You’re not really trying to be stealthy, since you’re carrying a flak cannon and you know how to use it. The enemy base is in front of you, and their flag is right there, just waiting for you to pick it up. You barrel in, blasting one camping defender to a cloud of gibs before he even knows you’re there, and you pick up the flag, dodging rocket fire from two more defenders who were hiding in the rafters. You bound out the door and do a quick side step to your right as soon as you’re out of their eveysight and you wait. Sure enough, they pop out and run past you, apparently thinking you’re dumb enough to move in straight lines. You make short work of both of them, and bound for your base with the enemy flag in tow.

For anyone who has played Unreal Tournament or Quake, you know that the description above covers about a second and a half of game play. Given the over the top violence, games such as these have often been criticized as contibuting to some sort of moral decay in our society, as if blasting nazis, terrorists, or alien invaders into tiny red (or green) chunks were somehow immoral.

New research, however, is shedding light on one potential benefit of action-oriented, First Person Shooter games such as these:

Video games that contain high levels of action can actually improve your vision, claim researchers at the University of Rochester. Their findings, which will appear in the journal Psychological Science, show that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.

So, in the end, action gamers may be trading away their morals, but at least they’re getting improved vision in the bargain.

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