Two Cheers for Video Games

Nick Gillespie | March 20, 2007

Sure, video games create adolescent automatons and slack-jawed dullards who only want to kill, kill, kill, right? Eh, not exactly:

"Action-video-game play changes the way our brains process visual information," said Daphne Bavelier, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Rochester and lead author of the study.

"After just 30 hours of training, people who didn't normally play video games showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see small, closely packed letters, like those on an eye chart, more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in," she explained.

More here.

More bad news for those who claim that violent video games are bad stuff: Texas A&M researcher Christopher J. Ferguson's recently completed meta-analysis of studies on the topic found a publication bias toward studies touting a connection between games and violent behavior--a finding that often wasn't even supported by the research presented in those studies. Read more here.