The Effects of Excessive Time Playing Video Games on Children

Video games are becoming a very popular form of entertainment but they do carry a lot of controversy and is a topic which is regularly debated. “The World Health Organisation recently added “gaming disorder” to its official list of mental health conditions”. This is worrying when many young children are spending a lot of time playing video games, which leads to the question, do you think video games have a negative impact on children’s lives? Excessive time spent playing video games can lead to addiction, violent behaviour, social isolation and the potential to be groomed online.

It has been suggested that playing video games can lead to violent behaviour. Violent video games have been blamed for school shootings, homicides and increases in bullying. A survey done by procon.org showed that “sixty percent of middle school boys and forty percent of middle school girls who play/played a M-Rated (Mature Rated) game got into a fight at school” this is to be compared to “thirty nine percent of middle school boys and fourteen percent of middle school girls who had not played a M-Rated game and had got into a fight”. This evidence clearly shows that playing video games has a negative effect and is shown to have made some children more violent. Many violent lawbreakers have admitted to playing excessive amounts of violent video games when they were younger. For example the people responsible for the “1999 Columbine High School massacre” which killed thirteen played violent video games. Anders Breivik also played a lot of violent video games and he killed “seventy seven people in Norway in 2011 over two scenarios”. He admitted to using Modern Warfare 2 to “train” This undeniably shows a trend of violent offenders playing brutal video games in their youth.

Online gaming can put you at risk of paedophiles. Statistics released by Barnardos show that in “2016 two hundred and ninety seven children reported being sexually groomed or being asked to send explicit photos while playing online games. “Two hundred and sixty five of the children were girls”. There would have probably been a lot more, this is because many children would have been frightened and scared to report these people. This is an obvious problem that we need to address and ensure young people are educated about internet safety. A man called Adam Isaac targeted two young boys while they were playing Minecraft he asked them to perform sexual acts for him. He has now been sentenced to two years and eight months for his crime. This evidently shows that paedophiles and child abusers have found an easy way to prey on children, this being through online video games.

It has been said that video games could perhaps have some positive impacts on a child’s life. There has been arguments to show that you could make new friends online. This is a negative effect because you are meeting complete strangers with no idea of their history. The Telegraph did a survey that showed “eighteen percent of kids between the ages of nine and eleven have met with somebody online, with over half of these children admitting that they went alone”. Would you like your kids meeting strangers? Do you think this is a positive impact?, It’s far healthier and safer to make friends face to face in protective environments and not through a screen. People also state that playing video games can improve your self-esteem and confidence. They say video games do this because when you are good at a game and are levelling up it makes you feel a lot better about yourself, but alternatively if you are failing levels and dying you could get angry and become violent. People also have arguments saying that playing video games improves your cognitive skills such as your focus, hand-eye coordination and reaction times. A website called Naturalife listed the best nine things to do to improve and maintain the levels of your cognitive skills, some of the things on the list were eating healthily, getting enough sleep, training your memory and much more, but playing video games is not on the list, this shows that there is no evidence of gamers having better cognitive skills than non-gamers.

Playing video games can lead to addiction and social isolation. On the website Psychology today there were many cases of killings after addiction to video games. An example is seventeen year old Daniel Petric, his parents confiscated his copy of the game Halo 3 after he became addicted. He then shot both his parents, he was sentenced to twenty three years in jail”, this also comes back to the point of gaming making children more violent. If a player becomes addicted it can lead to social isolation, there was a was an article on the Guardian’s website that stated that “three in four children from the United Kingdom spend less time outside than prison inmates on an average day”, this is really bad considering that prison inmates are only required to have two hours outside each day. ”At a primary school in Plymouth the teacher Richard Gribble did a survey of the gaming habits of his class”. “Of the 26 children in the P6-P7 class he found that over three quarters were playing video games every night, and over a third were playing in the mornings as well, some were staying up until 4am to play some other students were waking up at 5am before school to play”. This is unhealthy as children won't be able to concentrate in classes and might fall asleep, this would eventually end up in the child failing tests and falling behind their classmates.

In conclusion I still think that video games can have a negative effect on a child’s life. My reason for this decision is that playing video games can lead to addiction, social isolation, being groomed online and violent behaviour. Would you like your child being lonely and introverted because they played video games? Do you think it’s an appropriate way for children to enhance their cognitive skills? What do you think about children spending less time outdoors than prison inmates?, this statement shocks me, this is a terribly sad way to describe young children who live in the United Kingdom. My views remain unchanged, I feel that small amounts of gaming would not affect children as severely as mentioned in this essay; this shows that gaming is acceptable if children and their parents take responsibility for the time spent playing video games and the content of the games played.