It might be an argument you have with your parents frequently. Or you might just wonder in the back of your mind whether all this time online playing cooking games can be good for you. Is building a burger preparing your for a future career in food service? You certainly hope not - but there are surprising benefits to playing cooking games.

Hand-Eye Coordination What do surgeons, pilots and baseball players all have in common? Superb hand-eye coordination. When you play repetitions of a game that requires small movements with profound results, you are building up your hand-eye coordination which you will definitely need in the future.

Even if you don't have a future in rocket science or surgery, you can still benefit from more precise hand-eye coordination. It's rare you find a person who loves to miss the ball every time it's thrown at him or simply enjoys spilling food all over himself when he tries to eat. Use cooking games to better your overall coordination.

Skill and Strategy Actual research has shown that video and computer games including cooking games are beneficial to building skill centers in your brain. If you force your brain to work quickly and process information, pictures and movement in order to keep advancing in a game, that training is essentially building up a portion of your brain which will stay sharp no matter what you're doing.

Games of strategy also develop strategically centers helping you to see patterns, plots and rationality in all manners of things - from pizza dough to calculus.

Fundamental Knowledge You might not want to be the master chef of the local Golden Arches, but that doesn't mean practicing burger making or pizza decorating isn't good for you. Learning to cook can be as simple as playing cooking games. Unless you have a very advanced game, you won't be learning to make foie gras, but a basic sandwich, burger, pizza, salad, cake and steak will certainly keep you alive if you find yourself in need of sustenance.

You might also find that learning to make the basics does indeed give you a foundation for more complicated recipes down the road. Knowledge on any subject is valuable as you never know when you'll need to know the right allotment of pickles to onions or how to convert a cup of milk into tablespoons.

Practice Finally, it's astonishingly likely that you'll be facing a nametag and hairnet someday. I'm not saying your dream of rock and roll musician won't work out, but most teens find their first job in food service. That means all those burgers you've been building online in cooking games might just have been practice for the real thing.

Just think. Because you spend hours working your way through five levels of burger making, you'll be employee of the month the first time you get an opportunity to build a real PIZZA. It's a good thing all that practice is going to pay off!