Violent Video Games Can Improve Vision 205
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."
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.
Re:Have to see (Score:5, Funny)
"
You dropped this. I though you would want it back.
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.
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t
Hey dude, you dropped this while helping that other guy. I thought you might still want it.
You spent a long time spell checking that post, didn't you?
Re:Have to see (Score:5, Funny)
You wouldn't happen to have seen my car keys by any chance, would you?
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You wouldn't happen to have seen my car keys by any chance, would you?
I wish I could help you, but I don't play violent video games so much so my eyes are pretty bad :-(
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Now, if I could just find out why toddlers don't do what they're told, I think we'd solve the final frontier. But let's be real, this is slashdot, not ivillage.
Who needs iVillage. Speaking from recent experience: Toddlers don't do what they're told because either they weren't listening or you weren't telling them something they wanted to do.
The solution is simple and goes something like:
"Billy... Hey Billy...Billy! BILLY! Now eat all the cookies and spill the milk everywhere. Good Boy! That's it!".
Follow that model and you'll have no trouble.
My only problem is figuring out how to reply to this kind of post by hitting the "Parent" button.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hmm, on a somewhat related note, what about people who analyze images and video for a living (I was thinking low quality porn, people desperately looking for "penetration")... but spy satellites, robbery footage, etc...
As far as sex being proven "good" it already has, there are numerous studies done on people who have frequent sex, and not, and the length of their lives etc, however that could just be because of the cardio (which should be good for your eyes too), rather than the actual act itself, but horm
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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.
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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.
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Or, he had a particularly earth-shattering orgasm, and coupled with any other health problems, the spike in blood pressure blew out his retinas...
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.
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I believe there's pretty strong evidence that sex is correlated to creating life.
I'll leave it up to your judgement if that's beneficial or not.
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"See better or die. Simple."
Doesn't a few hundred generations of mating, reproduction and death have to occur in the middle there?
Otherwise Darwin's answer to 'hey you have a new evolutionary pressure in your environment' is generally not 'YOU EVOLVE! YAY!' but '... good try, but the rules have now changed, you all die, sucks to be you'.
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 eyesi
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"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!
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These are gaming lawyers.
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...
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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
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You have a valid point, but spelling Windows as windoze makes people not take you seriously...
Well, windows marketers certainly. Nobody else gives a shit.
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I have to say I love my new 24" LCD though... makes me sad that I paid $600 each for two 17" a few years back (still going strong, my wife uses 'em now) and it was $300-odd for a 24" 1920x1080 screen...
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Contrast sensitivity is pretty important. Ask anyone trying to play Doom 3...
Contrast sensitivity is futile. Put down your input devices. You will be head-shot.
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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.
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?
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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.
Mitigate, but not solve? (Score:2)
I think they mean that video-games help you to get better results from what you see using some "software algorithms" (i.e. using interpolation or extrapolation, the brain can make more accurate predictions about something).
The problem is that while the brain can compensate "bad input" with software post-processing, it cannot outperform another human, who has perfect vision (thus their eyes generate "good input" for the brain - so there is no need for post-processing).
It worked for me! (Score:2)
I used to need glasses as a kid, now, 15 years of online gaming later I've had 20/20 vision for over 8 years.
Of course, that doesn't prove anything, my eyes could've just naturally corrected themselves. Either way though one thing is for sure, staring at a monitor or TV didn't make my eyesite worse like my grandparents always told me it would ;)
Honestly though I wonder if my eyes ever were bad. When I was a kid and told I needed glasses my eye checks were always at commercial opticians. Eye tests over the l
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?!"
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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.
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3D (Score:2)
I wonder if this is why I can't see 3D effects in movies, TV shows, etc. because I played too many 3D games with my bare eyes. I recalled I used to be able to see them when I was little (e.g., Captain EO at Disneyland) and before 3D games existed. I watched those three SuperBowl TV ads, Chuck 3D episode, and recently saw two 3D shows at Disneyland's California Adventure. Is anyone noticing this too or just me? :( I also can't see those stereograms and those never worked.
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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.
That happens to me after reading a book for a while. If I look up after a few hours of reading, the world looks very blurry. I've never good explanation why (other than wild conjecture).
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Your lens muscles are tired after being tensioned so long.
Hold up a 5lb weight for about 2 hours, and feel the fatigue in those muscles... it's the same thing, realy.
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I find that when playing 3D FPS games for too long, my eyes start having a hard time with depth.
Go play paintball.
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Dell Latitude D830 here... 15.4" also... yet at 1920x1200. The display is the most important thing. And if there is even a single dead pixel, it is useless to me.
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I didn't even know you could get 15.4" displays that ran at such a res.
I'd prefer not to have to deal with the eyestrain though. Unless everything has been scaled up to a reasonable size of course, otherwise I can't help but thing you're doing massive long term eye damage that you aren't aware of just yet. :)
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I'm 40 years old. If it would cause damage, I think it would have happened by now.
Long ago, people used to say "don't sit so close to the TV!!" I was always inches from the TV. People also used to believe that when you get old, your teeth fall out...
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Your computer usage has probably caused myopia. Your age is probably working to hide the myopia. As we get older the eye shrinks and counteracts the 'bulging eyeball' shape of a myopic eyeball.
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'".)
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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
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I suppose you could
Because the experiment used violent games (Score:2)
corr != caus (Score:4, Insightful)
Jack Thompson! (Score:2)
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Uhm...
This study has good controls, so it's more than just 'correlation'.
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The paper uses the term 'fast-paced game'. Just saying...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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this is a kdawson story and on slashdot no one ever rtfa. With that in mind has anyone tried clicking the links? they could be to www.picklefarm.com and he could just be making this all up.
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)
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You mean, you'd rather not play at all, then get paid to play Sims?
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Sadly, reading comprehension might be a requisite skill for volunteers in such a study:
"Volunteers in the study played intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks."
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?
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Objective measurements.
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Because this study has decent controls.
Most of the "violent games make people violent" type studies have no controls, or at the very most, poorly planned and implemented controls.
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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.
Helped me in Entomology class. (Score:2)
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My experience after Quake 3 makes me wonder about this "study". Seeing that most games like Quake and such seem to be rendered in full spread of the "dirt" spectrum I wonder how it turned out to be grays? I guess I am a dolt. Shouldn't any color with fine gradients work?
I think one area where FPS games excel versus games like the Sims and Strategy games is lighting. I remember the first time I played Unreal (original) and the flicker lights and even first "staged encounter" were shockers. I spent a lot
Not fighting games (Score:5, Informative)
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You can't always assume that the guys writing the summaries or the articles are gamers/programmers/(experts in any field other than their own). I mean they look for buzz words, not more accurate words.
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What about side-scrollers? (Score:4, Funny)
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You joke, but it actually sounds very plausible. You should suggest this idea to the researchers.
Of course the major impact of this article has nothing to do with games so much as that it is overthrowing the prevailing scientific belief that you can't improve your contrast perception. Whether a side-scroller experiment is scientifically interesting likely also depends on what work has already been done on improving peripheral vision. But it doesn't hurt to ask.
It helped me (Score:5, Funny)
I can see all the Grues now.
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You missed one!
Sincerely,
The Grue Currently Behind You.
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!
Touhou Project (Score:2)
I wonder what effect Touhou Project would have on your contrast sensibility...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHmzO2RI1fs [youtube.com]
Wow. (Score:2)
The real deal (Score:2)
If you don't like the dumbed down version, the actual article can be found here [nature.com]. It is quite readable.
And it is a crappy summary - as usual. Violence is not even mentioned in the article.
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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]
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people talking about politics are reduced to chimpanzee-like sqwakings about their latest candidates, screaming from the tree tops of anywhere, that they have defeated the other party, killed their children, and impregnated their women monkeys.
You had me going until you mentioned politics.
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.
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