Positive Effects of Video Games

For years, people have argued that there are no positive effects of video games. Opponents of video games have claimed that it rots the brain, induces violence in people, and slowly eats away at a child's attention span. However, if monitored, playing video games can actually help in a child's development, assist in hand-eye coordination, and get lazy people off the couch.

Yes, whether you want to believe it or not, video games aid in developing better hand-eye skills. This article describes some research done at the University of Rochester at New York. The study finds that "video gamers tend to be more attune to their surroundings while performing tasks, like driving down a residential street, where they may be more likely to pick out a child running after a ball, than a non-video gamer." (National Geographic, see above link).

If you think about it, you must pay attention in most games, especially action games. The environment will have many things going on at once and you must pay attention to just about everything going on visually. The Army actually trains some soldiers on war video games like Medal of Honor and other first person shooters to get them used to intense action and adjusting quickly to vary degrees of reflexes. A well-trained soldier is an excellent example of the positive effects of video games?

Early video games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong got you to make your brain communicate faster with your hands. You couldn't be slow or you would lose a life. Of course, on the same token, if you lost your life or an entire game, you probably wanted to continue. "Just one more" was probably the most common phrase in the arcades in the 80s. Determination, confidence, and follow-through are all excellent effects that can be brought to the real world.

"Video games dumb people down." Have you heard that before? Well, that may have been before the intelligence games started appearing in the video game market. Every system available now has a number of educational games that you can substitute after Johnny beats the savage werewolves in the deepest parts of the jungle. Games like Brain Age, the Jumpstart series, and Oregon Trail all help children and adults alike learn many things like math, reading, history, and so much more.

Other games which can be educational are simulation games like SimCity and SimAnt, Civilization, and Nintendogs. They can teach people how they can affect the environment with their decisions or how other lives could be effected. Along similar lines, strategy and role-playing games can be longer versions where they take control of one character and follow through its life by making quasi-real choices and can affect one or many within the game. Sometimes you have to assess a situation and make a choice quickly, which can help those become quick and analytical thinkers, more positive effects of video games.

Within the past five years or so, exercise games have become extremely popular. At first, there was mainly Dance Dance Revolution, which had video gamers bounce around on a two by two mat in time with dance, hip-hop, and remixed music. This series got people off the couch whether they were good at the game or not. It was simply a lot of fun. When the Nintendo Wii was released, things changed a little bit. The revolutionary controllers added another element: movement of the upper body as well as the lower body. Games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit got you boxing, playing baseball and tennis, and doing Yoga. Now that's a movement everybody should get behind.

Debating whether there are positive effects of video games can go on until the end of time. People have experienced both the bad and the good, but now that there are more genres of video games and more opportunities for innovative games, the good have and will continue to outweigh the bad. Now stop reading this and get off the couch and enjoy some of the positive effects of video games.

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