Surgery by joystick?

Those thousands of hours spent playing video games might be worth something after all. According to Dr. James Clarence Rosser Jr., chief of minimally invasive surgery at New York's Beth Israel Medical Center, the complex manual dexterity required to be a stellar video gamer and a laparoscopic surgeon are strikingly similar. In fact, Rosser is using video games to help train a new generation of surgeons. Laparoscopic surgery uses a tiny video camera to help the surgeon guide long, slender instruments inserted into patients through small incisions. Rosser says it's like "tying your shoelaces with three-foot-long chopsticks" while watching it all on television. He began acquiring his skills while growing up in Rome, Miss., where he spent so much time playing coin-operated video games that his father told him, "You are going to be worthless!" Now a leader in his field, Rosser works with Hollywood visual-effects experts to produce new surgical-training devices. "We're going all over the world training people, trying to give them the skills it seems like I was able to nurture with video games," he says. "I have a video-game course I invented trying to trick these doctors into learning new tricks."