What About Video Games? Comm 303

Ah, where do I begin with video games? I have had a personal vendetta against video games for the past few years. I think that this vendetta stems not so much from a hatred for the games but for the parents or guardians administering them to their children on a far-too-frequent bases, solely to keep the child entertained. 

My six-year-old male cousin has been raised on video games, and not the educational kind. For the past two years I have not been to a family gathering where he was not on his GameBoy for the entire length of the party, and I am not exaggerating. I have been noticing this “tool” of placing video games or tablets in front of children as a way to keep the child entertained, and ultimately out of the parent’s way. I have seen the effects of this first hand through my cousin, who lacks social skills in a major way as well has become a very aggressive child. 

However, I cannot knock the video gaming business entirely, I feel if monitored, video games can be a fun activity for children, but creating a reliance on them is extremely damaging to the child’s emotional and mental growth. I grew up in a household that valued social interaction and playing outdoors, which is pretty much all that my sister and I did. We did not own any sort of gaming equipment until I was in high school when we got a play station 2, and had one “game” which was just an 80’s karaoke sing-a-long. Later in high school however I would occasionally (and by that I mean maybe three times) play Call of Duty with my friends. Many of my friends also play games like Angry Birds or Candy Crush on their phones on a frequent basis, which can be a fun and light distraction or way to pass time while you have to wait for something, like the bus for example. The difference here is that at my age, my friends are not reliant on these games as a way of avoiding social interaction, as my cousin does, and they are old enough to know when enough is enough and that there are healthier ways to have fun. 

So my overall view of video games role in society today is fairly negative, but as stated previously, the problem is mainly with the administrators and not the games themselves. I feel that Congress places their focus too much on research of the effects of video game violence and not enough on the social interaction repercussions that spending too much time not in communication with an actual person can cause. In class, we talk about the displacement theory, and I feel that this theory can be applied to video gaming. When someone is investing a lot of their time playing these games they are losing time they could be spending outdoors playing with actual people and enhancing their communication skills.