We have a large amount of data that shows playing fast-paced games improves hand-eye co-ordination, the ability to focus on the task at hand, and your ability to make decisions, as gaming improves your brain's allocation of resources.
You can't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games. They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention.
We need to go beyond saying, 'I know what these games do because I see my son playing them,' and try to understand the complexities - that different video games have different effects.
People who played action video games have better vision in the sort of conditions where there is not much contrast. It can make all the difference when driving at dusk, or in fog, in being able, for instance, to see a dog crossing the road in twilight.
In order to sharpen its prediction skills, our brains constantly build models, or 'templates,' of the world. The better the template, the better the performance. And now we know playing action video game actually fosters better templates.
The average age of a gamer is 33 years old, not eight years old, and in fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults.
Everybody thought that screen time was bad for vision. Well, it happens that spending a lot of time reading on a computer is bad for your vision, but spending a lot of time playing first-person-shooter games is good for your vision.
