Positive and Negative Effects of Video Games

Millions of people play video games every day, some to cure their boredom for entertainment, and some even to combat symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. They can also help increase the users' social skills, hand-eye coordination, and even their temper. On the other hand, they can lead to people becoming addicted to video games, which leads to bad habits and unhealthy lifestyles.

Video games have been around for some peoples entire lives, and for those very people it is just a part of their daily routine to come home after a long day, sit down, relax, and play video games for as long as they wish because when you live with your family they usually set a limit to how long you can stay up, or on what days you can play video games. This changes when you grow up and move away from your family.

Some people say that this is bad for kids to play video games for more than two hours, but for the kids that play video games for hours on end each and every day of the week, they do not have a direct correlation to having bad grades. In fact, when compared to that of a non-gamer, they seem to have even higher grades.

Also, video games have been proven by scientists to cope with symptoms of anxiety and depression, sometimes better than that of prescribed medication. They do so by making the brain release a hormone called dopamine, which helps increase the balance of dopamine in the body. This, in turn, increases both physical and mental well being.

In addition, video games have been proven to reduce stress in the users; life, violent video games especially. The reason being that frustrated players are more motivated to progress further and further into the game. Once the player accomplishes their goal, they then get less frustrated and get a boosted feeling of competency. This process of emotional restoration increased the players' enjoyment of both games and life in general.

In May of 2019, the World Health Organization officially added Gaming Disorder as a new addiction. It is defined as “an excessive and irresistible preoccupation with video games, resulting in significant personal, social, academic, or occupational impairment for twelve or more months.

More than two billion people play video games worldwide, over twenty-five percent of the world population. Sixty percent of those players play daily. Video game addiction is not an epidemic, but instead, it is quite a phenomenon, afflicting only two percent of those gamers are considered video game addicts. That is fifty times less than people that are addicted to cigarettes.

However, one person who was diagnosed with a severe case of video game addiction, once played for an average on ninety hours a week, he would work the bare minimum hours at work in order to make payment on his bills, His employer eventually caught on to this scheme and put him on probation until he resolved the issue. That night the man went home and took apart his computer. He then went to sleep, earlier than he had in over three years, in order to start off his new daily routine on a good note.

Many long months went by, and after being promoted to assistant manager, he decided to reward himself for his recently earned promotion. He put his computer back together, he then promised to himself to only play for a couple of hours. He then played for fourteen hours straight that night. Once again he had gotten addicted to the one thing he had before. From then on without any warning, he would disappear for days, sometimes weeks, at a time.

This is proof that when kids grow up into adults and start to go off to college or living by themselves, they sometimes begin to get into bad habits. This includes skipping class, not showing up to work, and falling behind on bills. The only reason this happens is that there is no one to regulate how much the player plays the game. If there is a parent, guardian, or even a roommate to limit how much the user plays, the likelihood of them becoming addicted dramatically decreases.

The influence that video games have on teens and young adults have long been discussed, but whenever the topic comes up people are exceptionally quick to highlight the negative effects it has on a teen's body, attitude, and behavior.

However, just like every coin has two sides to a story, video games have a positive and negative side to their effects. For instance, video games have been proven to improve your cognitive abilities including hand-eye coordination. This can be helpful in many career fields such as architecture, engineering, and even a surgeon. In fact, a study was done to compare the work of surgeons that played video games, versus that of those who did not. The results were very surprising. Surgeons who played games like Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty, increased their patients' recovery time by as high as eighty-five percent. They also made thirty-seven percent fewer errors, performed twenty-seven percent faster, and had a seventy percent higher success rate (Rence).

Contrary to popular belief that playing video games can cause real-life aggressive behavior in teens, studies have shown that video games, especially violent ones, can reduce violent behavior. They help channel the players' aggressive behavior, giving teens a place to vent out their frustration, in a safe and enjoyable way.

Also, multiplayer games have been shown to increase teen's social skills, rather than the thought that video games make teens antisocial. They do so because the players work as a team in order to accomplish a common goal, they do this by having to communicate. Communication is key in video games in order to alert your teammates to an enemy's position or to coordinate an attack. It is also key for careers such as, teaching, therapy, and being a receptionist.

In addition to this, video games have even been proved to help prevent one of the deadliest naturally occurring deaths in the world, Alzheimer's. They perform this miracle by making the player perform tasks in which you start to develop muscle memory, which increases the amount of grey matter in the brain, which in turn helps reduce the aging of the brain.

Video games have also been scientifically proven to help veterans deal with symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The way this happens is the veterans put on a VR (Virtual Reality) Headset, and they are transformed into a three-dimensional battlefield. It helps them experience the very reason they have PTSD and it helps them fight the break downs that they get every day. For the first experience, it may be very tough for them to get used to it, and it could take as many as ten uses for the patient to start seeing results.

In June of 2020, Microsoft is planning to release an ESports league designed for people, specifically veterans, in wheelchairs. This can be used as an escape from the daily pain of being a wounded veteran. This is made possible by Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controllers, these have customizable consoles and controllers. The controllers have wider buttons, taller sticks, and even extra input devices such as chin straps, headbands, fingertip scanners, and foot pedals.

With this type of technology, Microsoft has tapped into a very specific market. According to research, ninety-two percent of individuals with a motor cognitive disability say they play video games daily, saying that it is a great way to feel like a normal person, and even better at helping them make friends online. Gaming is also huge is veteran families, as many as eighty-eight percent of veterans play video games with their children, grandkids, and even other veterans.

One veteran was able to reconnect with his three older brothers after he started playing video games daily. It wasn't that his brothers didn't want to connect with him, it was the fact that he had lost both his legs and one of his arms in the Vietnam War. He was not used to using his new prosthetic limbs so by playing video games, he was able to grow more used to his new attachments, getting more used to them with every passing day (Rence).

With millions of people playing video games every day, there are correlations that begin to form. Those being the fact that video games help reduce symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. On the other hand, they also come with the fact they are and can be extremely addicting to people, which negatively affects their day to day lifestyle.

Finally, video games are not the devils we have made them out to be, as long as we are mindful of the amount of time we spend playing them, then the positive effects they can have on our minds and productivity skills can not be ignored.