Those wasted hours, days, weeks playing Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto may not be wasted after all. Sure, video games may make you more sedentary and perhaps even more violent, but at least they’ve improved your visual skills. C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester report in the May 29 Nature that people who played action-packed video games several times a week for at least six months beat nonplayers in lab vision tests.
Gamers reacted to fast-moving objects more efficiently, processed more information more quickly, and could keep track of more objects at the same time than nongamers. The researchers also found that nongamers could improve their visual skills by playing video games — as long as they were action-packed. They had nongamers play the shoot-’em-up video game, Medal of Honor, for an hour a day for 10 days in a row. A control group played Tetris, a puzzle game that requires rotating one shape at a time. But only the Medal-of-Honor group exhibited clearly improved visual skills. The researchers think that by forcing players to simultaneously juggle tasks such as detecting enemies, tracking enemies, and avoid getting killed, action-game-playing pushes the limits of visual attention. As the authors note: “Although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attention processing.”