Why Gaming is Good for You…
Dear All,
Have you ever wondered if gaming is good for you? Here you will learn how gaming actually helps children learn and improve skills. In recent years, video games have been considered extremely violent and detrimental to a teenagers psychological development according to scientific surveys. However, there is now new evidence to suggest that these teenage gamers have a distinct advantage in terms of multi tasking skills and overall brain development. Gaming is good for children and people for all ages because gaming improves problem-solving skills, improves decision making, and does not stimulate violence.
Gaming improves problem solving skills. Video games involve certain rules, so this means that the person has to think carefully before making any move to make sure that they stay within the required parameters of that particular game to become successful. “Studies suggest that mainstream games like “Call of Duty” may improve our cognitive abilities significantly more than games specifically designed to do so by designers like Luminosity. To help spread the truth about common misconceptions, seven neuroscientists from around the world signed the document “A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community” in 2014 to say they “object to the claim” that games can improve cognitive abilities, as no scientific evidence has been able to confirm such a claim. Even better for gamers, research from North Carolina State University and Florida State University suggests that mainstream games geared toward entertainment can help improve attention, spatial orientation, and problem-solving abilities.” This was from a Business Insider Article about how games can improve problem solving skills. “McGonigal says playing fast-paced games like “Call of Duty,” a first-person shooter game, can help improve visual attention and spatial-intelligence skills, which can lead to better performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”
Gaming also increases your decision making. Since action video games are fast paced, a lot of things happens very quickly. Things come up and disappear. These types of games teach people to have better responses, react more promptly and make better decisions faster. C. Shawn Green from the University of Rochester wanted to see how games affect our ability to make decisions. His goal was to test if games, which demand us to view and keep track of moving peripheral images, improve our ability to receive sensory data and thus help us make more precise decisions. The study had a group of young adults with no gaming experience play an action game for 50 hours. A second group of the same age played a slow-paced strategy game instead. After the study, Green had nothing but positive comments to say: “Action video games are fast-paced, and there are peripheral images and events popping up, and disappearing. These video games are teaching people to become better at taking sensory data in, and translating it into correct decisions.”
On the other hand, others would believe that gaming is bad for people because of the violence. People who play more violent video games are also more likely to have increased aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and decreased prosocial helping, according to a scientific study (Anderson & Bushman, 2001). Also, according to Dmitri A. Christakis of the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, people who watch/play a lot of simulated violence, such as those in video games, can become immune to it, more inclined to act violently themselves, and are less likely to behave emphatically. Another study suggests that long term exposure to violent video games is not only associated with lower empathy, but emotional callousness as well. This, is however, hotly debated because there is also evidence that shows that excessive use of video games does not lead to long-term diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative, avoidance or positive stimulus after repeated exposure to it, and lack of empathy. A 2017 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, for example, didn’t find any long-term effects of playing violent video games and empathy. To support this further, another study from University of York found no evidence to support the theory that video games make players more violent, and another study suggests that there is no increase in the level of aggression of players who had long-term exposure to violent video games.
All in all, I think that gaming is good for you, rather than the belief that gaming is more harmful than helpful. This is because gaming improves problem-solving skills, improves decision making, and does not stimulate violence. Next time you open up a game, think to yourself, “how will this help me in a good way?”
From a gamer
