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Violent Video Games Can Improve Vision
Ponca City, We love you writes "According to a new study, people who played fighting games on their PCs became up to a 58 percent better at perceiving fine contrast differences, an important aspect of eyesight. The breakthrough is significant because it was previously thought that the ability to notice even very small changes in shades of grey against a uniform background could not be improved. Contrast sensitivity is the primary limiting factor in how well one sees. Volunteers in the study played intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks with either Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, and the results were compared with another group who played The Sims 2, which is richly visual but does not require as much hand-eye coordination. The improvements lasted for months after game play stopped. The new finding suggests action video games could be used as training devices as a useful complement to eye-correction techniques, since gaming may teach the brain's visual cortex to make better use of the information it receives."
Based upon this definition and explanation of contrast sensitivity, it may be the horrible lighting that many FPS maps have (I'm looking at you, OAs) that make games particularly valuable for increasing contrast sensitivity. However, it seems that if that were true, the explanation given in the summary for why the Sims isn't as valuable as Call of Duty could be incomplete.
I would love to see a comparison of different maps within the same game -- one with excellent lighting and no dark corners, and the other with shoddy lighting. I'm willing to bet that there will be a measurable difference.
Also, does anyone have any idea why contrast sensitivity would be a particularly important thing to improve?
Being able to see better in the dark? Less important than being able to focus but still important. When it's very dimly lit, would you rather have that little more contrast ratio or be eaten by a grue?
Of course I only read the summary, but why use the word violent? It sounds like this has nothing to do with violence but fast paced complex spatial reaction.
Because /. has an ax to grind with people who make dubious claims about the harm caused by violence in video games. What better way to combat them than to implicitly make dubious claims about the benefits of violence in video games? (Though, to be fair, TFA is actually titled "Playing violent computer games 'can improve vision'".)
then you realize they are trying to look at 1280x1024 on a 17" monitor.
That surely only matters if you're too retarded to enlarge your font size (which you can do even on windoze nowadays, though by default windoze does some dumb shit compared to linux/x11 or macosx, you have to reconfigure it). You should be running at the highest resolution * refresh rate combo your system allows, but just making the fonts bigger. Because an outline font engine will give crisper, clearer fonts at a higher resolution (higher DPI), since there are simply more pixels per letter to work with with for a given "real" (physical world) font size.
So if you're measuring your font sizes in pixels instead of natural units like points or mm, you're probably Doing It Wrong.
Those are first person shooters, not fighting games. Fighting games are things like Street Fighter or Soul Calibur, not to be confused with beat 'em ups which are things like Double Dragon or Final Fight.
Mada mada dane.
Objective measurements.
Everyone knows the laser beams go on top of sharks, not gamer's heads! Get with the program!
Also, does anyone have any idea why contrast sensitivity would be a particularly important thing to improve?
Among other things contrast is an essential part of edge detection which in turn is a key part of how we see shapes. Better contract detection helps with seeing in low light conditions or where the subject is visually obscured. It wouldn't help so much when the subject is just optically smaller (e.g. physically farther away).
I'm no expert but I suspect a lot of our visual system is based on contrast because there are so many variables that would really mess with the absolute colors. For example, varying lighting or the changes in pupil dilation and retinal sensitivity that happen automatically.
The masturbation leading to blindness, is probably a superstition sort of thing, some guy had an orgasm, temporarily making his vision obscured, and he just took it way too far..."luckely I stopped, or it would have been permanent"
Or some guy was looking for some lesbian softcore and came across something like goatse, and in order to protect him (as brains are wont to do during traumatic experiences) his brain shut down the visual centers. I would correlate that with wanking if you were doing your bidness to an image gallery and halfway through that happened.
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
Samuel-Auguste Tissot (1728-1797) is the source of the myth that masturbation leads to vision loss. He attributed a host of health problems to masturbation in his 1760 book L'Onanisme, based on the belief (which persisted into the Victorian era) that semen is a vital fluid, and the loss of it weakens a man.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan