I remember as a kid, going to the dentist and being asked if I would like to wear headphones with kids stories being blasted to my very nervous ears. Today, we can rely on video games to distract kids away from things that frighten as well as hurt them.

The folks in West Virginia are on a role. First they adopt DDR for use in their public schools to help fight the childhood obesity epidemic, and now a new study from West Virginia’s Wheeling Jesuit University has found that certain video games can help people deal with pain.

Quick, someone notify EA Sports’ marketing team!
In the study Effects of Video Game Play Types on Pain Threshold and Tolerance the university’s Dr. Bryan Raudenbush and several undergraduate students investigated whether certain video game genres were better than others for distracting patients from painful stimuli. The result? Sports games and fighting games were able to “produce a dramatic level of pain distraction.” [Read the rest]

[tags]video games,west virginia,ddr,childhood obesity,pain distraction[/tags]