Study: Action games improve vision

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. → Learn More

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This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who ever sniped in Tribes, or got good enough at Street Fighter II to see kicks coming after a single frame. But to those who think there are no benefits to playing games, one study suggests at least one: improved eyesight.

Now, we’re not talking about going from 20/80 to 20/40 or something, but the study showed that people who had played 50 hours of action games (as opposed to casual games) over the course of 9 weeks showed increased contrast and luminosity detection. Speaking as someone who could (though not at first) bulls-eye a light armor flying through the air from across the map on Broadside, I think that’s the least of our abilities.

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