The Advantages and Disadvantages of Playing Video Games

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Video games have advanced massively over the decades and in the space of 50 years we have seen them become life-like and almost Hollywood in glamour. In the past 10 years alone the games industry has boomed with high-profile actors even playing the parts of games characters as plots turn into complete movie scripts. You only need to look at Call of Duty and Mass Effect as just a couple of games from the past 10 years that have called upon big named stars to provide voice-overs.

However, is gaming ruin our kids’ lives or is it providing a stable learning platform for our kids to grow and advance from?

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We are about to take a deeper look into the advantages and disadvantages of playing video games, not just for kids but for adults as well.

The Advantages of Playing Video Games

We start with the high points of playing video games, and the first port-of-call probably comes from learning different skills and gaining knowledge as progress. Some games in particular are designed purely to help us learn and progress our skills forward in life, and for these styled games, whether they are brain training or quizzes, we can often benefit from.

In a world where stress and depression are becoming a more popular element in people’s lives, video games have actually been proven in recent studies to dramatically reduce stress and depression by allowing people suffering from these mental health conditions to vent frustrations and aggression out whilst playing 3^rd person shooter games, or racing games.

For example, one of the biggest games recently for this has been Grand Theft Auto which allows you to essentially beat people up, play missions, crash cars and a whole host of other things (which also coincide with the disadvantages which we will touch on soon).

The other points that we would like to bring to your attention is that video games believe it or not can improve your vision, despite all those warnings from parents about sitting in front of the TV for long periods of time. This happens because many games are fast paced which means that you have to concentrate your eyes on movements more often, challenging and training your sight constantly.

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Also, decision-making skills are noted to be a vast improvement in gamers. Split-second reactions and decisions are a base for most games these days so take that virtual decision making between survival and death and implement it into the real world and you will see that video game players are much more advanced in decision making.

The Disadvantages of Playing Video Games

With every advantage come a disadvantage and the first most notable point is obesity in children. This was something that the Nintendo Wii and Kinect from Microsoft hoped to combat but to very little affect.

Children today compared to 30 years ago are much more glued to Smartphones and games consoles than they are the outside world. For many children sitting in front of their PC for many hours in each day can lead to no exercise and an increase in health conditions that can affect them not only now but later on in life.

The second point is that the virtual world becomes a reality and often what they see in games they think they can do in the real world. Perhaps this comes down to how good the technology now is in video games, which makes the games we play today so much more realistic than 20 years ago.

Unfortunately for kids, they get into a stage of mentality where they think its ok to carry out some of the acts they have seen online, in some cases reports from the US not long ago saw a teenager shoot his family after playing a video game.

Lastly, we can also look at social interaction and what we are really looking at here is face-to-face interaction. As we know during multiplayer games people can communicate via audio, but when presented with a real-life situation the social activity dwindles and a lot of younger adults have no idea how to act in a face-to-face situation.

Video games can definitely be a disadvantage to people in this manner, and to combat it they should from time-to-time engage in face-to-face communication to keep that area of social interaction stimulated.

Overall, video games are going to have pros and cons just like most things in life but its how you go about controlling yourself to whether a video game becomes more of a negative part of your life, or a positive part. Always try and make video games an advantage to you or your children and a good idea to do this is to also set times of when video games can be played and when they cannot be played so there is always that element of control.