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."

Comments

Net Benefit?

[nathan.fulton]

I have a serious problem with eye strain, even when using nice monitors. I'm not alone. Because of this, I have a hard time believing that there is a net benefit in terms of overall eye health. Doing visual-based puzzles or learning how to paint are probably far healthier ways to increase perception of fine contrast differences.

Also, does anyone have any idea why contrast sensitivity would be a particularly important thing to improve?

Re:Net Benefit?

[Anonymusing]

In a visual-based puzzle game like Bejeweled (or any of the zillion color-matching games out there) all the game pieces are already high contrast. You see a field of 5 or 6 different colored pieces, not thousands or millions of colors, like most modern FPS games provide. Hence, the game doesn't train you to look for the small contrast differences.

So... you're saying they should make a super-low-contrast version of Bejeweled and it might have a related effect on vision?

I have experienced negative effects from such

[erroneus]

I find that when playing 3D FPS games for too long, my eyes start having a hard time with depth. When playing the game, the focus point is the same for everything. But when I look out into the room or the real world, there is a kind of shock and discomfort until I get adjusted again.

But they are probably right about the ability to maintain good eyesight. The fact is, we strain to see all the fine details of things in the distance ... to shoot it or not be killed by it. Eyes are muscles like others and if you don't use them, they get weaker. My laptop display is 1920x1200 and I wish it were finer... most people are like "you can read that?!"

Re:I have experienced negative effects from such

[Alcoholist]

I find that long amounts of FPS gaming starts to make me dizzy.

I used to play Starcraft for 8 hours at a time, no problem at all, but after two hours of playing something like MOH or Counterstrike I start to feel a little off and have to take a break for a bit.

I don't get motion sickness. My screen resolutions are pretty high and the refresh rates are 80Hz+, so I'm thinking it is my eyes. I'm myopic and wear glasses to correct it, and I've always wondered if this has something to do with it.

Pffft, try Quake3!

[Cthefuture]

Those games are pretty slow. UT2004 is kinda fast but still not up the twitch action in Quake 3 (or Quake 2 for that matter).

Back when I played those games my vision and reflexes were enhanced very noticeably. While driving especially I noticed that I could see even the tiniest thing moving or various things that caught be attention. My favorite trick was to grab flies straight out of the air with my hands. It always impressed people. When I stopped playing as much I pretty much lost that ability completely after a few months.

FPS in real world.

[w0mprat]

Staring at a flat screen does little for depth perception which is seriously underutilized in such a situation. Although interestingly, ones ability to use parallax to calculate spatial depth, rather than stereo vision, must be massively enhanced, since this is the other way we mentally process our spatial environment.

So yes, a FPS gamer may do a lot better with depth perception if he/she suddenly lost one eye.

To give an example, my father was perplexed by the extremely convex side mirrors on his new truck (yes the "objects in this mirror are closer than they appear" kind), which give a great wide field of view yet he would complain the fish eye perspective meant he couldn't judge depth correctly (and this was his excuse for almost backing into things).

So I climb into the cab and start backing the thing up like I've done it for years.

He pointed out my childhood and adolescence saturated with 2D screens helped me have zero problems, where he was very much an outdoorsman from a young age.

Re:It's Evolution, my dear Watson

[gadget junkie]

"See better or die. Simple."

[...]

To get an 'evolutionary' effect out of video gaming you'd have to look at self-selection, I think. In other words, a case where it's not that playing a game makes your eyesight better, but just that normally-sighted people drop out en masse and the only players left are super-sighted freaks.

What's happening here seems to be more interesting than just selection.

Nature is a tightfisted lady. natural selection gives a set of potential abilities, but if you do not use them, they fall by the wayside. Think about how astronauts bodies lose mass and bone density in space.
the human race has been shaped by its tribal structure; the ability to discriminate visual info for hunting, while handy for everyone, kept honed probably only in the individuals who specialized in hunting. nature discarded the immediate availability in other members of the tribe.