Video Games: Good or Bad?

Three thug-looking dudes are approaching a man. In a split second, there will be booms and bangs. Enough with the storytelling, as you might have guessed it will all lead to blood.

Now you can imagine the same scene: three thug-looking dudes are approaching the same man. Then the man will have to make a split-second decision—which needs the man’s thinking brain—to survive the journey. If the man fails, he will repeat the scene. To succeed, he must develop and experiment with alternative tactics until he gets through that puzzling problem. And there comes the blood.

The opponents of video games, including anti-violence activists and some parents and educators, imagine the former when they hear the phrase “video games”. The latter is pictured by the proponents of video games, which include gamers and the addicts. The dawn of these pros and cons can be attributed to the increasing number of gamers, which accounts to around 500 million people around the world, according to Jane McGonigal, a game researcher, in her 2010 TED conference. Additionally, according to NPD research, consumer spending in the game industry in 2012 has reached $20.77 billion, the amount slightly more than the total Afghanistan production in the same year. Now the debate continues: are video games good or not?

The first yell against video games is about the amount of violence in our video-game contents. The California law defines violent video games as “a video game in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being”. While not all video games contain violence, allegedly the best-selling games are the most violent ones. The violence in video games is not benign. A study conducted by Douglas et al from Iowa State University in 2014 shows that children repetitively playing violent video games are prone to aggressive ways of thinking and behaving. Furthermore, another research by Taylor and Francis shows that violent video games delay development of moral reasoning—judgment about what is right and wrong—in teenagers.

On the other hand, a study from Markey and Harris in 2010 shows that the people affected by violent video games are those who have personality traits indicative of psychoticism. It means there is a predisposition toward violence in certain people, and therefore, not everyone playing violent video games tend to resort to violence when they face conflicts. Next, while it is true that some people are at-risk for playing video games, game industry has minimized their bad impact through independent control, the ESRB. ESRB has established the video game ratings based on age groups and suitability of contents, such as violence, language, sexuality, gambling, etc. Do video game retailers comply with the rules? Apparently, 80% of underage people were turned away when trying to buy or rent the Mature-rated games, based on nationwide research by the ESRB. Now the responsibility lies with us—parents, educators, brothers and sisters, shopkeepers—to prevent violent games from falling into the wrong hands, especially non-adults.

Apart from violence, the second yell at video games comes from parents and educators who see their children or students play games instead of doing schoolwork or playing outside. Lack of intelligence and ambition, and avoidance of social activities are among their worst fear for their little ones. Parents and educators may not wait a long time until the children’s behaviors lead to addiction. In fact, excessive video gaming actually has most of the symptoms of drug addictions. The American Psychiatric Association has included video game addiction as a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because of its prevalence, not only in children but also in adults. If our people are prone to addiction, how can we expect them to become responsible adults?

But, many researches have also shown that video games actually boost our brains. Brian Glass et al, researchers from Queen Mary University, have shown that certain video games develop the brain’s ability to think about multiple ideas to solve problems. Scientists name it “cognitive flexibility”. It is the cornerstone of intelligence as creative problem solving requires cognitive flexibility. Even in the previous research, according to Brian Glass, shows that action video games can speed up decision-making. A research in 2007 by Jim Feng et. Al, from University of Toronto, has shown that playing an action video game increases spatial cognition, a skill that is important in engineering and mathematics. This latter research even reduces gender differences in spatial cognition, a fact that has been generally accepted by many researches. Lastly, researchers from UC-San Francisco found that senior citizens have improved their cognitive abilities by playing a video game designed by UCSF team.

To sum up, video games give rise to good and bad effects. They remain a controversy in some countries. I think it is unwise if we outlaw video gaming considering its positive benefits. The best way to approach video games is through responsible gaming which is achievable through certain controls: play games according to your age, manage your time, and if you can’t impose control on yourself, ask for others’ help.

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