Some Pros and Cons

Some Background:
For many years video games have been proven to help and hurt the people who play them. It is shown that it helped in many ways but can have serious side effects. As a gamer myself I experience some of these effects and hope to help you understand like many things, most of the negative side effects can be avoided by playing in moderation. Here are some of the things that I have learned.

Pros:
I'm sure many people who don't play see all of the bad but don't see any benefits, buy I am here to tell you that there are in fact many benefits in playing games that exist. Some of the benefits would be increased hand-eye coordination, reaction speed, teamwork, increased perception, attention, and cognition. Also it was shown in a study that with longer term gamers' comprehension and puzzle skills are higher than the average non-gamer. Also pattern recognition increases, making a higher understanding in math. Many puzzle games help people help understand and reach higher understanding in connecting one thing to another, making a student such as myself see how my studies apply in the real world. Also it is proven that video games make it less likely for one to be aggressive if they play violent video games.

Cons: 
Sadly video games are not only good for you and have some very serious negative effects. A major one is that it adds to the obesity epidemic in the US, where I live. It also makes teens less active and more likely to get heart disease, due to lack of exercise. This would not be a problem if we only played about 3-5 hours every week, but sadly video game addiction is very common. The average for someone to play games when they are older than 13 is 6.3 hours a week. It also was recently added to the list of disorders in the US. Sadly this is only getting worse due to younger generations getting their hands on video games and having no self control. In fact families are not as close to each other as they were 20 years ago. Usually parents would spend time with their kids but are now more likely to just put them in front of a screen.



Tune in next week for my next report!!