Video games: a boon or a curse?

Video games have been played a huge crowd of 2.7 billion people. They have various positive and negative effects on people based on their gaming habits. They are a major part of most of our lives. A variety of people cherish them, may it be old or young people. It acts as a stress buster or a merry leisure activity for the gaming crowd or even normal occasional gamers, BUT many folk say that they (games) are a disadvantage especially for the children. While others believe that it’s a good thing to play games especially with friends; we’ll discuss not only that but also about the advantages and disadvantages later in this blog.

I being a gamer, think that games have a good influence on humans. I believe that video games help build the skill of teamwork specifically when playing with friends and also enhance eye-hand coordination.

Now lets talk about the advantages and disadvantages of playing games.

ADVANTAGES

1. Helps in problem solving and thinking: Game based studies are a huge supporter to this advantage. Other games such as Red dead redemption 2 helps in developing thinking skills as you have to make many decisions throughout the game that will decide your honor.

2. Planning, resource management and logistics: In these type of games, the player learns to manage resources that are limited; decide the best use of the resources as in real life. Examples of such games are simcity buildit and other games that are related to resource management.

3. Quick thinking, making fast analysis and decisions: According to the researchers at the University of Rochester, led by Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist, games stimulating stressful events such as those found in action or battle games could be a training tool for real-world situations. The study suggests that playing action video games primes the brain to make quick decisions.

4. Accuracy: Games that feature archery or pool as the main sport is a major example for this term. Players need to analyze their decisions for example in archery games, the wind speed deflects the arrow through a certain degree. According to the wind speed the players shoot the arrow in order to get a bullseye.

Credits: crazygames.com

5. Perseverance: In higher levels of the game, the player usually fails the first time around, but he/she keeps trying to succeed the level and finally after a couple of tries, the do it and go to the next level.

6. Memory: Playing first person shooter games such as CoD and battlefield series enables the player to effectively judge what information should be stored in his/her working memory and what can be discarded considering the task hand.

Credits: blog.activision.com

There are a lot of other advantages but if discussed briefly, would take a lot of time. So I would rather list the points without explanation. They are as follows:

1. Ability of taking risks when needed

2. How to respond to challenges

3. Teamwork and co-operation when playing with others

4. How to explore and rethink goals

5. Reasoned judgments

Now lets put some light on the disadvantages.

DISADVANTAGES

1. Affects physical health: This disadvantage is most commonly presented while speaking about the disadvantages of gadgets or gaming. Too much exposure to devices on which you play games may firstly affect your eyes a lot and secondly MIGHT make you lazy (this one is not so prominent)

2. Lack of other hobbies and poor academic performance: This point is only applicable for those who are still undergoing the process of education. Children and teenagers are a part of this; after their school/college they usually should study but they don’t. Games have sucked them toward itself in a way that they get addicted and even when they do some other thing than playing games, they keep on thinking about the game.

3. Behavioral change: Some times when people and especially teenagers get too much engrossed in the game, (as mentioned in the point above) they keep on thinking about it but that’s not the end of the line. Some of them start acting like they’re living in the game; they try to relate every situation with that of the game also act like it.

Credits: alphagamma.eu

Other disadvantages are:

1. Social replacement

2. Neglect of hygiene

3. Not sleeping enough; most likely fatigue, etc

FUTURE OF VIDEO GAMES BASED ON PRESENT TRENDS

1. Parents as gaming advocates: Parents who grew up playing video games, will give and are giving knowledge to their children about the games at their times and also play games with their children.

2. Spectating experience: with the present development in some games (like Call of Duty: Mobile) with the ‘spectate’ feature, there are pretty good possibilities that soon there will be a spectate feature in all games which will allow you to spectate youtubers, twitch streamers or even friends.

3. Players as developers: Many gamers have enough knowledge of how games are developed whether it is a high graphic-quality game (RDR2, Farcry) or a simple but very famous game, Super Mario. Software language has been made easier over the years which will help people to make games easily.

Credits: polygon.com

There are many more predictions but I listed the ones that I thought are important.

Now that I have given you all the advantages and disadvantages of gaming, I would like to leave you to decide on your opinion on the effect of video games on a person.

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