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Video games can't conquer all of life's ills. Or can they? Perhaps there is a panacea out there for what ails us, and all along there were real benefits to that whirring little box next to our television.

Would we lie to you? If you don't believe us, let science prove it instead. Or, at least, let these scientific studies provide ample excuses for you to thrust at your girlfriend, mother, psychotherapist, boss, prison warden or other unenlightened authority figure the next time they try to take away your video games.

Part by part, 10 things video games can upgrade in your life:

1. Your Social Life
As a modern Hive Human, complex social interactions are good for you. So guess what? Games are slightly more social than novels or TV. A 2001-02 study had students playing the LAN shooter "Counter-Strike." Long hours studying their gaming and chatting patterns concluded that the game's strategy and complex group interactions required to pull off winning moves meant that "Counter-Strike" players were engaging in -- according to the professor -- productive and healthy social behaviors, teabagging smack talk notwithstanding. The key to modern tribal supremacy has now been exposed.

Improve your eyes, your heart, your reptile brain ... read more science-tested benefits of video games, after the jump.


2. Your Attention
What? Playing games can actually keep you focused? Well, at least for activities that are based on the game itself. The National Institute of Health commissioned a study which discovered that playing "Medal of Honor" can increase quick reaction time to visual stimuli. At the University of Rochester, Shawn Green and Daphne Bevalier not only found the WWII shooter to be beneficial to quick reaction time and quick, attentive accuracy, but in a head-to-head comparison with supposedly brainy puzzler "Tetris," "Tetris" lost. Lock n' load.

3. Your Eyes
Staring at a screen all day doesn't necessarily kill your vision completely -- in the case of shooters (again, a victory for the much-maligned genre!), you can even gain a little improvement on discernment of detail. CSF, or Contrast Sensitivity Function, is your eye's ability to focus on tiny details at a distance. In a recent study run by the University of Rochester and the Goldschleger Eye Research Institute, players who took on "Call of Duty 2" or "Unreal Tournament 2004" instead of "more sedate games" showed improvement in their CSF, improving between 43 and 58 percent. CSF is key when night-driving, which means that video games are nature's training for future truckers.

4. Your Sanity
Play is important for us psychologically. That's why babies like to suck on brightly colored blocks and why casinos in the middle of deserts are weirdly compelling. Video games have a natural advantage over non-interactive forms because the level of engaging role-play is higher. Boston College developmental psychologist Peter Gray believes we've moved away from good old-fashioned competitive play, such as hunter-gatherers and primitive tribes engaged in. Work hours have increased, and we've gotten less community-based. Well, what better reason to log on for a few hours of Xbox Live to take on some "Left4Dead"? We need to because our sanity will suffer otherwise.

5. Your Heart
Games don't need to make you fat, as long as you're not using a regular controller. "Dance Dance Revolution"'s real revolution wasn't convincing people to shake it in shopping malls: It was the way it convinced the press that a game could actually make someone lose weight. "DDR" has produced so many success stories, burned so many calories, and been adopted by so many school fitness programs that it could have spawned a Gaming Fitness genre single-handedly. Then, of course, came "Wii Fit." Although the health benefits for Nintendo's balance board system have been less exhaustively proven, either one provides more aerobic exercise than a "Lost" marathon on the couch.

6. Your Cognitive Prowess
Steven Johnson, author of "Everything Bad Is Good for You," might be one of the gaming industry's most high-profile allies. In his wildly popular 2005 book, he argued that just about all popular culture holds hidden benefits that the morally righteous are too dumb to notice. "The Sleeper Curve," as he terms his research's findings, is the growth in complexity in pop culture such as gaming. The amount of pattern recognition, systems analysis and probability theory required to play a session of "Grand Theft Auto IV" is not clearly quantified, but according to Johnson, the bar's being raised higher every single year. So keep playing!

7. Your Math Skills
Dr. Kawashima, neurophysiology professor and creator/mascot of Nintendo's "Brain Age" series of DS games, obviously believes games can help make you smarter. But he's not the only one. A Scottish study of the "Brain Age" games' effectiveness was carried out among Scottish primary school students, and those lucky kids not only got to play Nintendo without getting yelled at, but they found a marked improvement in their math skills. Maybe, then, it's not surprising that Nintendo released a special-focus title dedicated to math earlier this year. As far as higher-level math goes, we can only hope for "Brain Age: Differential Calculus."

8. Your Memory
You don't want to become senile, do you? Of course not. So go play some "Civ 4." Senior citizens of the world, we're talking to you: Older adults can benefit from game playing, especially when it comes to strategy titles. At the University of Illinois, 40 adults over age 60 were gathered to play "Rise of Nations." While we would have loved to join their LAN party, apparently it wouldn't have done us any good: The study found that older gamers had improvements in working memory and task-switching, while the average 20-something gamer saw no real improvements. It's nice to know that our future can also benefit from video games.

9. Your Sense of Armchair Athleticism
Would-be athletes and commentators of the world, rejoice! Sports games can help build knowledge of the sport being played. This sounds kind of obvious and pathetic, but believe it or not, a study was commissioned to achieve this discovery -- by none other than EA Sports. A survey of random "Madden" players found them to be 60 percent more knowledgeable than NFL fans who didn't get their game on. That knowledge consists largely of formations, plays and Madden ratings, but don't let that stop you from using "Madden '10" as a cheat sheet that's perhaps better than ESPN itself (but worse than, say, playing in the NFL).

10. Your Reptile Brain
So what if games teach questionable moral values, such as the value of cheats, hacks and unofficial walk-through FAQs? According to Mia Consalvo, a professor at Ohio University, cheating means you're actually invested in the game. And that is a good thing. In an article for Forbes, Consalvo argued that cheating "can keep you active and involved in a game, reward game play and allow expert players to teach others." Sounds great. Oh, except this was written in 2006, before the housing bubble collapse and Bernie Madoff. Perhaps Consalvo was onto something after all.