Violent Video Games: I Can See for Miles and Miles...

From Techdirt:

Nearly six years ago, we wrote about a study showing that playing video games can help improve your vision, and now there's another study showing that such video games can help improve vision -- specifically contrast sensitivity, which is noted to be "important in situations such as driving at night, or in conditions of poor visibility." But, of course, rather than paying attention to all that, we get stories about how all violent video games must be banned.

It's a delicate balance and a controversy that will always be around, especially as games for next-gen consoles (and those coming after that) are only going to get more and more realistic. Unfortunately, the studies and research and thoughts are all reliant on tests trying to quantify subjectivity. Vision is measurable and objective, but violent tendencies and video games rely on hundreds of different personality and history variables that really can't be converted to reliable numbers. And even the worst studies hit on correlation - not causality - which is the rule more than the exception in psychological studies.

What are your thoughts? Are video games too violent? Is there good in them if they have benefits? Do you think brain exercise titles that have appeared recently for the Nintendo DS and Wii can replace the violent nature of war games and still deliver the benefits?