Don’t watch TV, I was always told when I was wee, you’ll get square eyes. Actually, if anything, you’ll get eyes that can see better in the dark. That’s the news that’s emerged from a study on the effect that shooters and other action games can have on your eyesight, and the news is good.
Read all about it over the jump!
The study, published in Nature Neuroscience (never heard of it), revealed that playing fast-paced games like Call of Duty improved your “contrast sensitivity”, the ability with which you can distinguish colours from each other such as very subtle changes in a shade of grey.
Apparently contrast sensitivity is something you could only sort with some glasses or overly-expensive laser eye surgery. That is, of course, until we brought some games into the equation.
The folks who conducted the study sat some (non-action playing) gamers down for 50 hours; one group played a “visually rich” game lacking in excitement, and the other got down and dirty with shooters.
The result? The gamers who sat down with the shooters found their contrast sensitivity improved by 43 percent (probably about the same as eating a couple of carrots or something; I’m no scientist but that sounds nice and technical). The non-action gamers weren’t even a teeny bit better at distinguishing subtle changes in colours.
The change wasn’t even short-term; according to the study the improvement in contrast sensitivity lasted months and could last for over a year. Result!
Finally, we have something to be pleased with when it comes to the bland colour schemes generally favoured by so many FPS games like CoD4 and Left 4 Dead. I have therefore come to the conclusion that more games should have really boring colour schemes; I’m thinking Modern Warfare 2 should be rendered entirely in grayscale.
Will this ever be reported in the mainstream media? Probably not. Annoyingly, games – especially shooters – still remain a scapegoat for [shooting incident here] and nowt more. But that’s a debate for another time. At least, for now, if somebody complains that you’re playing CoD4 too much you can just tell them you’re working on seeing in the dark.
Source: Kotaku
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Wow, that’s amazing. My wife always tells me that its unfair I can see in the dark much better than she can, but I always attributed it to my lighter-colored eyes. The trade-off is that I have to wear sunglasses almost constantly, even on a cloudy day.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing, Yamster.
I actually just saw this like 10 minutes ago on the news. Of course they basically just said your first paragraph and moved on.
Hooray for Gears of War, and all the next gen colourless games that it inspired!
so that means Halo 3 dosen’t do it seeing as it’s brightly coloured meaning…..
BUNGIE DON’T WANT US TO SEE IN THE DARK! The swines! They’ve proberly known this for years now.
ITS COLORS!!