Video games: Benefits and Dangers
What do you think, which genre of video games can change a person’s behavior?
The video games sector is the fastest growing in the entertainment industry. These days, the industry enjoys great financial success, with international sales of $31 billion in 2009. The United States recent sales figures are of between $7 to $10 billion in 2008. (Activation.Online). All these numbers are so huge that nobody can believe it. Video games make the players do the right decision while they play or improve their thoughts, and the way they think or behave. However, there are several genres of video games such as sports, cards, family games, and war like shooting games. All these kinds of games are usually for young people to play, which is good to improve their knowledge because it’s one of the best things as benefit in playing video games is health oriented. There are a lot of games designed to educate kids about their health and behavior. But when we make it more specific, on one of these genres are the most likely playing in these days: the war games, especially shooting games; most people who play this type of game can get addicted.Violate video game can change people behavior, but there are a lot of good benefits.
Is it fun to play video games? Sure it is, but not always. It could be a waste of time. ’Gaming becomes an addiction when it starts to interfere with a person’s relationship or their pursuit of other goals, such as good grades or being a member of a sport team’. Video games that do something to make a player feel good will played again and again. You can’t control them, even they can’t control themselves, and that’s how people become addicted. Like what happened to a young lady in the airport, she was waiting her flight. ‘’She decided to play a quick game of Pac-man. Before she knew it, she was hooked; Pac-man took her for every last quarter she had. Yet, she did not have the feeling of the game, so she tried again. She did a little better this time’’. Once the person plays a game such as Pac-man, he or she thinks that he or she could win. So if someone is able to break the habit before it breaks him or her. ’’She couldn’t stop, and the missed
her fight flight, because of Pac-man game’’ (Loftus,Mind at play). Pac-man game is one of the games that hook people, and it’s a very old game and very simple. What about the games in these days with a good graphics? They would attract people to play them all the time. However, there are many games like Pac-man which have small side effects, but we cannot compare them with violent video games; they are very different, like when someone who wasted time playing video games like “Pac-man”, there are no problems or dangers on the people who stays around him or her, but when someone plays violent video games such as “Call Of Duty” there are problems and it could be dangerous for the people how stays around him or her. Here is percentage of students who involved in physical fight that make a high record in The United States. The percentage shows how students hostility after they play violent video games, from low violent games to high violent games. It shows the higher percentage that students got into physical fights which it is 63%, and the lowest one is 4%.
How violent video games make people aggressive or changed their behavior? There are a lot of video games that have violence in them, and it’s not good for children as provoking player reflect. For example, if someone used to go every week to video games store, and buy games or play them there, and he always plays violent video games, and this violent video games contains bad words. One day he fought someone and he will swear, and the way he behaves would change and he would be aggressive until he killed someone.
Like what happened in these countries people plays violent video games until they killed people and killed themselves and here is the summery of the story. In ‘’Littleton, Kentucky, and Arkansas, these three towns recently experienced similar multiple school shooting. The shooters were students who played violent video games. Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine high school students who murdered 13 people and wounded 23 in Littleton, before killing themselves, enjoyed playing ‘’Call of duty and Doom’’, these are violent video games. Harris created a customize version of Doom with two shooters, extra weapons, unlimited ammunition, and victims who could not fight back- features that are eerily similar to aspects of the actual shootings’’.( Marsha ,Play with power ) It’s very serious situation that make the addictive person kills people, because of the aggressive and violent video games.
How does video game addiction works? “Consequently, games are designed to be just difficult enough to be truly challenging, while allowing players to achieve small accomplishments that compel them to keep playing. In that respect, the design of video games is similar to the design of gambling casinos, which will allow players to have small "wins" that keep them playing. There are several "hooks" like “high score” and it works like this, Trying to beat the high score even if the player is trying to beat his own score can keep a player playing for hours, that are built into games with the intent of making them addictive”. (Travis,Online)
To make this clear, what is aggressive behavior? ‘’Aggressive is a behavior intended to harm another individual who is motivated to avoid that harm. It is not affect, emotion, or aggressive thought, plan, or wish. This definition excludes accidental acts that lead to harm, such as losing control of a car and accidentally killing a pedestrian, but includes behaviors intended to harm even if the attempt fails, such as when a bullet fired from a gum misses it’s human target’’ (Gale, Health line).So that’s what I called it ‘’from gun game to gun store’’ (violence policy center, Online). The more you play violent video games the more you get addicted.
In my own experience, I was addictive to violent video games, and there a lot of things happened to me without knowing about them. Like the way I think or behave. When I hung out with my friends, I always talked about aggressive things such as fights or accidents, and I was the only one who plays violent video games of my friends. So my thoughts were different from my friends. At school, I was always thinking about ‘’Call Of Duty 4: Modern warfare ‘’ wandering how would I move to the next level? Sometimes I memorize all the guns, even their names. When I walk in the street, I always look at the building guessing it there is a sniper. Or when I got to the mall, I was thinking that everybody staring at me, I don’t know way, but then I realized that all I had are from these violent video games. Thank God that I got rid of it.
There are a lot of benefits of video games that help people ‘’from their addiction’’. Video games can help children who is ill or has been injures due to any accident by distracting their mind from pain and discomfort. While playing video games, the child fully concentrates on that, and forgets about his or her pain and as there is no physical movement so there is nothing need to move from the place. And there is another benefit; it is to improve the language skills no matter which language is it, and teaching new words of various languages, because every game contains certain rules and instruction according to which game can be played. So it is very necessary to the player that he or she must understand the instruction of the game. Video games encourage the child in recognizing the alphabet and numbers. It is also helps in building the children vocabulary. And there are more and more, actually I will show some different benefits.
First, better vision; video games can help improve a person’s eyesight. A study performed at the University of Rochester found that those who played video games for at least a few hours each day for a month improved their ability to identify letters in a visual acuity test by 20 percent.
Second, the pain; games helped the ill people to temporarily forgot about much it not all of their pain, and most of these games who helped people are “Sports and fighting games”. Here is a benefit about aggressive or violent video games.
Third, fitness; video games are often stereotyped as obese and lazy, but the future might prove that to be untrue. It is an excellent way for getting kids hooked on physical activities, such as Nintendo Wii; it is one of the games that growing in popularity. So the future of video games might be in top shape because of the systems controllers that often provide physical activity.
Fourth, social skills; video games had been used to improve the social skills for young people who suffer from severe learning disabilities.
Resources:
Elizabeth, loftus. “Mind At Play”. New York: Vincent Torre, 1983.
sex, brains, and video games.
BureK, Jennifer. “Sex, Brains, and video games”. Chicago: American library assoclation, 2008.
Kinder, marsha.”Play with Power” California: Oxford, 1991
