Video Games: More Beneficial than Harmful?
Think of a time you were playing video games. Your parents probably called it mind-numbing, right? And most people agree that video games are harmful because of negative effects from staring at screens, earbuds that can damage ears, distractions from grades and school, and a plethora of other bad effects. However, these can be investigated and studies show that they are actually beneficial, especially high-action shooter games. For example, certain games can promote problem solving and reaction time, like timed games and word games. Other games help with hand-eye coordination and muscle memory, like if a controller or keyboard is involved. Not only can games help train your brain and body, but they can boost your overall physical and mental strength with games like Wii Sports. These sorts of games can train your brain and body, even if you don’t think of them that way. You can easily exercise yourself without even knowing it.
Problem Solving and Reaction Time
As mentioned, video games can promote problem solving and reaction time. These are real life skills that people use outside of their homes. These skills are used every day and playing certain games just amplifies them. Some examples of games that help problem solving using words and numbers are Wordscapes, Words Story, and 2048. Wordscapes and Words Story are games where the objective is to find words in jumbles of letters, and the goal of 2048 is to combine numbers to get to 2,048, which is two to the eleventh power. These help with problem solving and thinking things through because of the decisions made to find words and combine numbers. Another decision-making game is called Survivors: The Quest and it is a game where you have to find things and uncover secrets to reveal a storyline. These sorts of games are similar to scavenger hunts because you have to find clues to get to more clues and uncover things.
Games like Black Ops and Flappy Bird can train reaction time. Black Ops is a first person military game designed to play with others and avoid dying. Life or death in the game can be determined by your reaction time and how fast you can dodge people. Playing the game frequently can help not only blow off steam if you’ve had a bad day, but also help train your brain to react to things faster as well as use the controls faster. Flappy Bird is an application where you are a bird and you try to fly through holes in pipes and survive as long as possible without hitting the pipes. This one helps train your brain to figure out when you’re supposed to tap the screen and fly higher, because if you tap too soon you’ll hit the pipe above the hole. If you tap too late you’ll hit the pipe below the hole. Reaction time is something that requires a lot of attention in Flappy Bird.
Besides specific skills, there are plenty of games that can help benefit skills that are open and obvious, for example games like Candy Crush and Gardenscapes are games where the objective is to get the same types of candy next to each other to get points. You have to plan each move so that the end result meets the standard. Other games like Flow Free or Where’s My Water are games that include getting something to another place in a strategic way. In Flow Free, there are dots of colors spaced out and the aim is to fill the entire board with color without having them cross over the other lines. You have to make sure that the whole board is filled and that each color reaches its other dot. It’s really difficult to make the correct decisions to have no colors overlap, and it helps train your brain up to speed of each level that you complete.
Hand-eye Coordination and Memories
Video games can help with hand-eye coordination and different types of memories. Different memories include memory of moments and information as well as muscle memory. Memory with moments and information are helped by games like Minecraft and find the difference games. In Minecraft, most of the items are crafted using a crafting table/bench, and it’s a lot to remember all of the crafting recipes. Games with controllers and keyboards, such as Black Ops or Halo, can help teach muscle memory in the aspect that your hands will learn how to function the games without even needing to look at the controller. You just know where everything is and what they do. Knowing where everything is without looking is hand-eye coordination as well.
Physical and Mental Health Boosts
People play video games because they’re fun, and they’re a great way to kill time in a way that feels exhilarating and entertaining. In this way, they can boost mental health. Sitting down and working all day can take the life out of anybody, and playing games gives a nice break. It’s healthy every now and then to take a break from all the hard work and do something that is exciting and gratifying. Playing games like Roblox can mean that while you’re having fun, you can also practice coding and do great activities. Playing games like Wii Sports can help benefit you physically as well. It’s commonly known that standing up and doing a “brain break” or stretching a little bit is healthy while you’re working. Wii Sports is a game where you can play different sports just by swinging your controller and pressing a few buttons, but it also can exercise you because it requires certain movements that don’t include furious pounding a controller, like a high maintenance gun game.
Shooter Games Support Your Brain
There are well-known facts about video games that almost everyone can agree on. Violent shooter games are mind-numbingly unintelligent compared to sudoku or crosswords. However, investigative research shows that playing high-action shooter games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops or Halo can truly improve the aspects that most people think they damage. By conducting experiments, scientists were able to reveal that playing video games surprisingly invalidate a lot of theories about the harm done by video games.
The reason why so many of these theories were brought up is because of how people overuse video games. A lot of people play for hours at a time. “I’m not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health,” Daphne Bavelier said in a TED Talk. “It’s not, and binging is never good.” However, studies revealed that playing in “reasonable doses,” as Bavelier called them, can actually improve eyesight, attention span, and multitasking.
Daphne Bavelier plays mind games with her audience in a TED Talk
One of the most well-known theories about the damage of video games is that it hurts your eyesight. People who do not play video games have normal or corrective-to-normal vision, which is around the sixth line on an eye chart. However, people who play action video games regularly can see to around the eighth line on an eye chart. Their brains are more capable of “picking out small details in the context of clutter,” which is to say that they can read finer print. They are also to “resolve different levels of gray,” meaning that they are able to see better in fog, for example. So playing action video games regularly does not harm your eyesight, it truly makes it better.
Another well-known theory is that video games reduce your ability to pay attention, and playing them makes you tend to get distracted more easily. This theory is also one that was tested and the results were that action video games mostly affect the attention parts of your brain. For action gamers, playing games like “say the color, not the word” is less challenging than for most others. Also, the average adult can track around three or four objects at a time, while action gamers are able to track around six or seven objects all at once. This theory is yet another example of quite the opposite than most people think: it is beneficial to the brain in the correct doses, not harmful.
Something else that action games can benefit is multitasking. Multitasking is when people do many things at once, and their attention shifts to each thing for a little while and then switches again, and it continues like a cycle. There is even a group of people called multimedia-taskers. These people will listen to music at the same time as watching a show and texting their friends. That is just one example of what multimedia-taskers will do, and most kids nowadays do that often. Different types of technology have different effects on the brain, and as it turns out, people who multimedia-task are surprisingly dreadful at multitasking, and are convinced that they are incredible at it. People who play action games, however, can multitask adequately.
After extensive research and experiments, scientists have come to the conclusion that playing action video games, like first person shooter games, are more beneficial to the brain than harmful. This is as long as they are played in good, reasonable doses to ensure that players are not taking advantage of these effects.
Playing Games Will Never be the Same
Now that all of these facts have been shared, the next time your parents or coworkers tell you it’s not good to play video games, you’ve got a pretty strong counterargument. With problem solving and reaction time, hand-eye coordination and memories, physical and mental health boosts, and tons of other great effects, there are plenty of good things about video games. With these facts in our arsenals, playing games will never be the same. It will possibly be seen as something that’s more beneficial than not, and video games will be seen in a new light. It’s possible that there are even more benefits from playing video games that have not yet been mentioned or discovered, but they are bound to be found out at some point. It has now been proven that video games are not very harmful, and with the right usage, something to encourage.
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