Years of gaming/computing taking a toll on your vision?

[o.pwuaioc]

I've needed glasses since I was 11, and I think it's a genetic thing, although I did sit really close to the TV when I was young playing video games all the time.

[J T]

Couldn't it just be age?

This.

I'm pretty sure the whole idea that video games mess up your eyes is just an old wive's tale. It's something your mom would say to try to get you stop playing and clean up your damn room.

[foxhound1022]

Couldn't it just be age?

This.

I'm pretty sure the whole idea that video games mess up your eyes is just an old wive's tale. It's something your mom would say to try to get you stop playing and clean up your damn room.

I can't remember how many times I heard my Mom say, " You're gonna ruin your eyes if you don't quit playin' that shit all the time!" Which was ususally followed by, "Pick up this damn mess, it looks like a pigsty!"

[deathsled]

Roughly 30 years of staring into screens and my vision is still perfect. In fact it may have somehow gotten better than perfect, lol. People are always saying things to me like "That's so far away! How can you read that??"

[BoringSupreez]

I've been playing games and watching TV for literally longer than I can remember, and I still have 20-20 vision. I don't think gaming or computing is the cause of your vision deterioration, much more likely it is age. Which sucks, but that's life.

The Victorian in me thinks that it may be something else making these young men go blind.

I though it gave people hairy hands.

[prfsnl_gmr]

The Victorian in me thinks that it may be something else making these young men go blind.

I though it gave people hairy hands.

That condition is also among its many pernicious results!

[chilimac]

There was a time when I spent nearly all day long staring at a computer screen, and there's no doubt I have some permanent eye damage as a result. Most of the damage occurred during my 12-hour gaming sessions of Diablo II about 10 years ago. My eyes had gotten extremely fatigued from playing that game, but I continued playing anyway. After I got over my addiction to that game I realized I needed to make a change or else I'd end up destroying my vision. So I quit playing PC games and I refused to buy an HDTV due to their high resolutions that strain the eyes.

I did some research into how it is that playing video games on high-res screens damages the eyes, and I found out that the higher resolutions make the muscles in your eyes work harder to focus on the images on screen, and over time the muscles will become depleted of a neurochemical called acetylcholine. Eventually the nerves also become depleted of this chemical, and this depletion can permanently damage them.

Just another reason to play classic game systems on an SDTV. As if we needed more reason to do that, eh?

[RyaNtheSlayA]

I don't know, I feel a lot more eyestrain trying to focus on a SDTV these days than I do on a nice 1920x1080 monitor that's calibrated and kept at low brightness.

[TEKTORO]

Wow great topic, it just so happen to me within the same time period of this year. I noticed at work I couldnt make out my blackberry words anymore and just got a PSM collection in the mail and couldnt read that either after 5min.

I would stop reading and rest my eyes then it would happen again. I was starting to think because Im 30 now maybe, but I always had insane good vision so it boggles me some.

I doubt 7 hrs in front of the computer and 3 hrs playing videogames a day dosent help either

[chilimac]

I don't know, I feel a lot more eyestrain trying to focus on a SDTV these days than I do on a nice 1920x1080 monitor that's calibrated and kept at low brightness.

Don't know how to explain that, other than to suggest that perhaps you have spent so much time looking at high-res screens that your eyes have adjusted to them and now have to work harder to readjust to a lower resolution.

I can tell you from my experience that I have never had any eye strain after having 12-hour gaming sessions on an SDTV, unless I also stayed up well beyond my normal sleep time. But with Diablo II on PC, my eyes got so fatigued I could barely keep them open, and it took a couple of weeks for them to recover.