Video Games: A Site for Sore Eyes

Abstract

V ideo G ames : A S ite for S ore E yes Sahar Mozaffari B S J This paper will address three distinct areas of research in which video games are being used to im- prove eye and brain conditions in the medical field. “I was very surprised by this finding,” research Roger Li, PhD, of the School of Optometry and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at University of California, Berke- ley said in a news release. “I didn’t expect to see this type of improvement.” From the earliest days in the history of video games, accusations (whether true or not) have circulated suggesting that they somehow negatively im- Figure 1. A Play Station 2 contoller, used to control the movements of characters in video games. pact society, specifically the juvenile and adolescent life- style. However, recent studies suggest that video games may prove to be useful treatment methods in the field of vision science. It has been assumed that video games are detrimental to vision, in the same way that staring at any electronic screen for long periods of time has been traditionally discouraged. However, the accidental discovery of using video games to cure adult amblyopia, more commonly known as “lazy eye,” has provided a basis to help those without perfect vision in a non-clinical way as opposed to contact lenses, glasses, or laser surgery. This study is one of the first to show that playing games can improve blurred vision in adults with amblyopia (Li, On September 21, 2010, an issue of PLoS Biology pub- lished a study in which people with amblyopia showed improvement in their vision after playing video games. Amblyopia is improvable in children through treatment, but is more difficult to treat in adults. After playing 40 hours of video games, adults with amblyopia showed an 1 • B erkeley S cientific J ournal • A ccidents • V olume 14 • I ssue 2 improvement in visual acuity and 3-D depth perception (Li, 2010). According to the National Eye Institute, amblyo- pia is a brain disorder in which the vision of one eye does not develop properly (Li, 2010). It is the most frequent type of permanent visual impairment in children, affecting two to three of every 100 children (Li, 2010). Amblyopia is also the most common cause of one-eye visual impairment among young adults or people of middle age (Li, 2010). While the study has shown vision improve- ment for adults with amblyopia, researchers say this does not necessarily justify spending more time playing video games for the general population, as there have been no observations of similar benefits for people with normal vision (Li, 2010). “These new findings are very encouraging because there are currently no accepted treatments for adults with amblyopia,” says Dennis Levi, of University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley and Dean of Optometry at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. Levi says that conventional wisdom has held that unless the disorder is corrected in childhood, damage was thought to be irreversible. Li and Levi said they have found that intensive training on a perceptual task, such as getting two horizontal lines to align, can lead to an improvement of 30 percent to 40 “Video games may prove to be useful treatment methods in the field of vision science.” percent in visual acuity (Li, 2010). In one experiment, 10 subjects with patches over the stronger eye played an action video game for two hours at a time for a total of 40 hours in one month. The action video game required subjects to shoot at targets, while the non-action game consisted of users having to construct things on screen. Twenty subjects participated in this study between the ages of 20 and 60. In another experiment, three people played the