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Violent Video Games Can Improve Vision
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Mar 29, 2009 07:35 PM
from the look-sharp dept.
from the look-sharp dept.
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."
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Have to see (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Have to see (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, but so would any game thats fast paced, requires acute visual discrepancies, and something is at risk, or is rewarded for the ability.
But, in classic KDawson style... "Violent" games... may as well say "Stabbing people to death improves hand-eye coordination", when the articles starts with "Video games with lots of action, such as the shoot-'em-up variety, can improve your vision, a new study finds.
Parent
Re:Have to see (Score:5, Funny)
"
You dropped this. I though you would want it back.
Parent
Re:Have to see (Score:5, Funny)
t
Hey dude, you dropped this while helping that other guy. I thought you might still want it.
Parent
Re:Have to see (Score:5, Funny)
You wouldn't happen to have seen my car keys by any chance, would you?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, but so would any game thats fast paced, requires acute visual discrepancies, and something is at risk, or is rewarded for the ability.
He's talking about Doom 3. All you can see there is shades of dark brown and red. Also, the violence helps with the fear factor, which means you'll pay attention to the subtle differences more.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the older games are probably better finding just two tiny bits and putting your target on them has to be harder than the more modern engines with better scalings.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Clearly, there should be studies done on video games that don't deal with violence at all, but only deal with sex. I want a study done to determine if viewing pornography can improve visual acuity. Sex and sexuality have often been related to blindness (amongst other nasties); it would be good if it can be scientifically demonstrated that sex can actually be beneficial.
Re:Have to see (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly, there should be studies done on video games that don't deal with violence at all, but only deal with sex. I want a study done to determine if viewing pornography can improve visual acuity. Sex and sexuality have often been related to blindness (amongst other nasties); it would be good if it can be scientifically demonstrated that sex can actually be beneficial.
Masturbation and watching pornography can improve your hearing. Listening for any other noises, like the creaking of the door to your room, or footsteps on the floor is a great exercise.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"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. [nasa.gov]
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.
Acecoolco (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:Acecoolco (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone knows the laser beams go on top of sharks, not gamer's heads! Get with the program!
Parent
Net Benefit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, does anyone have any idea why contrast sensitivity would be a particularly important thing to improve?
Re:Net Benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrast sensitivity is pretty important. Ask any Vietnam vet. Ask any microbiologist. Ask anyone trying to play Doom 3...
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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 w
Re:Net Benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The reason why FPS games help your contrast perception is rather simple. If you want to stay alive, you have to be able to see the guy moving around that is 3 shades of gray lighter than the dark corner he's hiding in. Because of the required reaction time to be successful (aka shooting him before he shoots you) the game trains you to closely watch for these contrast differences.
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. Painting may provide some benefit, but painting is a much slower process than fragging some n00b who's coming around the corner with a rocket launcher. You have as much time as you want to figure out if one color is different than the other. Taking an extra few miliseconds deciding on your next brush stroke for your still life painting isn't going to result in a grenade being lodged in your sphincter.
Parent
Re:Net Benefit? (Score:4, Interesting)
So... you're saying they should make a super-low-contrast version of Bejeweled and it might have a related effect on vision?
Parent
Re:Net Benefit? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
I have experienced negative effects from such (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Violent? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Violent? (Score:5, Informative)
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'".)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well actually there kind of is a legitimate reason to that. Games such as the Call of Duty series involve enemies wearing camouflage, and sometimes they blend in damn well with what you see them against, mostly when they're in the dark or mostly hidden. If you've ever played a lot of Call of Duty online, you must have realised that careful observation is absolutely crucial in the survival of your player. The sniper in ghillies on the facing hill, the camper in the window, the guy in the shady corner, if you
corr != caus (Score:4, Insightful)
Jack Thompson! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Uhm...
This study has good controls, so it's more than just 'correlation'.
same game, different maps? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
While I'm sure the lighting does have an effect, that's not the reason games such as The Sims wouldn't be as valuable. It's the level of immersion and the (virtual) struggle for survival in violent games that makes them valuable.
Now, get subtle clues into non-violent games and make the player really feel that failure matters, and then they might be more valuable.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Seems due to darker not more violent games (Score:2)
As I remember it, Sims tends to be more brightly colored, with a higher contrast among people and objects. UT and COD typically have people hiding in shadows, so you have to learn to pay attention to low-contrast details. This is a horrible conclusion and the authors should be shot.
Unless the authors actually made this conclusion and it's the summary that's wrong, not that that ever happens.
Not suprising (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it also news that someone who runs a lot may be really good at running ?
In a related study... (Score:5, Funny)
Where do i sign up? (Score:2)
Night Vision (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Welcome to 1983 (Score:2, Offtopic)
Intensive? (Score:2)
I'm not much of a video game player myself, but I rather suspect that most people who do play video games regularly, especially teenagers with lots of spare time, rack up more than fifty hours in nine weeks; that's about five and a half hours a week.
Other Studies (Score:4, Insightful)
According to other studies, violent games make people violent.
Why believe this study and not the others?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Objective measurements.
Pffft, try Quake3! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not fighting games (Score:5, Informative)
What about side-scrollers? (Score:4, Funny)
It helped me (Score:5, Funny)
I can see all the Grues now.
FPS in real world. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
CLEARLY (Score:3, Funny)
Clearly, this works because you're selling your eternal soul to satan by ritualistic virtual murder in return for slightly better eye sight!
Re: (Score:2)
go to any video game website, try to find some meaningful discussion there related to the bigger issues of life.
To find such a discussion, shouldn't you search in a place about the real world?
Also, http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=913782 [bethsoft.com]
Re:they also dull your sense of logic and reason (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)