Video Games Could Put Millions at Risk of Permanent Hearing Loss
If you’re spending hours with your headphones blasting attack sounds, theme songs, and your friend’s weird battle cries into your ears, you might be at risk of permanent hearing damage. Sound is a major part of the video game experience for many, but we don’t know much about what gaming does to our hearing. Studies into this are few and far between, but a team of researchers has rounded them up to see what we know so far.
Their systematic review identified 14 unique papers, which together involved over 50,000 people from nine different countries, all with a focus on the relationship between hearing loss and/or tinnitus and video games. The research spans a variety of gaming circumstances, including home computers and consoles, mobile games, gaming centers, and eSports.
It’s not just about turning the volume down. Both loudness and exposure time factor into the impact noise can have on your ears. As sound intensity increases, the safe exposure time drops drastically. So a three-hour gaming session with the volume cranked can cause far more permanent damage than a 15-minute stint at the same level.
Adults can safely endure sound levels of about 80dB for 40 hours a week, according to the World Health Organization. But at 90dB, the volume of a person shouting, that time limit drops to four hours a week before risking hearing loss. Our ears can only handle sounds of 95dB (sound of a motorcycle’s engine) for an hour and 15 minutes.
So, it’s a bit concerning that the average headphone volume in four shooting games was 88.5 to 91.2dB, according to one of the studies in the review. Another paper found that impulse sounds – short, loud bursts of noise that might signal a shot or a crash – can peak at 119dB. One study found over 10 million Americans may be exposed to ‘loud’ or ‘very loud’ sound levels from video games.
