A maternal nag familiar to the ears of many young gamers usually follows the lines of "you're wasting your life in front of a console." Browbeaten controller wielders rejoice—a new study from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) has proven the superior hand-eye coordination skills honed from hours of joystick-based gaming are the same talents required to master the world's most advanced robotic surgery tools.

The study sought to identify the developmental effect video games have on training future surgeons. "A new era has started," explained Sami Kilic, lead author of the study and associate professor and director of minimally invasive gynecology at UTMB. Kilic was inspired to conduct the study after seeing his son easily take control of a robotic surgery simulator at a medical convention. "Robotic surgery has been implemented in the medical field recently—most of the physicians were not trained for it. We had to come up with an idea of how to train our trainers."

A group of physicians studying at UTMB—a world leader in robotic surgery—was put up against US high school and college students in a series of robotic surgery simulation tests. The study measured participants on 20 different skills, including how steady their grasping abilities were when performing surgical tasks such as passing a needle or lifting surgical instruments. There were 32 different teaching steps required to operate the robotic surgery simulator—a training tool with dual hand-operated controllers. Real-time surgical movements are displayed on its video monitor.

The surgical skills of the high school students (who played video games an average of two hours a day) and the college students (some of whom spent four hours a day gaming) were found to be equal to the UTMB physicians—and in some cases, even exceeded the skills of the residents. The UTMB physicians were able to save face when the same test groups were asked to perform non-robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery, the physicians unsurprisingly coming out on top.

"Most physicians in practice today never learned robotic surgery in medical school," said Kilic. "However, as we see students with enhanced visual-spatial experience and hand-eye coordination that are a result of the technologically-savvy world they are immersed in, we should rethink how best to teach this generation."

The study noted the additional two hours the college students spent gaming when compared with the high school students didn't seem to provide them with any additional advantage when using the robotic surgery simulator. This led Kilic to observe that two hours might be the optimal time spent at the controls of the robot simulator. While young gamers might now rightfully claim that time spent at the controller is building useful (robotic surgery related) skills, the argument runs dry beyond the two-hour mark.

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.