Shades of gray
Today a story about how playing “action video games” might improve eyesight made its way across the Web. The study subjects were found to have increased contrast sensitivity, meaning they could better see various shades of gray. Every once in a while you’ll get stories like this, which I think people must find newsworthy because the common perception of games is that they’ll rot your brain worse than meth. A couple of years ago it was doctors and surgery. There have been previous eyesight studies, too.
It would be nice for the popular perception of games to be turned on its ear for their artistic value. Headline: “Games found to have emotional impact on players.” Instead of seeing increasingly subtler shades of gray on a screen, we would be shocked to see shades of gray in characters and story lines. Of course, that kind of depth does exist in some games, but it’s just lost in a sea of brown corridors and bald space marines.
