Imagine your kid sitting in front of a tv screen, playing a game, learning all the little bits of button pressing for sick combos, or even being able to recognize specific cars or planes down to incredible details, but while also giving it the time people need to relax and even have lots of fun. It can even help people be more social with multiplayer games.
Video games have gotten more accessible than ever before. While with many games that are perhaps violent and gory, many other games may teach you the ways of farming, driving, flying, and even how to assemble and disassemble entire pieces of furniture or even machines down to minute details. A study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, an academic journal, found that parents of boys aged 8 to 18, the group most likely to play violent video games, reported that children were more likely to destroy things after playing such games but not become violent against other people. While it may be bad in many cases that objects may be broken, this study helps support the argument that video games aren’t related to violent crimes committed by the people playing them.
The other thing about games is their ability to help minds develop and perhaps even get better with other benefits to people’s brains. People have even always benefited from video games from mobile devices to desktops. From the article “Are video games good for you? Your brain thinks so.” Cleveland Clinic 2 December 2024 had this “Like stimulants, video gaming can increase gray matter in the brain,” says Dr. Manos. “Grey matter provides interconnectivity and allows parts of your brain to communicate with other parts of your brain and advance your self-perception.” Which helps support that video games can help you get stimulated and even help with brain function. Along with that video games can help with hand eye coordination with some of the fast paced fps shooters out these days
Gaming can especially help with social issues that many people now face these days, and multiplayer video games can easily help with that. Then from the same article from Cleveland Clinic had this, “A 2022 Oxford study of nearly 40,000 gamers found that gaming doesn’t appear to have damaging effects on a person’s mental health.” Now 40,000 is a minute number compared to the billions that play but it does help get a sense that gamers are not strongly affected by games as we think they are, it could be more beneficial than bad.
Overall gaming may be a tool in the future in education or may always be a fun hobby or even serious job to some in E-sports. We may never know now or even soon in the future but as we know now there’s lots of gamers out there that are helped by video games to relax and socialize with.
