lot of things. Not that there is anything wrong with spending a lot of time on a game, especially a game that really never has an ending, but I think that I would want to have a surgeon who is very focused on doing surgery. I want a doctor who reads up about new medicine rather than arena strategy, you know?
Apparently, I am wrong.
Through the past few days I have been kinda struggling for things to blog about. The evil dwarf, Krystofar, directed my attention to a new study that has just been done. WoW Insider also wrote a little something about this too, but I thought I would talk about it today as well.
The American Psychological Association did a study of surgeons to try and determine how playing WoW and other video games affects the way they perform in the operating room. To my surprise, the doctors that did play video games had an overall better performance during the surgeries. This really got me thinking.
Now, do you think how wellthe surgeon plays WoW affects how well they can perform a surgery? I know some not-so-great WoW players out there and I KNOW I don’t want that kinda person performing a surgery on me. I mean, I don’t want the tank who rushes into the mob in Kara (no rushing into my surgery), the aggro-puller who isn’t paying attention to omen (needs to have full attention during my surgery), or the healer that’s never on time for the raid, operating on me (I want my surgery to be on schedule).
I guess I’ll have to take my chances with the next surgery I get, but I’ll be sure to check the Armory for them first…just to know how committed they actually are to the game, rather than to their sugery. In the end, I guess all that matters is that just before the operation the doctor doesn’t yell “Dr. LEEROY JENKIIIIIINS’.
/hug
Siarah
