Teens work on their hand-eye coordination playing Dragon's Lair - circa 1983. Photo credit: The Tribune News

I’m from the earliest generation of gamers.  The first, really.   I played table-top Pong when I was 7 or 8, even though it was only available in bars (parenting was more relaxed then.)  I played Missile Command, despite the fact that it was kinda boring.   Robotron was an obsession.  I played Zork, with it’s command line interface, on my Apple IIc -  drawing my own map.   In college I got sucked into Myst, and Super Mario Bro.’s and there were dozens of others along the way.   And then, like nearly everybody else of my generation, I quit playing video games.   Why? In a word, guilt.  Games were considered indulgent, addictive, violent -something for man-boys.  Certainly not suitable terrain for serious people.  But throughout this entire period of moralization against gaming there was always a bit of pop cognitive science floating around in defense of video games.   Games build hand-eye coordination, people would say -everybody would say.  After a 7 hour stint on the couch I’d think, well, at least I’ve got that going for me.  In graduate school I studied cognitive science and learning theories and even video games- and never once encountered the phrase hand-eye coordination.   So I set myself to wondering – what is it? is it important? and does playing video games improve it?

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