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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."
You've got to be able to see well to pwn enemies with headshots and get first post!
Ok, so playing violent video games makes you a serial killer, and improves your eyesight thus making you superhuman?
Just wait until they add laser beams on top of gamers heads!!!
We are effing doomed!
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?
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?!"
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.
Where are are you correlation != causation people? This has nothing to do with the violence. Go mod Sims 2 so that you can grow a serial murder/rapist, and I bet you won't improve your vision. This title could be misleading.
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.
Someone who's played counterstrike a lot is physically conditioned to react as soon as possible to movement (counter terrorists coming around a corner).
Is it also news that someone who runs a lot may be really good at running ?
...some interesting results were generated when the group that had been playing "Unreal Tournament 2004" and "Call of Duty 2" then started playing "The Sims 2". Remarked one researcher, "the carnage was truely remarkable".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Pfft forget video games, my parents raised me in a cave from the age of 5 to improve my vision in preparation for the inevitable apocalypse. No outside light whatsoever.
We upgraded the cave 3 years ago for broadband, had to get a box for the router because the blinking lights burned my sisters eyes.
What about the other direction? A lot of these people you are complaining about may never have had any of these skills, and it's only through violent games that they have learned the logic of tactics, teamwork, command and control. Also, anybody that has learned tactics and teamwork is halfway to learning other social skills. Social skills are nothing more than tactics necessary to navigating the minefield of human interaction.
Not only that, but you contradict yourself. You say "they dull your sense of logic and reason", and then talk about "the inexorable logic of tactic, teamwork, command and control" being a central part of those people's language, all of which require logic and reason.
I think you need to go back and re-think your argument, and be more precise in your language.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Shhh. Silence. All right thinking people know that you can only learn teamwork from real-world violence and violence simulations. Go team!
According to other studies, violent games make people violent.
Why believe this study and not the others?
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.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
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.
Do they improve peripheral vision? Just sayin'..
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I can see all the Grues now.
Task Mangler
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.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Clearly, this works because you're selling your eternal soul to satan by ritualistic virtual murder in return for slightly better eye sight!
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
"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.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)