Playing video games can actually improve aspects of your eyesight, despite popular opinion to the contrary, new research has discovered.

Apparently, games can aid a player's "contrast sensitivity"; the ability to detect colour changes between shades of grey on a solid background. Apparently, scientists didn't realise that this was something that could be 'improved'.

"This is not a skill that people were supposed to get better at by training," admitted Daphne Bavelier, a professor at the University of Rochester in New York, head of the new research.

"It was something that we corrected for at the level of the optics of the eye - to get better contrast detection you get glasses or laser surgery."

So there you go.

By Luke Guttridge