Shoot ’em ups sharpen eyesight. Official!

Fetch your bi-focals and read that again if you like. A new study by New York State’s Rochester University shows that playing fast-paced videogame blasters can significantly improve ‘contrast sensitivity’ in eyesight. 

Contrast sensitivity is a medical term referring to the eye’s ability to distinguish between subtle shades of grey against a plain background. It’s crucial for such everyday activities as reading or night driving and, as some of you may have noticed, it gets worse with age. Moreover, as study leader Professor Daphne Bavelier notes:

“This is not a skill that people were supposed to get better at by training. It was something that we corrected for at the level of the optics of the eye – to get better contrast detection you get glasses or laser surgery.”

However, when Bavelier and her team undertook an experiment comparing a group of hardcore action gamers against videogame fans of a similar age who preferred less high-octane fare, they found that former group were 50% better at detecting contrast.

And then, just to make sure that the action gamers weren’t drawn to the genre precisely because they had better contrast sensitivity in the first place, the researchers took two groups of non-gamers and subjected one to 50 hours playing wartime shooter Call of Duty while the other team played something equally visually rich but rather less intense. The results were pretty conclusive.

“We found that the people in the first group improved by 43 percent, and the other group not at all,” says Prof. Bavelier, who also revealed that the benefits were not short-lived:

“The positive effect remained months, even years after training, indicating long-lasting gains.”

Well, who knew? So we’ve got Wii Fit for physical well-being, myriad brain-training games for the old grey matter and now the likes of Call of Duty to improve visual acuity. You might not have much of a social life left after all that, but is there anything that games can’t do?