Here’s some interesting news by way of Wired and Yahoo. A study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that playing action games may improve visual acuity.

This would represent a stunning reversal over my mother, who always told me I would go blind.

Researchers divided test subjects into two groups, one for Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2 and one for The Sims. After 50 hours of gaming over nine weeks, the action group showed a marked improvement on average in distinguing shades of grey, while the Sims group did not.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that contrast sensitivity can be improved by simple training,” Bavelier told Yahoo News. “When people play action games, they’re changing the brain’s pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it, and we’ve seen the positive effect remains even two years after the training was over.”

It makes intuitive sense. Games take a lot of fast pattern recognition that starts to feel natural after some practice. For instance, noticing in the chaos of a Team Fortress 2 match that an enemy blue soldier didn’t shoot at a red demoman when he had the chance tells you that…

A) That demoman is a disguised spy, and
B) You should go ahead and set him on fire

The kind of high-speed visual processing required to play “bullet hell” games like Ikaruga is astonishing.

(For those unfamiliar with Ikaruga’s gameplay, you can switch the polarity of your ship between light and dark, absorbing bullets of the same type harmlessly while looking for safe spots in the two patterns of colors.)

The funding for the study came from the National Eye Institute, which has an obvious interest in vision, and the Office of Naval Research. If I were a better man, I’d guess the latter is looking for new possibilities in training soldiers.

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