Study: Action games improve vision

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.