Growing up I enjoyed playing video games. After a long day of school or a hard practice, there was no better feeling then jumping on the Playstation and playing online with a couple of my friends. If I had a dollar for every time my mom told me to get off my Playstation, I’d be filthy rich. She’d say something along the lines of “Get off your playstation and go outside and do something healthy!”. She was convinced that there are no health benefits to playing video games. However, I am here today to tell you action packed video games CAN be beneficial to your health.

Playing video game can be beneficial to your eye sight, according to some studies. According to this study, playing a first person shooter, such as Call of Duty, can be beneficial to your eyesight. Playing these types of games can improve eye sight in dark places, which makes tasks such as driving at night become much, much easier. The ability to see objects stronger at night is called contrast sensitivity function. While playing video games, constant moving into different backdrops help improve people’s contrast sensitivity function. Another way video games improve people’s eyesight is because people are exposed to multiple stimuli at the same time. When playing video games, people are forced to track multiple objects at the same time. This can be especially useful for people who’s jobs force them to have great eye sight, for example like being a ground soldier.

Video games have been found to help children who struggle with dyslexia. A study has recently been done with kids ages seven to thirteen to prove that action packed video games help kids with dyslexia. The kids were placed into two groups, one group that would play Rayman Raving Rabbids, an action packed type video game. The second group of children would play a more calming type game. After playing the video games for eighty minutes, the children’s reading ability would be tested. The children who played the more action-oriented video game were found to read at a faster pace and read more accurately compared to children who played the other game.

Lastly, playing video games helps improve your brain’s spacial recognition area of the brain, memory, and help develop motor skills. To investigate, scientists in Berlin had people play Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo XXL for thirty minutes a day for two months. In comparison to people who were not apart of the study, scientist found an increase in the amount of gray matter in the right hippocampus, which is involved in spatial recognition, the right cerebral cortex, which is involved in memory formation, and the cerebellum, which is involved in developing motor skills. The following picture is from the study and shows the MRI results after two months of participating in the experiment.

In conclusion, video games do actually provide health benefits, unlike the common perception within society that video games are unhealthy. So the next time somebody tells you to get off your playstation, just point to a couple of the health benefits and I promise you will never have to deal with being lectured about your video game playing habits again.