First-person shooters singled out for potential therapeutic benefits.
By Mark Walton, GameSpot UK Posted Mar 30, 2009

Video games have racked up their fair share of controversy over the years, accused of desensitising people to violence, warranting their own health warning labels, and being called a public health threat. There is, however, a positive side to many of the studies focusing on the effect of video games, with researchers at the University of Rochester finding that playing video games, most specifically action-orientated games, improved contrast sensitivity function (CSF); that is the ability to detect subtle differences in shades of grey. The research focused on 13 individuals split into two groups, playing video games for a total of 50 hours over nine weeks. One group were given action games including Call of Duty 2 and Unreal Tournament, whilst the other played non-action games which do not require such precise gameplay actions, such as The Sims.

Those in the action group showed a 43 percent improvement in CSF compared to those in the non-action group, whose average was 11 percent. More startlingly, the effect was said to last for months, even after the games themselves had stopped being played.

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